Rhymes With Cy

I’ve never been able to keep up with Robert Rauschenberg’s print practice, which has often passed by me in a blur. So I wasn’t surprised not to recognize @garadinervi’s post of what turned out to be a proof of a single stone from Visitation I & II, a pair of 1965 ULAE lithographs. Each of the “actual” prints was made with two of three different stones, but when the Art Institute of Chicago bought ULAE’s collection, they also got seven variants. Sorting this out led me to ULAE’s own site and archive, and the 1999 Ruminations series, where Rauschenberg made splashy portrait/homages of nine people who influenced his early life and artistic career, by brushing developer of photogravure plates. The resulting images echo the imperfections of his earlier solvent transfer process works, and seems to use previously published photos of the subjects, so no new intimacies or revelations. But honestly, what gets me is the project itself—and the names. Ileana, Tanya, Jap and John [Cage] are…