Robert Rauschenberg

Mr. and Mrs. Marcel Boulois, Paris
Sonnabend Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in April 1975)
Sotheby's, New York, November 11, 2008, Lot 39
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution; New York, Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Robert Rauschenberg, October 1976 - January 1978, cat. no. 34, p. 81, illustrated in color (incorrectly dated 1954) 

Matthew Baigell, Concise History of American Painting and Sculpture, New York, ca. 1984 (1st edition), p. 336 (text) 
Exh. Cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (and travelling), Robert Rauschenberg Combines, 2005, pl. 10, p. 24, illustrated in color (incorrectly dated 1954)

This work is in excellent condition. The original fabric and newsprint support has been lined to cheesecloth. The paint is structurally sound and stable. There is some fine hairline cracking in the red and green oil paint and in the silver, but no insecurity is apparent. The collage elements are also secure, although there are two very small tears in the paper at the lower right and lower left corners. Under ultraviolet light, there are no apparent restorations. The work is framed under Plexiglas in a blonde wood shadow box frame with a 2 ¾" float.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Robert Rauschenberg’s compelling and intricately woven Bantam is a rare, early Combine painting by the artist: a critical summation of Rauschenberg’s radical artistic achievements distilled to a jewel-like articulation of his defining format. Every inch of Bantam’s richly variegated surface serves to describe Rauschenberg’s distinctive conceptual project, one that remained steadfastly creative and experimental for over sixty years. Rauschenberg pursued a diversity of media, from oil paint to photography, sculpture and collage, in his embrace of the impulse of other artists in his generation to challenge the traditional notions of painting. As described by Calvin Tomkins, “Rauschenberg’s real motive was curiosity, an intense and constantly renewed curiosity about what a picture was or was not, and his curiosity led him to test, more and more radically, the boundaries that other people had set up around art.” (Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg, New York, 1980, p. 94) In the intervening years between the triumphs of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the early 1950s and the advent of Pop Art in the 1960s, Rauschenberg's bold hybrid invention of a sculptural form of painting by way of the Combine embodied the impulse of artists at this time to strip away the hegemonic influence of New York Abstract Expressionism and to examine the nature of painting on their own terms. Included in the seminal Robert Rauschenberg retrospective that travelled across the country in 1976-1978, Bantam is an urgent and pivotal exemplar of Rauschenberg’s indelible imprint on art history: seemingly bursting out of the confines of its own frame, Bantam overflows with rich pictorial data that is both readymade and painterly, exploiting the dimensionality of collage with the same conceptual gravitas as his antecedents Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso.

Embedded within the stratified compositional network of materials in Bantam are three primary pictures that Rauschenberg formally harnesses as found objects. Archetypal of the artist’s incorporation of photographs, postcards, newspaper, and various other printed ephemera in his work, the iconographic interplay of these images together allude to issues of sexual identity, a central focus pertinent to Rauschenberg's oeuvre. The reproduction of the supine odalisque painting is an obvious nod to art history; Rauschenberg incorporated female nudes into many of his Combines, particularly as a driving mechanism behind one of his most important works, Odalisk from 1955, now in the collection of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. In Odalisk, female nudes are juxtaposed with photographs of the artist’s mother and various other references to his own home and family, creating a fascinating monument to his own identity radiating with a feminine sexual resonance. Like the rooster that perches atop Odalisk, the title Bantam also alludes to a small breed of poultry; the word can also be used to describe a person of a diminutive stature but potent force, often with a combative personality. Often incorporating chickens or hens in his Combines, the theme of flight or the inability to fly was oft explored in Rauschenberg’s work, thereby making this painting a characteristic take on self-portraiture. 

In the left region of Bantam, veiled behind a swath of pearlescent grey fabric is an image of Judy Garland, the iconic American actress and singer who was as famous for her talent and beauty as for her personal struggles. Although it pictures a youthful Garland in a glamourous studio portrait from her MGM glory days of the 1930s and 1940s, Bantam was created at a very different time in her career, just a year after one of Garland's greatest performances in the 1954 musical A Star is Born. This film briefly revived her screen career but was her last Hollywood triumph. Garland’s symbolic role is often cited in relation to her portrayal of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, in which her character sought to escape her small town black-and-white life in a journey toward big city Technicolor dreams, immediately accepting those who were different from her along the way. The two female images in Bantam are juxtaposed with the team photograph for the 1955 New York Yankees which runs the length of the lower portion of the collage. The 1950s Yankees won the World Series six times during the decade, and the virile stars of the team were celebrities in their time as well as ours. These male superstars included Mickey Mantle (pictured at center), Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Elston Howard (the first African-American to play for the Yankees, who joined the team in the year Rauschenberg created Bantam). During this decade of Yankees glory the team was managed by Casey Stengel, pictured in the center of the bottom row, whose photograph graced the cover of Time Magazine in 1955. Thus one of the most prototypical of American male heroes—the professional athlete—is central to Rauschenberg's narrative theme of identity and gender in Bantam. A cryptic re-creation of Marcel Duchamp’s iconic The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the positioning of the nude in the upper register above the band of Yankees echoes the composition of Duchamp’s complex glass sculpture—it is as though the odalisque is the anthropomorphized bride undressed by the team of baseball players that stand in for Duchamp’s bachelor machine. With the painting’s lush textural surface that harkens to the macho painting of the Abstract Expressionists, Rauschenberg makes a potent comment on stereotypes of male expressionism that is both pictorial and conceptual. As William Rubin noted in 1960, "Everything the eye delights in is eligible to enter into the autobiographical poem. The iconography in Rauschenberg pictures seems to reach back through time and consciousness, memory by memory...they never relinquish their autobiographical intimacy." (William Rubin, "Young American Painters", Art International 4, no. 1, January 1960, p. 26)

With a celebrated sense of theatricality, Rauschenberg brilliantly fused the once disparate genres of painting and sculpture into a distinctive aesthetic, thus devising his own unique challenge to the preceding decades of innovation, as well as contributing the ultimate breakthrough for the visual arts in the second half of the Twentieth Century. In defiance of Renaissance perspective, he began to build his pictures out into the viewer’s space so that they came to operate somewhere between painting and sculpture, in a new frontier of the visual arts described by Rauschenberg as “combine-paintings.” He translated this dichotomy into his art with the use of found objects in the service of painting, merging them into landscapes of pigment, photography, and object. The paisley patterned fabric collaged atop a maze of sumptuous burgundy brocade in the upper register references popular home décor of the era, and speaks of the artist's frequent evocation of the quotidian, including fragments from the domestic sphere in the arena of his artwork. Merging the world of the everyday with the painterly, Rauschenberg layers his readymade materials with swathes of paint that conjure Abstract Expressionism. The bold yellow brushstroke at center evokes Franz Kline and the cascading drips of colored paint call to mind Jackson Pollock, while the scrawls to the upper right mimic Cy Twombly. Rauschenberg admired Kline’s bold gestural compositions, his starkly reduced, predominantly achromatic color palette, and insistence on a unified figure-ground relationship. He appreciated the grid-like nature of Willem de Kooning’s compositions, particularly in works such as Asheville (1949), and likely noted the subtle traces of newsprint left embedded in the pigment where the artist had blotted his surface with newspaper. As a remarkable early example of the distinctive combine-painting medium, Bantam acts as a sort of repository for these critical stylistic influences: its structure displays a grid-like organization of collage elements overlaid with expressive swathes of paint that brilliantly summarizes and incorporates the dominant stylistic elements of these foremost art historical giants, while letting the world into the picture plane in a mode that is unmistakably and exclusively the hand of Rauschenberg.