Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In the early 1960s, Rauschenberg made a change from his Combines and Assemblages. The result was a number of canvases that were created by using silkscreened images from magazines and his own photographs. The silkscreen paintings of 1962-64 are brought together in this volume.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

With their silkscreened images culled from magazines and newspapers, Rauschenberg's often monumental collages take the viewer on a roller-coaster ride through the America of the early 1960s. Astronauts, Army helicopters, JFK and baseball players, mixed with allusions to Velazquez and Duchamp, are a vibrant testament to this artist's propensity ``to consider the world as one gigantic painting.'' Feinstein, curator of an exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum which this volume catalogues, convincingly interprets the paintings as an open-ended, associative dialogue about the ubiquitous role of the mass media in American life, with the technological present overwhelming the past. Throwing light on the smaller, lesser known, black-and-white silkscreen experiments that led to the artist's enormous, colorful canvases, Feinstein also belabors the familiar point that Rauschenberg was at the forefront of postmodernism, manipulating the image bank of culture. Tomkins's informal journalistic essay profiles the artist at work making the silkscreens. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Feinstein's monograph on Rauschenberg's silkscreen paintings from the 1960s nicely supplements the fuller account of the artist's career in Kotz' recent Rauschenberg: His Life and Art [BKL D 15 90]. Rauschenberg's appropriation of images from magazines and from his own photographs and their reproduction and rearrangement on canvas created both another stage in the painter's evolution as well as an important development in the emergence of pop art. The question of whether Andy Warhol or Rauschenberg was the first to use silkscreening techniques is also settled here, although Feinstein states that each artist used the technique in a very different manner with very different results. About half of the 79 paintings in this series have been included in the exhibition and are reproduced in full color, while the catalog lists the others, often with smaller back-and-white illustrations. Critic Calvin Tomkins contributes the opening essay. Biblio~graphy. ~--John Brosnahan