Robert Rauschenberg valuation
Erased a de Kooning, put a stuffed goat in a painting, and opened the gap between art and life.
Robert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925, studied at Black Mountain College under Josef Albers, and in 1953 persuaded Willem de Kooning to give him a drawing so he could rub it out — Erased de Kooning Drawing is the result.
What a work by Robert Rauschenberg is worth
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Bio
Robert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925, studied at Black Mountain College under Josef Albers, and in 1953 persuaded Willem de Kooning to give him a drawing so he could rub it out — Erased de Kooning Drawing is the result. The Combines that followed put quilts, tyres, taxidermy, radios and street salvage into paintings, and the silkscreen paintings of the 1960s brought photographic imagery in directly. He collaborated for years with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and founded ROCI to make work in ten countries. He died in 2008.
The Combines are conservation objects of the first order: they contain fabric, paper, rubber, taxidermy, electrical parts and adhesives that were never intended to survive, and their condition and treatment history bear directly on both value and saleability. Rauschenberg was also one of the great printmakers of the century, working with Universal Limited Art Editions and Gemini G.E.L. across five decades in lithograph, screenprint and transfer, and the prints are extensive, well catalogued and are what most sellers hold. The Rauschenberg Foundation holds the archive.
At a glance
- Born
- 22 October 1925, Port Arthur
- Died
- 12 May 2008, Captiva
- Movements
- Neo-Dada, Postmodernism, Modern art
More on Wikipedia.
Accident, Booster and the print publishers
Rauschenberg began making lithographs at Universal Limited Art Editions on Long Island in 1962. When the stone for Accident cracked during printing in 1963 he printed it anyway, break and all, and it won the grand prize at the international print exhibition in Ljubljana that year, the first time an American had won it. Booster, made with the printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles in 1967, is a life-size self-portrait built from X-rays of his own skeleton, and was at the time the largest lithograph printed on a hand press.
Both publishers documented their editions closely. The National Gallery of Art in Washington holds the Gemini archive, with an example of each edition, and its online catalogue of Gemini's first decades is preserved in archived form. A Rauschenberg print should match a published edition in size, paper and edition number, and usually carries the publisher's blind stamp as well as his pencil signature. Proofs outside the numbered edition are common and are described by their own abbreviations. Large lithographs on soft paper crease and stain easily.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
