Contrary to Picasso, who remained true to figuration throughout his life notwithstanding his persistent stylistic progressiveness, Rauschenberg's enormous oeuvre also transcends the traditional boundary between figurative and abstract painting. His artistic confrontational spirit is immense and made him instantly famous in 1953 when he was just a young artist of 27 who asked Willem de Kooning, the leading figure of Abstract Expressionism at the time, if he could erase one of his works. The result of this new artistic beginning, "Erased de Kooning Drawing", which was considered vandalism at the time, is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco today. Rauschenberg is a key figure in post-war American art, and his fascinating and diverse oeuvre that defies all conventions has recently been honored with major solo exhibitions at, among others, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017), Tate Modern, London (2017) and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2018).
Since the 1950s, Rauschenberg has decisively broadened the concept of art, constantly pushing boundaries and creating fundamentally new works through his strong love of experimentation: Alongside "Erased de Kooning Drawing", his monochrome white, black and red paintings inspired by John Cage's toneless pieces and his famous "Combine" entitled "Monogram", in which he combines a stuffed Angora goat with a car tire and a baseball to create a seemingly absurd hodgepodge, are considered his most famous creations of the 1950s. Like Rauschenberg's subsequently made "Combines" and "Combine-paintings", which also incorporate object-like elements, the seemingly arbitrary compositions of his transfer drawings and silkscreen paintings, which are based on images from print media and his own photographs were initially regarded as provocations. Today, however, they are icons of a new concept on which these collage-like compositions realized in the technique of screen printing are based. In hindsight, they paved the way for pop art and its focus on the artistic presentation of everyday objects and events.
In Rauschenberg's unique creation "Posse Stir", the images based on the artist's photographs and from mass media spread out in front of the viewer like a tabula rasa and seem to expandi the artistic visual repertoire into infinity. Simultaneously, the spectator is confronted by the vibrant color contrasts of the different gestural and serigraphic pictorial elements on the surface of the panorama-like horizontal format. "Posse Stir" is a prime example of Rauschenberg's silkscreen paintings of the 1980s, which he no longer executed on canvas as he did in the 1960s, but on large metal surfaces instead. In the monumental landscape format of "Posse Stir", part of Rauschenberg's famous "Galvanic Suite" created on galvanized steel plates, the pictorial content partially extends beyond our field of vision due to its expansive width and at the same time offers space for new associations that arise from the title and the respective pictorial objects of a flag, an overturned billboard, an empty coat hanger and a shuffle board system. The title "Posse stir" also seems particularly exemplary of Rauschenberg's delightfully non-conformist artistic work. [JS]