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Lot Essay
In 1958, in conjunction with the creation of his celebrated Combines, Robert Rauschenberg also began to make a series of transfer drawings. Like the Combines, these were works that incorporated into themselves an entire world of images and materials. Part collage, part drawing, part painting, incorporating 'real' imagery in the form of photographs transferred onto paper; these 'transfer drawings' formed the graphic counterpart to Rauschenberg's larger-scale experiments 'combining' the fields of painting and sculpture. Cage, executed in 1958, is one of the first of these drawings.
It had been on a trip to Cuba in 1952 that Rauschenberg had first experimented with the technique of transferring printed images to paper, but it was only in 1958 alongside his work on the Combines, that Rauschenberg began a concentrated exploration of this technique. Using printed images from the mass media, from newspapers, comics and popular magazines Rauschenberg transferred these onto paper by covering them with a solvent such as turpentine or lighter fluid, laying them face down and rubbing the back of the image with a pencil or ballpoint pen. A flipped version of the image would subsequently be 'transferred' onto the paper. As with the collaging of imagery that he had used in his Combines, the 'transfer' technique allowed elements from the 'real' world of daily life to be incorporated onto the picture plain. In essence, it allowed for the new aesthetic of the Combines to be extended into the graphic arena of drawing.
Cage follows this grid-like layering of imagery with its structure of vaguely rectangular blocks of white and yellow paint, torn paper and multiple use of architectural imagery. The title, while perhaps descriptive on one level, also references Rauschenberg's friend and confident, the musician John Cage. Cage and Rauschenberg had first met at the Betty Parson's Gallery in 1951 during Rauschenberg's first solo show and immediately recognized an affinity between both themselves and their way of working. They became friends and their friendship grew closer the following summer when Rauschenberg enrolled in classes at Black Mountain College where Cage was a faculty member. 1954 marked the first collaboration between the two artists, entitled Automobile tire print. This work involved Cage driving his Model T Ford with an inked tire over a series of paper sheets laid out by Rauschenberg and pasted into a strip. The result was a 22 foot long tire print on paper.
In Cage, in which Rauschenberg has applied another, less elaborate, transfer technique, he has appropriated the imagery of classicism and in particular classical architecture, to create a multifaceted work of shifting elements and imagery that still maintains a strong sense of landscape. This is no traditional landscape, however, it is one of multiple and simultaneous viewpoints. But in the main all the elements of the picture adhere to an understated horizontal versus vertical axis that suggests a non-hierarchical but nonetheless sequential sense of progression as if the painting could be read. At the center of the work is a reproduction of Madame Récamier by the great French master of classicism Jacques-Louis David. Such referencing of the imagery of 'high' art is typical of Rauschenberg and one of the elements of his work that garnered him much notoriety.
All around this postcard-like image of a famous work of art are other transfer sketches depicting Roman columns and classical and neo-classical cathedrals as well as a range other buildings and examples of classical architecture. Cage himself, before deciding to become a musician, had travelled to Europe with the idea of studying architecture and of becoming an architect before ultimately rejecting the idea in favor of following music. A sense of such voyaging and of personal wandering throughout the picture, of displacement and of what Cage once encouraged people to understand as the fascinating richness of life--'once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of the way'-- is suggested by many of Rauschenberg's transfer drawings. It is particularly the case in this work with its schismatic positioning of the imagery of different buildings and locations and with its image of a jet plane flying across the sky towards an enigmatic diagram of a spiral. This plane is also shown flying away from a lone figure of a man who appears to be watching the strange celestial body or sunset that is represented by a browned paper plate stuck onto the surface of the work in the top right hand corner. No accident, this figure stands for the lone wanderer who is both a part of and apart from the scene which he appears to be contemplating. Above him a vast and ludicrous plate appears like a planet. Sketched onto it in vague and loose writing are the numbers from a clock face. This celestial disk/plate is therefore also a clock--a mechanism of keeping time and, more importantly here, of introducing the concept of time and of the passage of time into a picture. Preoccupation with time and of its passing is something that would become of increasing importance to Rauschenberg and with which he would experiment on numerous occasions in future work. A conceptual element, it is again, one of the features of Rauschenberg's work that was strongly influenced by both the work and the example of his friend John Cage.
