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reality of anti-Semitism into this scene of an already physically dismembered and miserably broken image of society. 

As the world out there becomes more absurd and out of control, the "man in the street" loses himself in his newspaper. Is it a reflection of reality or an escape? In Franz Radziwill's The Island Bridge at Wilhelmshaven, "the little man" clings to the paper reality of black and white (Fig. 17). The presence of the cold, hard metal of the war machines which surround him is utterly beyond his scope of vision, control, or understanding. 

In 1943 Hans Richter took scissors to paper in response to world events. Richter chose newspaper articles to create a scroll collage, Stalingrad (Victory in the East) (Fig. 18). The scroll is over 15 1/2 feet long. In a direct, literal, and legible manner the cut shapes record the unfolding of dramatic military events. The "Rollenbild" format, oil and paper pasted on shade cloth, suggests movement through time, narrating with newsreel immediacy the events of the defeat of the Nazis at this pivotal battle of World War II. The New York Times, the Daily News, and other New York papers provided the raw material for this expatriated German: 

The war against Hitler found its expression in my painting. I collected newspaper clippings....I had originally planned to use these clippings only as reference material; but my first sketches, made on newspaper for economical reasons, gave me the idea to incorporate the original reports into my scrolls—the speeches, the accusations and all the proclamations of inhumanity. So I made two scroll-collages: "Victory in the East (Stalingrad)" and "Liberation of Paris".... "Liberation of Paris" became a vertical scroll, being a moment in history, not an epic like "Stalingrad" (a horizontal scroll).17

The Cubists had infused the text of their collages with personal and elusive meanings. Dada collages were bitter. Richter's use of the text was factual. His news clippings report in the art context, just as they did in the real world. Stalingrad functions as a modern form of history painting. Headlines, small print, maps, and colors interpenetrate. As the narrative evolves, abstract shapes punctuate the story. The verbal and visual progressions reinforce one another, from the gray, black, and white geometric shapes of the invasion to the final colorful and organic forms of the people's victory. "The work was inspired," Richter explained, "by a sentence in Tolstoy's introduction to War and Peace: 'It is never the generals but always the people who decide the outcome of a war'."18 The artist recognized his inability to influence the crucial events. Frida Richter remembered later that "Hans followed the battle exactly. A map hung in his studio and he attentively read the newspaper. He was in the middle of it...."19 Richter's efforts were an artist's attempt to pull himself out of the role of the simple newspaper-reader and make a political comment. His clippings objectively report the news, but his infusion of factual material with abstract forms imposed a personal meaning to create what he described as an "optimistic triumphant style."20

Particularly sensitive to media, materials and time, Robert Rauschenberg used the newspaper as surface. The "Black Paintings" of 1952 gradually revealed more of the newspaper background. The "gray map of words," as he called it, was frontally presented and obscured. The literal fact of newsprint met the fact of paint head-on in a new confrontation of life and art. Rauschenberg used newspapers again in Currents (Fig. 19). To make "the largest and most beautiful drawing in the world," he wanted to use "the hot news" and "not obscure its potency with any artistic facility."21 The final 6-by-60-foot collage silkscreen print probably came "from a futile desire to escape the responsibility of feeling depressed by the things going on all around us."22

Here, more so than in the previously discussed works, the newspaper is presented within a minimal artistic context. Though as a silkscreen the object is used less directly, the technique does not control one's perception of it. The work is impressive for its technical achievement and scale, but it is the bareness of the material's presentation that is most striking. Here the viewer is starkly aware of the newspaper as an information-bearing object because there is no painted or collaged background. Unlike Richter's scrolls, Rauschenberg's news selections are less focused. There is no specific subject and neither is there optimism nor triumph. Currents mirrors a chaotic era. Made from 36 screens, the articles were selected from eight newspapers from six cities. The cutting and pasting present a fragmented reflection of the concerns of an era, everything from drugs to pollution, Mickey Mouse to Manson.

There is continuity between this work and the imagery of the newspaper-reader, for the work creates again the feeling of an intersection of the private and public worlds. The jab of newsprint as a piece of reality has only become more insistent, the reading of the text more burdensome. As Rothko's paintings often suggest a personal confrontation between viewer and the unknown or the void, Rauschenberg's Currents places the viewer in the position of confronting the glut of the "known" and the world mirror of this particular medium.

Picasso wanted to displace the newspaper, make it strange within the collage constellation, because he was "conscious of living in exile in a scarcely reassuring world."23 Rauschenberg was no exile, but he too wanted people to reflect. He called the work an "active protest, attempting to share and communicate my response to and concern with our grave times and place. Art can encourage individual conscience. Everyone's independent devotion is the only vehicle that can nourish the seed of sanity that is essential in the construction and change that makes all the difference in the world."24 His collaboration with the newspaper was the intersection of an artist and his time. Currents is an homage to an era and to a communication medium. We stand back and reality unfolds in bits and pieces. This is no longer his-story. In Currents, we all become simple newspaper-readers.25

1. Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh, Collage, Personalities, Concepts, Techniques, Philadelphia, Chilton, 1967, p. 188.
2. Janice McCullagh, "The Element of Time in August Macke's Urban Paradise," Arts Magazine, September 1981, pp. 136-141.
3. Lorenz Eitner, "The Open Window and the Storm-Tossed Boat," Art Bulletin, XXXVII, December, 1955, pp. 281-290. (See also: Beiträge zur Motifkunde des 19ten Jahrhunderts, Munich, Prestel Verlag, 1970).
4. Other examples of the subject might have been included in this discussion. The most relevant and accessible have been selected to suggest a feeling for the pervasive attitudes within important movements. Though the list can not be exhaustive, other notable examples include the following works showing men reading the newspaper:
W.S. Mount, The Herald in the Country, 1853; Wilhelm Trübner, Negro Reading a Newspaper, 1872; Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Man Reading a Newspaper; Andre Derain, Portrait of an Unknown Man Reading a Newspaper (Chevalier X), c. 1913; Walter Trier, Sturm readers at the Cafe des Westens, Berlin, drawing; E.L. Kirchner, Davoser Cafe, 1928; René Magritte, Man with a Newspaper, 1928; Edward Hopper, Room in New York, 1932; Jean Helion, numerous works, including Journalière, 1947-48, and Grand Journalèrie, 1951; Duane Hanson, Lesender Mann, 1972; Red Grooms, Rukus Manhattan, 1975; Jorg Immendorff, Cafe Deutschland XII: Eagle's Half, 1982.
5. Pierre Daix, Picasso, The Cubist Years 1907-1916, Boston, New York Graphic Society, 1979, p. 287.
6. Pablo Picasso,in F. Gilot and C. Lake,Life with Picasso,New York,Signet,1964,p.71.
7. Ibid., pp. 71-72.
8. Pierre Daix, op. cit., p. 128, quoting from La Lettre dans la peinture cubiste, Université de Sainte-Ettienne, Travaux IV: Le Cubisme, 1973, pp. 46, 47.
9. Robert Rosenblum, "Picasso and the Typography of Cubism," in Picasso 1881-1973, London, Paul Elek, 1973, pp. 49-75.
10. McCullagh,August Macke and the Vision of Paradise, Dissertation,University of Texas,1980, pp. 133-139.
11. Edward Tannenbaum, 1900, the Generation Before the Great War, Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1976, p. 231.
12. Karl Kraus, translated in Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898-1918, London, Phaidon, p. 220.
13. Dawn Ades, Photomontage, New York, Pantheon, 1976, p. 110.
14. Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestoes, 1916-1920, translated by Ralph Manheim in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. by Robert Motherwell, New York, George Wittenburn Inc., 1951, p. 92.
Les bourgeois se ressemblent—ils sont tous pareils. Ils ne se ressemblaient pas....
Pour faire un poème dadaiste / Prenez un journal./ Prenez des ciseaux./ Choisissez dans ce journal un article ayant la longeur que vous comptez donner à votre poème./ Découpez l'article./ Découpez ensuite avec soin chacon des mots qui forment cet article et mettez-les dans un sac./ Agitez doucement./ Sortez ensuite chaque coupure l'une après l'autre dans l'ordre où elles ont quitté le sac./ Copiez consciencieusement./ Le poèm vous ressemblera./ Et vous voilà un écrivain infiniment original et d'une sensibilité charmante, encore qu'incomprise un vulgaire. (7 manifestes dada, Paris, Jean Budry, 1924, p. 75, 77).
15. George Grosz,A Little Yes and a Big No: the Autobiography of George Grosz,translated by Lola Sachs Dorin, New York, Dial Press, 1946, p. 116.
16. Wolf Von Eckardt and Sander L. Gilman, Bertolt Brecht's Berlin, A Scrapbook of the Twenties, Garden City, New York, Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1975, p. 49.
17. Hans Richter,Hans Richter by Hans Richter,ed. Cleve Gray, Holt, Reinhart and Winston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, 1971, p. 116.
18. Ibid., p. 119.
19. Frida Richter, in a interview with Cynthia Jaffe McCabe, New Haven, Conn., July 28, 1977, in Hans Richter 1888-1976, Academie dur Künste, 1982, p. 115.
20. H. Richter, ibid.
21. Robert Rauschenberg, quoted by Calvin Tomkins in Off the Wall, New York, Penguin, 1980, p. 289.
22. R. Rauschenberg, quoted by Tompins, ibid., p. 290.
23. Picasso, in Gilot and Lake, loc. cit.
24. Robert Rauschenberg, Currents, introduction to exhibition at Automation House and Castelli Graphics, June 1970, n.p.
25. It would of course be impossible to list all the collages using newspapers. Other notable examples which might have been included are: many works by Picasso, Braque, and Gris; Jasper Johns' 4 the News; Arthur Dove's The Critic; Maricio Lasansky's Nazi Drawing; Joseph Beuys' Zeuge deine Wunde; and paintings by Dennis Ashbaugh, who collages headlines to his abstract works by making them the titles of his paintings.

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Transcription Notes:
Some citations -- like 6, 8, 10, and 17 -- seem to have no spaces after some if not all of their commas. Not sure if this is too important but I tried my best to reflect that in the transcription.