羅伯特·勞森伯格

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC #156)
The New York Hilton Hotel (acquired from the above in May 1963)
Sotheby's, New York, November 15, 1995, Lot 19 (consigned by the above)
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Andrew Forge, Rauschenberg, New York, 1969, p. 227 (text)
Andrew Forge, Rauschenberg, New York, 1972, p. 81 (text)
Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, New York, 1980, p. 305 (text)
Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962-64, 1990, cat. no. 34, pl. 67, p. 152, illustrated

This painting is in excellent condition. Under ultraviolet light, there are no apparent restorations. There is a very fine 1 ½" vertical hairline crack in the lower right corner, and scattered hairline cracks in the heavy impasto of the orange and white brushstroke along the right edge. All appear stable and secure. The canvas is framed in a blonde wood strip frame.
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Broadcasting an entrancing cacophony of visual stimuli across its rich surface, Round Trip I, from 1963, is an indisputable testament to Robert Rauschenberg’s voracious creativity. More than simply a visual artist, Rauschenberg was truly a poet of forms who constantly sought to free his images from the confines of visual language and its prescribed logic, instead presenting his viewer with an array of literal and associative referents that at once beg and categorically deny interpretation. Loosely divided into four quadrants, the composition of Round Trip I mimics its title as it encourages us to travel in an orbital motion through the compressed layers of photographic reproductions, rendered with an eye toward graphic intensity in stark black and white. Many of the prevailing themes of Rauschenberg’s silkscreened corpus – the caged bird, a football, dancers, architectural facades, and modes of transportation – here coalesce into a striking mélange of forms that bespeak the artist’s distinctly contemporary brand of collage.

Rauschenberg’s path toward the Silkscreen Paintings can be charted over a period of four years. In 1958, with his first “transfer drawings,” Rauschenberg established the primacy of the photographic image in his art. By moistening magazine or newspaper illustrations with a solvent, placing them face down on a piece of drawing paper, and rubbing them to transfer an impression of the image onto his clean surface, the artist created subtle, evanescent ghost-like reproductions hued in pastel tones. In 1962, at the urging of Tatyana Grosman of Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Rauschenberg took the next major evolutionary step toward his Silkscreen Paintings when he created his first lithographic compositions, Urban and Suburban. In contrast to his delicate “transfer drawings,” Rauschenberg’s lithographs were bold and graphic, rendered in jet black printer’s ink; additionally, because each lithographic image was created using a separate plate, it could be reused and recombined with other images to create indefinite compositional permutations. It was this aspect of the mechanical process that Rauschenberg embraced, for it fueled his persistently audacious aesthetic ingenuity.

Rauschenberg’s first silkscreen painting was executed in the fall of 1962, nearly simultaneously with Andy Warhol, who had begun to explore both black and white and colored silkscreens in August of that year. By incorporating into the realm of fine art a method of image-making previously confined to the domain of commercial advertising, these two giants of the Twentieth Century forever shifted the dynamic of painterly discourse within the canon of art history.  Though exercised to diametrically opposed ends – Warhol sought the explicit dismissal of the significance of the artist’s touch by emphasizing the coolly repetitive, mechanistic process; whereas Rauschenberg devised a heady mix of imagery that fundamentally retained something of the expressionistic and painterly – both artists used the silkscreen method to seize upon the prevailing desire of the moment to strip away the recent past and re-examine the nature of painting.

Photographic reproductions by definition are images or traces of things twice removed rather than the things themselves. In Round Trip I, the spectral quality of Rauschenberg’s source imagery, in the words of Max Kozloff, “recedes into the fibers of the canvas, from which it once protruded [in the Combines]. …That the new presences do not have the immediate, yet enigmatic, impact of real things is as obvious as that their range in time, space and memory is infinitely greater.” (Max Kozloff, “Art,” The Nation, December 7, 1963, p. 402) The mundane objects that Rauschenberg incorporated into his renowned Combines, once fixed to the composition, became cemented in time, vestiges of a specific moment. In Round Trip I, Rauschenberg’s images relinquish all ties to temporality, operating instead within a limitless expanse of past and present, as if our own memory were recorded within the confines of the artist’s canvas. As such, this work exemplifies Ellen Johnson’s articulation of the essence of the artist’s silkscreen practice: “Rauschenberg gives new power to the dynamic means of the cubists; he speeds up the simultaneous viewpoint befitting a more mobile observer and a faster changing world; his distortions in scale are more fantastic; his shifts in space and meaning are more abrupt; and the dialogue between substance and illusion and between art and reality is evermore complex.” (Ellen H. Johnson, “The Image Duplicators – Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, and Warhol,” Canadian Art, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, January 1966, p. 17) A brilliant summation of this definitive description, Round Trip I is simultaneously archetypal of a seminal series within the career of one of the most influential artists of the Twentieth Century, whilst also monumentalizing the proliferation of mass-media imagery that so profoundly characterized the historic moment of its creation.