Pledge - Robert Rauschenberg

 

         Rauschenberg created this piece in 1968 in the medium of lithograph on paper.

 

Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist whose work is known to have greatly influenced the 1950s Pop Art movement. He was born in Port Arthur, Texas on 22nd of October 1925 and died at the age of 82 in Florida on 12th of May 2008. He was both a painter and a sculptor, but also worked with photography, papermaking, printmaking and performance. He has received various different awards for his work, including the National Medal of Arts and the Leondardo Da Vinci World Award of Arts. His influences included people like Jasper Johns, John Cage and Marcel Duchamp.

I find it very interesting how, on this piece, he used greyscale photographs (which he seems to use very often in his work) from newspapers or magazines to make a simple yet effective collage. Some of the photographs used appear to have a blue tint which gives looks quite like biro ink. The pictures used look quite faded and aged. The collage incorporates pictures of a woman, a car, some baseball players, a farmer holding some plants and a skyscraper, all of which seem quite disconnected and unrelated, so the fact that the collage is only in black and white means that it doesn’t look too busy and overdone. The pictures are pasted in a quite disorganised manner on the plain white page and do not appear to follow a pattern, making it seem chaotic, in a way, yet still quite simple. They aren’t placed too close to each other which again, echoes the fact that the collage in simple and not too overdone.
The collage may be useful when I’m doing my work as the photographs appear to be memories that Rauschenberg may have had. The unorganised and seemingly unrelated pictures could represent that his memories are quite scattered or difficult to remember and the dark colours could represent his feelings at the time (them possibly being fairly negative). The piece also links to the work I have been doing in class recently, as lithography is a way of printing making that I could use in addition to the methods I have already tried.