Always adventurous in his incorporation of found materials within his artworks, Robert Rauschenberg was also an excavator of his own imagery. From the early 1950s until his death in 2008, Rauschenberg’s radical blending of disparate mediums and processes expanded the traditional boundaries of art – an experimental mindset that he equally applied to his photographic projects.
In the Bleacher series (1988 - 1991), he returned to his own photographs, some taken as early as the 1950s, and re-photographed them as large-format black-and-white Polapan Polaroids, each one a unique object. The series was born from the Polaroid Corporation’s invitation to work with its massive 235-pound 20-by-24-inch camera, which was transported to both his Florida and Manhattan studios.
Similar to Polaroid’s small-format consumer-market black-and-white film, this Polaroid process required the application of a print coater with a foam brush to arrest the action of the developing agent and to create a hard, protective, fade-resistant surface. Given the large scale of the Polapan prints, the coater had to be applied manually. True to his inventive nature, Rauschenberg ‘painted’ swaths of coating across the surface of each print, leaving gestural traces that rendered intentionally uneven development. Seeking a greater change in the appearance of the photographs, he subsequently experimented with subjecting the prints to bleach, water, and sun. Works from this series were then mounted to aluminum, the same type of metal frame Rauschenberg used at the t.mes for his paintings (for example, see the works above).
His most majestic works from the Bleacher series present multiple prints in gridded arrangements. Imperial Palace Wall, Japan combines four Polapan prints, each one an architectural detail taken from snapshots he had made during various trips to Japan, a country he visited as early as 1964 when he was accompanying the touring Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
Noting that Rauschenberg integrated photographs into his work since the early 1950s, art historian Jonathan Green outlined the inherent relationship between Rauschenberg’s paintings, ‘combines,’ and photographs:
‘Perhaps the most important, and least acknowledged, photographer of the past decades is Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg’s position in the world of painting has so overshadowed his role as a photographic innovator that he is usually overlooked in discussions of the history of photography. Yet his achievement as a painter is essentially photographic in method. His painting recapitulates the sensibility of the major photographers of the fifties, parallels photography’s preoccupations of the sixties, and anticipates the “mixed media” and conceptual works of the seventies.’
Each work from the Bleacher series is unique. Multi-print compositions seldom appear at auction. In June 2010, Replica Shoes
's set a new benchmark for the series with the sale of Japanese Sky I (1988) from the collects
ion of the Polaroid Corporation. Imperial Palace Wall, Japan is the first four-print composition to come to auction in more than a decade.