Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Curator Megan Fontanella discusses this work. Transcript: This painting is Gabriele Münter “Still Life with Queen” an oil on canvas from 1912. Gabriele Münter often combined unrelated objects from her private world in her paintings, as in the “Still Life with a Floating Puppet”, her Queen, and framed behind a vase of flowers. Gifted to her by the Russian dancer Alexander Sakharov, the puppet takes on a life like presence. Without that context, however, viewers may not immediately recognize the figure as a puppet. Instead reading it as disproportionately small beside the bouquet of flowers. Such deliberate dissonances, slippages between artifact and human were characteristic of Gabriele Münter’s practice. The artist Vasily Kandinsky observed that her uneven translation of objects in one in the same painting helped her to achieve a “strong, complicated inner resonance.” “Still Life with Queen” entered the Art Institute of Chicago's holdings in 1931 through the Distinguished modern Art collection of Arthur Jerome Eddy. It was therefore among the first of Münter’s works to appear in a US private collection by 1914, and later in a museum collection

Senior Paintings Conservator Julie Barten gives an inside look at how "Barge" was created and how it traveled from Bilboa to New York. Transcript: To create "Barge", Rauschenberg used a combination of silk screening and direct painting on his massive canvas. For the silk screen sections, he had photographic images commercially transferred to screens, and he used those to print directly on the primed white canvas. While he incorporated some of his own photographs, he also made prints using found imagery that depicts things like sports, transportation, space exploration, and even a reproduction of a well-known painting by Velázquez called the Roqueby Venus. He also painted directly on the canvas, limiting his palette to black and white and gray admixtures. His vigorous brushwork conveys the remarkable speed with which he was working. Some of the paints were applied quite thickly, but others were so diluted that they caused drips of paint to run down the surface of the canvas. There's film footage of him rubbing solvent-soaked rags across the paint surface, which resulted in dissolving the underlying paint and partially obscuring or blurring some of the imagery. The wiping with solvent-drenched rags also caused additional drips to run down the surface. Bringing a painting of this scale into the galleries is a complex undertaking. A 32-foot-long canvas cannot be walked up the spiral of the Guggenheim, nor does it fit in a truck or an airplane. So each time the painting is exhibited in a new space, the canvas has to be removed from its stretcher. Before the work travels, conservators detach the canvas and roll it very carefully face out around a sturdy, large-diameter tube. It takes a team of at least 16 or 18 people to do this work. The stretcher comes apart and travels along with the rolled painting, and once the work arrives at its next destination, we unroll the canvas and restretch it on the reassembled stretcher. Traditionally, paintings are attached to their stretchers using staples around the edges. But when the Guggenheim acquired this work, conservators devised a new system for attaching velcro to the tacking margins to avoid the need to repeatedly add staple holes.

Senior Curator Joan Young introduces "Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can't Be Stopped" Transcript: My name is Joan Young. I'm the Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Guggenheim, New York, and curator of "Robert Rauschenberg's Life Can't Be Stopped", part of our "Collection in Focus "series. The exhibition is part of the centenary celebration of Rauschenberg's birth. Museums and galleries across the world have organized exhibitions of his work to examine the impact of his practice on art. Our exhibition features more than a dozen works from the Guggenheim's collection, along with major loans from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. The works on view demonstrate his engagement with the world around him through his use of photographs, both drawn from mass media sources, such as newspapers and magazines, as well as his own photography. Rauschenberg often blurred the line between art and everyday life. This work reflected the proliferation of visual images within culture, which is even more inescapable today. Illustrated in the works on view are the many experimental techniques Rauschenberg has explored, from transferring images directly from newsprint and magazines by rubbing them with a burnishing tool, to silk screens made from his own or found photographs, to adopting vegetable dye-based inks for transferring imagery in order to avoid using chemical solvents. When he felt too comfortable with one process, Rauschenberg would try a new approach, evidence of his endless curiosity and willingness to take risks.

Senior Curator Joan Young discusses the significance of "Untitled (Red Painting)" Transcript: "Untitled", from Rauschenberg's Red Painting series, displays the innovative and experimental approach that he took to materials. He used layers of paper, newsprint, and fabric to create a variegated ground for a range of reds applied at some points thickly and in other places thinly as washes, splatters, and drips. Framed at the top and bottom with blocks of wood, melding the two-dimensional aspects of painting with a three-dimensionality of sculpture. This is something he would pursue further in his Combines. His pioneering series began in 1954 that often integrated found objects, such as a tire, an umbrella, pillow, or stuffed goat, into his paintings. For source material, for both his drawings and paintings, Rauschenberg often turned to sources from the mass media, such magazines as National Geographic, Life, Newsweek, common publications that people encountered in their daily life. These images might be both easily recognizable to viewers, but also really capture the moment in which these works were created.

Senior Curator Joan Young on the centerpiece of the exhibition. Transcript: A centerpiece of the exhibition is "Barge", the largest in his silkscreen painting series, approximately 80 paintings made between 1962 and 1964. "Barge" was executed predominantly in a 24-hour period and suggests a barge in shape and size and in the volume of images it carries, ranging from sports to transportation to space exploration and iconic historical works of art. The cacophony of images enlivened by areas of expressive paint reflects the random and unending visual stimulation we encounter in daily life. Guggenheim, New York jointly acquired the work with the Guggenheim Bilbao at the time that we organized Rauschenberg's extensive retrospective in 1997. "Barge" has not been exhibited in New York in nearly 25 years, and we're excited to have it on view where it will be seen by a new generation of artists and museum visitors.