Rauschenberg’s Blueprints
Nude works revealed from his early career
A recent discovery of photographic negatives from the University of Illinois at Chicago library archives brought to light an early part of iconic artist Robert Rauschenberg’s career. In the early 1950s, when Rauschenberg was living with artist Susan Weil in a one-room apartment on West 95th Street in Manhattan, they produced a series of cyanotypes—images produced without a camera, by shining an ultraviolet light on an object or nude model resting on blueprint paper, exposing the paper where the light isn’t blocked and creating a negative shadow of the object or model’s outline, similar to the way an X-ray is done. The blueprint is then washed, to “develop” it, and the final image sets in blue.
The photographs found in the archive documented how the couple collaborated in creating these cyanotypes, which would be come to be known as “blueprints.” The whereabouts of most of the artworks themselves are unknown today (some were used commercially—in Bonwit Teller windows, for example—and were probably discarded), but the handful that remain and could be documented by PROVOKR are showcased here, courtesy of the Rauschenberg Foundation.
In early 1951, Weil and Rauschenberg—who married in June of that year, just before their son, Christopher, was born—convinced a Life magazine photographer, Wallace Kirkland, to come to their apartment and photograph their process. The result was a three-page spread in the magazine, which was, in those pre-digital times, the most effective mass-media exposure an artist could get. (Two years earlier, Life had displayed Jackson Pollock at work and cemented his reputation with the headline: “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”) It was Kirkland’s unpublished negatives that were discovered in the library archives, in a folder marked “Nudes.”
Though it was Weil who introduced Rauschenberg to cyanotypes—and who would continue to use the technique without him long after the couple divorced in 1953—the blueprints have always been remembered in the way that they presaged Rauschenberg’s ascendancy to the pantheon of revered American artists. (It was mostly Rauschenberg who was visible at work in the Life article.) These beautiful, figurative blueprints clearly show his rejection of Abstract Expressionism and signal the beginning of his innovative use of everyday objects, silkscreened images and mixed media, which would culminate in his celebrated “combines” of the late 1950s. Rauschenberg’s paintings—which he characterized as “neo-Dada”— would usher in the Pop Art revolution and change the way art is perceived worldwide.