It had been on a trip to Cuba in 1952 that Rauschenberg had first experimented with the technique of transferring printed images to paper, but it was only in 1958 alongside his work on the Combines, that Rauschenberg began a concentrated exploration of this technique. Using printed images from the mass media, from newspapers, comics and popular magazines Rauschenberg transferred these onto paper by covering them with a solvent such as turpentine or lighter fluid, laying them face down and rubbing the back of the image with a pencil or ballpoint pen. A flipped version of the image would subsequently be 'transferred' onto the paper. As with the collaging of imagery that he had used in his Combines, the 'transfer' technique allowed elements from the 'real' world of daily life to be incorporated onto the picture plain. In essence, it allowed for the new aesthetic of the Combines to be extended into the graphic arena of drawing.
Cage follows this grid-like layering of imagery with its structure of vaguely rectangular blocks of white and yellow paint, torn paper and multiple use of architectural imagery. The title, while perhaps descriptive on one level, also references Rauschenberg's friend and confident, the musician John Cage. Cage and Rauschenberg had first met at the Betty Parson's Gallery in 1951 during Rauschenberg's first solo show and immediately recognized an affinity between both themselves and their way of working. They became friends and their friendship grew closer the following summer when Rauschenberg enrolled in classes at Black Mountain College where Cage was a faculty member. 1954 marked the first collaboration between the two artists, entitled Automobile tire print. This work involved Cage driving his Model T Ford with an inked tire over a series of paper sheets laid out by Rauschenberg and pasted into a strip. The result was a 22 foot long tire print on paper.
In Cage, in which Rauschenberg has applied another, less elaborate, transfer technique, he has appropriated the imagery of classicism and in particular classical architecture, to create a multifaceted work of shifting elements and imagery that still maintains a strong sense of landscape. This is no traditional landscape, however, it is one of multiple and simultaneous viewpoints. But in the main all the elements of the picture adhere to an understated horizontal versus vertical axis that suggests a non-hierarchical but nonetheless sequential sense of progression as if the painting could be read. At the center of the work is a reproduction of Madame Récamier by the great French master of classicism Jacques-Louis David. Such referencing of the imagery of 'high' art is typical of Rauschenberg and one of the elements of his work that garnered him much notoriety.
All around this postcard-like image of a famous work of art are other transfer sketches depicting Roman columns and classical and neo-classical cathedrals as well as a range other buildings and examples of classical architecture. Cage himself, before deciding to become a musician, had travelled to Europe with the idea of studying architecture and of becoming an architect before ultimately rejecting the idea in favor of following music. A sense of such voyaging and of personal wandering throughout the picture, of displacement and of what Cage once encouraged people to understand as the fascinating richness of life--'once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of the way'-- is suggested by many of Rauschenberg's transfer drawings. It is particularly the case in this work with its schismatic positioning of the imagery of different buildings and locations and with its image of a jet plane flying across the sky towards an enigmatic diagram of a spiral. This plane is also shown flying away from a lone figure of a man who appears to be watching the strange celestial body or sunset that is represented by a browned paper plate stuck onto the surface of the work in the top right hand corner. No accident, this figure stands for the lone wanderer who is both a part of and apart from the scene which he appears to be contemplating. Above him a vast and ludicrous plate appears like a planet. Sketched onto it in vague and loose writing are the numbers from a clock face. This celestial disk/plate is therefore also a clock--a mechanism of keeping time and, more importantly here, of introducing the concept of time and of the passage of time into a picture. Preoccupation with time and of its passing is something that would become of increasing importance to Rauschenberg and with which he would experiment on numerous occasions in future work. A conceptual element, it is again, one of the features of Rauschenberg's work that was strongly influenced by both the work and the example of his friend John Cage.