With Jeffrey Warda, discover how Rauschenberg used newspaper rubbings, solvent transfers, and inkjet prints to pull everyday imagery into layered works grounded in an age-old printmaking tradition.

Transcript:
One of the most accessible ways of making a print, maybe for him, was what we call transfer drawings. And if anyone remembers holding a newspaper up until the 70s, the more you read that newspaper, you’d realize you had black smudges all over your fingers. Manufacturers did not like this.

Rauschenberg says this is a great thing, and he finds something really interesting out of it. And you hear this story of him being in Cuba in the early 50s cutting out a piece of something from the newspaper, laying it face down on to paper and then rubbing that from the back, pulling it off and some of the ink transfers.

The manufacturers, they're all about putting an end to this. So, by the late 70s into the 80s and 90s, they figure out, okay, our inks are stable now. And that's largely done by adding resin to the inks. And the resin essentially fuses to the paper. So now it doesn't just flake  or powder off.

Not to be deterred, though, Rauschenberg says, oh, okay, I can handle that and he finds another way to do these transfer drawings by using pretty much any organic solvent. It's often said that he used lighter fluid to do solvent transfers. You could really use anything and if you had done any printmaking or as a painter, you'd have easy access to turpentine or mineral spirits, acetone, lacquer thinner. These are common solvents in any studio. What's fun about solvent transfers is that they're very accessible, anyone can do this.

When you look at a work called Religious Fluke from 1962, you can see in  some of the open areas of the paper where, okay, I can tell something was printed and transferred but you can see how it's sort of washy and didn't completely transfer and it definitely bled. That's very classic. Just too much solvent probably. So, you know he's using solvent to do this, and you can see how it just migrates into the paper as it gets wet.

As printing technology changes over time, this process of solvent transfers, this is something he does throughout his career. But when you look at a work much later from 1997 called Bilbao Scraps, those are inkjet transfers. So now he's moved to a modern printing technique that we use today and transferring those prints. Now he could take a photograph that he made , enlarge it and make a larger inkjet print out of it.

He wouldn't be limited to the size of a newspaper publication or a magazine publication. He could make this any size and then do a similar solvent transfer with that inkjet print onto an artwork. And that's what you see in Bilbao Scraps.

Now, this process of transferring, this goes back thousands of years, this is not unique to Rauschenberg. This goes back to Chinese rubbings, where stone tablets with texts or images or bronze vessels with designs, these large stone monoliths with text were available to only those who could make it to that site. And with the advent of paper, you get the ability to distribute this, and printmaking is the vehicle to distribute widely. Popular texts back in the day, thousands of years ago could be distributed through printing on paper and rubbings did this.

So Rauschenberg, thousands of years later is doing it with our current popular culture  from the 70s and 80s and 90s. And often that was, National Geographic or Popular Mechanics. These are the most common magazines that you would find. And he's distributing that popular culture through this technique that goes back thousands of years.

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