Robert Rauschenberg valuation

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.

Rauschenberg's father worked for Gulf States Utilities. At 18 he began studying pharmacology at the University of Texas at Austin and soon dropped out; he did not yet know he was dyslexic. He was drafted into the Navy in 1944 and served as a neuropsychiatric technician at a hospital in California, and in 1950 he married the artist Susan Weil. The White Paintings of 1951, made with house paint and rollers, were shown at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery in 1953, and John Cage called them "airports for the lights, shadows and particles". Black paintings on newspaper grounds and the Red Paintings came next, before the Combines.

At Black Mountain he took part in John Cage's Theatre Piece No. 1 of 1952, often called the first Happening. He designed sets, lighting and costumes for Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, and in May 1963 choreographed his first piece, Pelican, for the Judson Dance Theater; his full-time work with the Cunningham company ended after its world tour of 1964. That year he won the International Grand Prize in Painting at the Venice Biennale. In 1969 the Metropolitan Museum commissioned his Centennial Certificate. He set up Change, Inc. in 1970 to give emergency grants to artists, and lobbied for the resale royalties that California adopted in 1976.