#Robert lens iconographer windows#

There is 'no difference in fact,' Kramer went on to say.4 In 1961 Robert Rosenblum scoffed, 'The extravagant reorganization of vulgar objects is hardly the most jolting thing about Rauschenberg's work far more upsetting is the artistic logic which produces such illogical results.'5

#Robert lens iconographer windows#

Ward noted that she 'had to remove the guest book during his show because of the obscenities being written into it,' and that 'many people really thought that it was immoral.'3 Indeed, Rauschenberg's entire body of work up until the early 1960s was summarily reviled as the sensibility of a vulgarian whose taste ran to Harper's Bazaar or the 'decorative displays which often grace the windows of Bonwit Teller and Bloomingdales,' as Hilton Kramer put it. An exhibition in 1953 with Cy Twombly at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery is a case in point. Postmodern critics later seized on the plethora of imagery infinitely reproduced via Steinberg's 'flatbed picture plane' as an assault on modernism proper.Īt the time, however, Rauschenberg’s work received harsh criticism, often tinged with moral outrage. And it was through an engagement with this flatness that Leo Steinberg's 1972 essay 'Other Criteria' was to suggest the emergence of a triumphant postmodernism. A square cut into the canvas, prominently placed in the upper center, where a Manhattan phone directory was bolted in place beneath its surface, was his final assault on the heralded flatness of the picture plane.

On top of it, Rauschenberg collaged an array of other equally decorative materials and printed reproductions: a small 'wanted by FBI' notice veiled by two sheer bits of nylon laid across it, an arrow, an anonymous photograph of two boys. Pictorially, a large portion of Hymnal is given over to the lyrical pattern of this dark rust-colored shawl, whose paisley forms sweep across the surface like Abstract Expressionist trails of paint - only its arabesques have been mechanically produced. With this act, Rauschenberg effectively repositioned the aesthetic decision-making process of the Abstract Expressionists - so often touted in the literature as the element that secured their membership in the existentialist Zeitgeist of the time - as nothing more than choices one might make when standing before a storefront window. In 1955 Robert Rauschenberg decided to lay down a broad swath of a dark paisley-printed shawl onto a stretcher, substituting a readymade ground for the blank canvas before which the artists of the New York school had anxiously stood.

The main thing about is the way he lays out a picture - pure graphic design, with an ab-ex overlay.