Sunday, January 6, 2013

Rauschenberg's piece for Duchamp, 1960



Robert Rauschenberg, "Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp)" - 1960.

From 1959 to 1962, Robert Rauschenberg created a series of "Trophies," highly personal combines dedicated to those artists who had most influenced him. In "Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp)," he repurposed a seven-panel white painting, inbuing it with vibrant color, aseemblage, and references to Duchamp and his wife, Teeny. The left-hand panel refers to Teeny with its inovcation of letters T and Y, while the right-hand panel is a stand-in for Duchamp and includes an aluminum sheet in an oblique reference to the reflective surface of The Large Glass.

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis owns this 1960 piece. I saw it at the Rauschenberg/Cage/Duchamp/Cunningham show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in late December 2012.