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Lot Essay
Ghostly images flicker shadow-like across Robert Rauschenberg’s Cusp (Hoarfrost). These phantasmagoric pictures, wrought from contemporaneous magazine publications, emerge like shadows from the opaque translucency of the diaphanous fabric support—itself barely material—merely two pins on the upper edges holding the work as it billows with the slightest disturbance.
The Hoarfrost series was the innovative American artist’s first to deal with fabric, executed just after his move to Captiva, Florida. Initially coming upon the idea after cleaning a lithographic stone with cheesecloth and solvent and noting the metamorphized image impregnated upon the cotton fabric, Rauschenberg set to work producing this defining series. Printed on his new green-painted Griffin flatbed press—affectionately named “Grasshopper”—the artist laid his fabric in the press, then arranged selected paper images—in this case, advertisements from the 7 November 1974, edition of The Los Angeles Times—on top, some flat and face down, others wadded, crumpled, or torn. After spraying a fine mist of solvent over the entire assembly, he layered padding on top then sent the work through the press, exacting thousands of pounds of pressure upon the barely material fabric to create his hallucinatory imagery.
Rauschenberg’s first interactions with photographic transfers occurred in the 1960s, when Andy Warhol instructed him on the silkscreen technique. Rauschenberg utilized the transfer technique to overlap images onto each other, their original spatial meaning canceling out into a crescendo of optical noise. This amalgamation of illusionary imagery created what art historian Leo Steinberg considered the single most important artistic breakthrough of the twentieth century, the construction of the flatbed picture plane, where “the painted surface is no longer an analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes” (“Encounters with Rauschenberg,” in S. Schwartz, ed., Modern Art: Selected Essays, Chicago, 2023, p. 87).
Hoarfrost’s inception can be first traced to Rauschenberg’s 1958 project to illustrate each Canto of Dante’s Inferno. For each drawing, the artist would read a Canto with his friend Michael Sonnabend, an art dealer and Dante scholar, before translating verse into image. Rauschenberg discovered the term hoarfrost in Canto XXIV, the artist explaining that “hoarfrost is like a mock frost, but it’s a warning about the change of seasons” (quoted in M.L. Kotz, Rauschenberg / Art and Life, New York, 1990, p. 162). Dante lent on the natural phenomenon in a metaphor describing a fleeting emotion, the resultant visual effect so profound as to deeply affect Rauschenberg, who translated the scene into a tableau strewn with silver grey effervescence hesitantly laid across the sheet, the forms’ abstracted shapes suggesting their fleeting nature.
The work recalls another Western tradition, depictions of the Veil of Veronica, the fabric said by medieval legend to have captured the visage of Jesus Christ. Veronica’s veil can be conceptualized as a precursor to Rauschenberg’s photographic transfer process. Zurbaran’s seventeenth-century painting depicting the subject bears stylistic similarities to Rauschenberg’s work as well, the Old Master’s evocative painted veil hung similarly to the American artist’s fabric, Christ’s face just barely discernable from the cloth’s folds much as the transferred media only barely registers from the fabric support.
Just as for Dante’s hoarfrost, “but the color from his brush soon fades away,” Rauschenberg’s media proved fungible in his Hoarfrosts (The Portable Dante, trans. M. Musa, New York, 1995, Canto XXIV, 6). The artist describes how “The first ones [in 1974] were very obscure, they were almost like brushstrokes. And in many cases you had to know what the image was in order to be able to see it… I was actually trying to dematerialized the surface as much as I could so that you had a sense of the fabrics being there so the light would have something to fall on” (quoted in M.L. Kotz, op. cit., 1990, p. 162). The work’s delicate execution and interaction with its surroundings, constantly modulating against the slightest breeze, captures the essence of both Dante’s metaphor and Rauschenberg’s broader artistic project, deconstructing symbolic allusion to advance a bold, innovative art.
The Hoarfrost series was the innovative American artist’s first to deal with fabric, executed just after his move to Captiva, Florida. Initially coming upon the idea after cleaning a lithographic stone with cheesecloth and solvent and noting the metamorphized image impregnated upon the cotton fabric, Rauschenberg set to work producing this defining series. Printed on his new green-painted Griffin flatbed press—affectionately named “Grasshopper”—the artist laid his fabric in the press, then arranged selected paper images—in this case, advertisements from the 7 November 1974, edition of The Los Angeles Times—on top, some flat and face down, others wadded, crumpled, or torn. After spraying a fine mist of solvent over the entire assembly, he layered padding on top then sent the work through the press, exacting thousands of pounds of pressure upon the barely material fabric to create his hallucinatory imagery.
Rauschenberg’s first interactions with photographic transfers occurred in the 1960s, when Andy Warhol instructed him on the silkscreen technique. Rauschenberg utilized the transfer technique to overlap images onto each other, their original spatial meaning canceling out into a crescendo of optical noise. This amalgamation of illusionary imagery created what art historian Leo Steinberg considered the single most important artistic breakthrough of the twentieth century, the construction of the flatbed picture plane, where “the painted surface is no longer an analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes” (“Encounters with Rauschenberg,” in S. Schwartz, ed., Modern Art: Selected Essays, Chicago, 2023, p. 87).
Hoarfrost’s inception can be first traced to Rauschenberg’s 1958 project to illustrate each Canto of Dante’s Inferno. For each drawing, the artist would read a Canto with his friend Michael Sonnabend, an art dealer and Dante scholar, before translating verse into image. Rauschenberg discovered the term hoarfrost in Canto XXIV, the artist explaining that “hoarfrost is like a mock frost, but it’s a warning about the change of seasons” (quoted in M.L. Kotz, Rauschenberg / Art and Life, New York, 1990, p. 162). Dante lent on the natural phenomenon in a metaphor describing a fleeting emotion, the resultant visual effect so profound as to deeply affect Rauschenberg, who translated the scene into a tableau strewn with silver grey effervescence hesitantly laid across the sheet, the forms’ abstracted shapes suggesting their fleeting nature.
The work recalls another Western tradition, depictions of the Veil of Veronica, the fabric said by medieval legend to have captured the visage of Jesus Christ. Veronica’s veil can be conceptualized as a precursor to Rauschenberg’s photographic transfer process. Zurbaran’s seventeenth-century painting depicting the subject bears stylistic similarities to Rauschenberg’s work as well, the Old Master’s evocative painted veil hung similarly to the American artist’s fabric, Christ’s face just barely discernable from the cloth’s folds much as the transferred media only barely registers from the fabric support.
Just as for Dante’s hoarfrost, “but the color from his brush soon fades away,” Rauschenberg’s media proved fungible in his Hoarfrosts (The Portable Dante, trans. M. Musa, New York, 1995, Canto XXIV, 6). The artist describes how “The first ones [in 1974] were very obscure, they were almost like brushstrokes. And in many cases you had to know what the image was in order to be able to see it… I was actually trying to dematerialized the surface as much as I could so that you had a sense of the fabrics being there so the light would have something to fall on” (quoted in M.L. Kotz, op. cit., 1990, p. 162). The work’s delicate execution and interaction with its surroundings, constantly modulating against the slightest breeze, captures the essence of both Dante’s metaphor and Rauschenberg’s broader artistic project, deconstructing symbolic allusion to advance a bold, innovative art.