ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG — Bilder. Zeichnungen. Lithos, Amerika-Haus Berlin, 1965

Robert Rauschenberg, Bilder. Zeichnungen. Lithos. Amerika-Haus, Berlin, 8 January–4 February 1965. Works from Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Paris. Folded and stapled exhibition publication; 10 pages, 20 × 25 cm; colour and black-and-white offset printing.

A small exhibition publication produced at the moment Rauschenberg’s work was moving rapidly from New York into an international institutional system. Black wrappers, oversized condensed typography, ten pages. Inside: paintings, drawings, reproductions, biography, studio photograph and exhibition information. Works include Retroactive II (1963), Almanac (1962), Ohne Titel (1963) and Magnet Zeichnung (1963).

The route printed into the object is almost as important as the images: Rauschenberg → Ileana Sonnabend, Paris → Amerika-Haus, Berlin → exhibition visitor → retained document. Sonnabend was instrumental in moving American postwar art into Europe, and this publication records that transfer in an unusually compact form. An American artist represented through a Paris gallery inside a Cold War-era American cultural institution in West Berlin.

Rauschenberg’s work had already collapsed distinctions between painting and photography, newspaper and artwork, found image and authored image. Here those works pass through another conversion. They become reproductions again: resized, captioned, sequenced and circulated as information. The catalogue therefore performs a small reversal of the work itself. Images taken from circulation enter Rauschenberg’s paintings. The paintings enter the art system. The art system returns them to paper.

Not a retrospective catalogue. Not quite a brochure. A ten-page distribution mechanism carrying an artist, a gallery and an exhibition between cities.

Condition: Good to very good. Light handling and surface wear to black wrappers, faint rubbing and minor edge and corner wear. Small handling creases internally consistent with period use.

Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.