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Throughout his 60-year artistic career, Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was at the forefront of postwar American art since Abstract Expressionism and a longtime collaborator with Graphicstudio. Working in a wide range of subjects, styles, materials, and techniques, Rauschenberg’s early works established his ongoing dialogue between mediums, relating the handmade and the readymade, the gestural brushstroke and the mechanically reproduced image.
During Rauschenberg’s residency in 1973, he experimented with the process of solvent transfer and screenprint to create the Crops suite. The title of the suite suggests multiple meanings, not only the concept of plant life but also the process of “cropping” an image for publication. The suite of five prints, Coconut, Mangrove, Peanuts, Cactus, and Watermelon were created from strips of shredded newspaper, layered with larger strips and sheets of cropped newspapaer, arranged into the final composition. This was then placed face down onto the paper and solvent was liberally sprayed over a backing sheet before being run through the lithography press. The newspaper needed to be replaced in the same approximate position, which resulted in each print being slightly different and unique. These slight variations are also simultaneously being cropped like the world events detailed in the newspaper clippings. Using the newspaper fragments in scattered orientations to allude to an array of meanings, Rauschenberg ultimately leaves the interpretation up to the viewer.
“Ideally I would like to make a picture [such] that no two people would see the same thing, not only because [the people] are different but because the picture is different.” (Robert Rauschenberg, in Forge 1969, as published in Fine, Ruth e., Corlett, Mary Lee, Graphicstudio: Contemporary Art from the University of South Florida, National Gallery of Art, 1991.)
