TEFAF New York
Booth 337

Robert Rauschenberg
Thai drawings

May 11 – May 16

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10065

A quintessentially American artist, Robert Rauschenberg was, nevertheless, a citizen of the world. Throughout his long career, he traveled extensively—from his time as costume, set, and lighting designer for the Merce Cunningham Company, with whom he toured to thirty cities in Europe and Asia in 1964, to his global arts initiative, the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI), which spanned eleven host countries between 1984 and 1991. There were also myriad international exhibitions and residencies over the years. Rauschenberg was indeed peripatetic, seemingly always on the move. While travel necessitated time away from the studio, it never prevented him from producing new artworks. On the contrary, he took inspiration from local customs and materials, often collaborating with resident artisans and borrowing from indigenous practices to create entirely new bodies of work. This ethos may have found early form during the Cunningham world tour, during which Rauschenberg designed an entirely new set for each performance of Story (1963), using found local objects and building materials in response to each existing site. And while in Tokyo with the company, he produced the Combine, Gold Standard (1964), which he created in front of a live audience, adding quotidian items and paint to a gold folding Japanese screen. Rauschenberg’s stints in Asia proved particularly fruitful for his art. A residency in Ahmadabad, India, in 1975, where he became fascinated with brilliantly hued, silk fabrics, occasioned the Hoarfrost and Jammer series. In 1982, Rauschenberg travelled extensively in China, culminating in a collaboration with the world’s oldest paper mill in Jingxian. The same year he experimented with ceramics for the second time in his career at the Otsuka Ohmi Ceramics Company; combining in Japanese Clayworks his signature imagery with pictures culled from ancient and modern Japanese culture.

The stage was, therefore, set for the creation of three suites of sumptuous works on paper produced sequentially in response to Rauschenberg’s extended journeys through Japan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand in 1983. The first two sets, the Kyoto and Sri Lanka drawings were made on site in each location utilizing paint and solvent transfer imagery—a technique the artist inaugurated in 1958 in order to quickly and efficiently reproduce and layer photos culled from mass media sources at 1:1 scale. For the Sri Lanka drawings, he used local ceremonial mat boards for his surfaces, incorporating their embellished borders and richly hued floral patterns. Their readymade designs lent a mandala-like format to the elaborate compositions, which fused images from local publications with passages of translucent watercolors. In Kyoto, Rauschenberg discovered Japanese dedication boards, or Shikishi boards comprising handmade paper laminated to a thick support and edged with strips of gold paper. Traditionally used for sumi paintings, haiku poems, and calligraphy, Shikishi were often hung on fabric hanging scrolls. The Thai drawings were, unlike the series before them, completed when Rauschenberg returned to his studio in Captiva, Florida. Using the gold-trimmed Japanese dedication boards, he absorbed and combined the imagery he discovered abroad, but this time integrating color photographs that he had taken while in Sri Lanka—one of the first occasions in which he used his own pictures in the solvent transfer process.

In their composition, the Thai drawings recall the all-over, nonhierarchical surfaces of Rauschenberg’s celebrated Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (1958), which also prominently features solvent transfers. But the 1983 palette is brilliantly prismatic with purple, orange, green, yellow, and rose-colored washes of watercolor. Some images were gleaned from Thai magazines, including culturally specific views of pagodas, statues of the Buddha, and saffron-clad monks. But mostly notably, they provide a sense of the artist’s own photographic eye with examples of Sri Lankan street scenes, hand-painted signage, overflowing market stalls, and plantings. Researchers at the Rauschenberg Foundation have diligently identified the actual photographs from the artist’s archives that he used for the transfers. The sensibility of these pictures evidence Rauschenberg’s affection for the peripheral, the overlooked, and the commonplace wherever he might encounter it. The juxtaposition between the Thai drawings’ gilded edges and, in some cases, richly-hued matting boards, with the dynamic energy of the compositions and their subject matter is a defining feature of the series. Rauschenberg’s abiding respect for world cultures and a deep desire to learn from and contribute to them are perfectly embodied in this work—a fact that would be further manifested in his subsequent ROCI initiative, during which these drawings were significantly featured.