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Course: The Seeing America Project > Unit 6
Lesson 5: 1960-now- Making an icon: JFK and the power of media
- Homage to JFK: Rauschenberg's Retroactive I
- Stone Mountain, Georgia
- Faith Ringgold, Ben
- An unflinching memorial to civil rights martyrs, Thornton Dial's Blood and Meat
- The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
- Kehinde Wiley, Rumors of War
- Shan Goshorn, Sealed Fate: Treaty of New Echota Protest Basket
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Homage to JFK: Rauschenberg's Retroactive I
Robert Rauschenberg's painting, Retroactive I, captures the emotional turmoil following JFK's assassination. Using popular media images, Rauschenberg creates a collage of the era's events, including the space race. The painting, a mix of mechanical process and artist's touch, serves as a memorial to Kennedy's legacy.
Video transcript
(jazz piano music) - [Steven] We're at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut,
looking at a large painting by Robert Rauschenberg. This is Retroactive I from 1963. - [Patricia] Retroactive
I was made immediately following John F. Kennedy's assassination. And so, we're looking at a
president who was deeply loved by the public, who was
recently assassinated and here, pictured as the
central element of a painting that speaks very emotionally to the times. - [Steven] So, the artist
has taken a photograph from popular media and blown
it up and then applied it to the surface of this canvas
as if it was an oil painting. - [Patricia] There are multiple
screened images on this, all of them taken from popular
culture, many from magazines, such as National Geographic
and Life Magazine. But each image is screened on separately and done in a different color,
so there's a whole brickwork of images that puts
together this composition. - [Steven] It must have been
so difficult for the artist who had ordered the screens
before the assassination intending to use this image,
but then having the meaning of that image utterly
transformed by the time he received it back from the fabricator because of the assassination that had subsequently taken place. - [Patricia] He had
ordered these silk screens, they were in his studio, he
was on a trip in the South when he learned of Kennedy's death and suddenly questioned
whether it would be appropriate to really go forward with
making these paintings with Kennedy as an
element because Kennedy, as a president, and now
an assassinated president, has taken on this whole other dimension. The portrait of Kennedy has been sourced from a news conference. It's a very large image
of Kennedy doing this emphatic gesture, and this
gesture is so connected with Kennedy that his hand is shown twice. - [Steven] So, the artist
would take the image and would send out to a commercial
silk screen manufacturer for the screen itself, and
then he would take a squeegee, take silk screen ink, and force it through the screen to apply it to the canvas. - [Patricia] You have
to think of these images of being in magazines and newspapers, and so, when the artist
orders these silk screens that are made by a fabricator,
he's having them blown up so that they have a much larger presence. And so, what was probably
a very small picture of navel oranges in a crate is now one by 1-1/2 feet in
size, so larger than life. - [Steven] This issue
itself is so complicated because, for the entire
history of art in the West, we think about the handicraft of making, we think about the skill
of one's brushwork. But here, we have a mechanism,
a mechanical process. And to complicate it even
more, by the time we get to 1963, when this is being produced, contemporary art was
supposed to be abstract; and here, we have the
reintroduction of images. - [Patricia] Artists like
Rauschenberg were reacting against abstract expressionist artists. But at the same time, there are many elements that show the artist's hand. You see brushwork, you see drips, so it's not pristinely reproduction. - [Steven] So there's a
reference to the drips of Jackson Pollock, to the energized brush strokes of Willem de Kooning. For me, when I'm looking at this image, I'm not seeing Kennedy, I'm
seeing an image of Kennedy. This is very much about
reproduction and representation. - [Patricia] We're looking at
a conglomeration of images. Kennedy, of course, is
the central element, but then there's a crate of oranges, there's a glass of water,
there's a construction site, and there's an astronaut. It's a cluster of a lot
of different imagery, and it's as much about
what's going on in the world at the time and about
what's outside your window. In fact, Rauschenberg was quite famous for a particular quote:
"I want my paintings "to look like what's
going on outside my window "rather than what's inside my studio," which is a big change from what, say, the abstract expressionists were doing. - [Steven] So, where Pollock
and de Kooning were trying to make manifest what was taking
place in an interior space, within them, in some
psychological, spiritual way, we have an interest in the
mundane, in the immediate, in the actual world that surrounds him, in the events around
us, the debris of news, the debris of our commercial
and industrial culture. - [Patricia] Think about Rauschenberg, with his studio in downtown New York, and outside his window,
probably plenty of construction sites, markets that
sold cartons of oranges; these things were just outside his window, like he says in the quote. - [Steven] Kennedy, who
is front and center, is surrounded, if framed by
all of these other forms. We have a thermometer, or at
least a forecasting device; we have photographs of a nude
through space, through time; the glass of water; all of these things framing the central figure. - [Patricia] Kennedy was
very closely associated with the space race with
Russia, so to have Kennedy front and center, and
then to have an astronaut the second largest
image over his shoulder, I think it's really speaking a lot to Kennedy directly, as
well as the generalities of what's going on out in the world. - [Steven] Kennedy had made
this promise that we're going to go to the moon, and, although
we didn't in his lifetime, there was a tremendous
technological set of advances that were unleashed as a result. And Rauschenberg was a
real fan of the American space program, of science and
technology, more generally. - [Patricia] Kennedy was
a very popular president, and Rauschenberg, too, was
very much engaged with Kennedy. I think he was devastated
when Kennedy was assassinated, and his work became much
more political after that. - [Steven] Even though this
painting is so concerned with the contemporary,
because the painting was made after Kennedy's death,
it becomes a memorial. - [Patricia] Kennedy is eternally young. He's depicted exactly how
all of us remember him and see him in history
books, and it really is just an incredible homage to a very
important political figure. This is the only painting
from the Kennedy works, of which there are eight,
that depicts Kennedy in blue. Most of the others show him in black and white or even real color. And so, this is very strong, in a way, that is conveys the impact of this tragedy and is taking on this
kind of ghostly visage. (jazz piano music)