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RR 84
Sunday, February 5, 1984
Life
Port Arthur News 1E
Photos courtesy Leo Castelli Galleries, New York

Group tours of exhibit available

Robert Rauschenberg's exhibit will remain at the Port Arthur Public Library, open to the public at regular library hours. The exhibit will run through Feb. 19.
Among the pieces exhibited are "Arcanium I-XIII," a suite of 13 prints finished in 1981; and two pieces from the Slide collection "Radial Pose" and "Forged Gift," which are solvent transfer on fabric collaged to paper. This collection was completed in 1979. 
From his Signal Collection, 1980, "Dart," "Spore" and "Channel II" — all owned by the artist — are a solvent transfer, collage and acrylic on wooden panels.
"Change" and "Howl," from the Seven Characters Collection, 1982, are collages finished when Rauschenberg visited China.
Upon the artist's arrival in the People's Republic of China, he and his party collaborated with the craftsman of a 1,500-year-old paper mill. 
A collection of Rauschenberg's photography is also part of the exhibit.
A commemorative poster by Rauschenberg for this event will be on sale throughout the run of the exhibit. The artist signed 200 copies of the poster, and those are on sale for $125. The unsigned edition of the poster is $30.
Library personnel will conduct tours and explanations of the exhibit, for groups. To arrange a group tour, call Mary Lou Featherston at 985-8838.
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RAUSCHENBERG
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HAWK, 1960
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MONOGRAM, 1955-59

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DRAWING ROOM II, 1982

Rauschenberg exhibit reveals artist's success
By PAM ROBERSON
Guest Writer
I was watching the Electric Company with my kid the other day, and a teacher with the word "sketch" floating over her head said, "Today with will make a s-k-e-t-c-h." 
She pointed her long stick at one beany-topped tyke. "Now, Picasso, come up here and draw a s-k-e-t-c-h." He obliges. Then came Salvador (Dali), Rauschenberg and Warhol to the board. Wait a minute. Rauschenberg? He's that famous?
Robert (born Milton in 1925) Rauschenberg didn't even know there was such a thing as being an artist until he was 18 years old. As a kid, he drew in the margins of his homework and painted fleur-de-lis all over his bedroom. He thought everyone could draw. It wasn't until his portraits of Navy cohorts made him popular for the first time in his life that he discovered otherwise. And when he visited the Huntington Art Gallery in San Marino, Calif., he experienced a moment of realization that would shape his future. There were the first oil paintings he'd ever seen in his life, and it dawned on him that someone had "thought those things out and made them. Behind each of them was a man whose profession it was to make them. That just never occurred to me before."
Twenty-one years later, in 1964, Rauschenberg became the first American to be awarded the international painting prize at Venice Biennale, which put him in the company of such previous winners as Henri Matisse, George Braque and Max Ernst. In fact, only two other Americans had won painting prizes of any kind there: Mark Tobey and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
But it was only recently that Rauschenberg received the fame that had eluded him for 12 years in New York. His work was generally misunderstood, seen as a joke, or considered an affront to serious art. This is not unusual. All new developments in art are greeted with some degree of outrage. Some of his first works, his "white paintings"  — and that's just what they were — were meant to incorporate the environment. That is, the incident shadows and light described the surroundings, bridging the gap between the work and the viewer. In that one concept lay the theme of all his subsequent work. Yet no one understood the motive until much when in a retrospective in 1963, all his works were seen together. 
During the '50s in New York, Abstract Expressionism was gaining ground and changing the accepted norms of art. It was an inward-looking, self-contained art in which the creative "spark" was transformed into the unique being, the work of art itself, which exists unto itself and does not refer to the outside world. Rauschenberg's work, while making use of some of its painting techniques, was a direct contradiction to this. His art was outward-looking. He incorporated the environment, letting the viewer respond in his own way. Rauschenberg sought to remove Rauschenberg from his art and just let it be.
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BED,1995
Two famous works exemplified his opposition to Abstract Expressionism. The first was the erased de-Kooning drawing. Rauschenberg asked the foremost Abstract Expressionist of his time for one of his drawings, and, over the course of four months, painstakingly erased it to a ghost image. The second was the pair of abstract expressionist paintings, Factum I and Factum II, identically painted down to the last brush stroke. So much for reverent uniqueness.
Rauschenberg had no ideological home, and he continued to work in his individual fashion, incorporating material and paper scraps, junk, ladders, chairs, fans, stuffed ani- [[animals]]
See RESTRICTIONS, page 2E

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COLLECTION, 1953-54 [[1954]]