Cv/VAR series no.176 reviews 'Jammers' by the celebrated American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), in an exhibition held at Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street London, from 16th February to 28th March 2013. The series comes from a month in 1975 when the artist worked in an Ashram (textile factory) in Ahmedabad, India. He continued to develop the loose fabric structures in New York, bringing reference to sails of crafts (windjammers) and the sense of free natural movement. Born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925 Rauschenberg attended Academie Julien and Black Mountain College, where he studied under Josef Albers. He worked with Jasper Johns and John Cage in the early 1950s, developing the famous 'combines', assemblages of found objects, and created the White and the Black paintings - presaging movements of Pop, Minimalist and Conceptual art of the following decades. Includes an essay on the artist's development 1952-62, his links with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Jasper Johns. Studies 'The White Paintings','Black Paintings' and an interview with David White, long time colleague and friend, and Chief Curator of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Table of Contents

Emergence of the artist 1952-62 . The artist's interviews' by James Cahill. 'Jammers' by N.P.James and interview with David White.

Author Biography

Edward Lucie-Smith was born in 1933 at Kingston, Jamaica. He moved to Britain in 1946, and was educated at King's School, Canterbury and Merton College, Oxford, where he read History. Subsequently he was an Education Officer in the R.A.F., then worked in advertising for ten years before becoming a freelance author. He is now an internationally known art critic and historian, who is also a published poet (winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), an anthologist and a practicing photographer. He has published more than a hundred books in all, including a biography of Joan of Arc (recently republished by Penguin in paperback as a 'classic biography'), a historical novel, and more than sixty books about art, chiefly but not exclusively about contemporary work. A number of his art books, among them Movements in Art since 1945 , Visual Arts of the 20th Century, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today are used as standard texts throughout the world. Movements in Art since 1945, first published in 1969, has been continuously in print since that date. He has been curator of a number of exhibitions, including three Peter Moores Projects at the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, (surveys of contemporary British art), The New British Painting (which toured US venues in 1988-90) and two artist retrospectives, Lin Emery and George Dunbar, both for the New Orleans Museum of Art. He has been a jury member for the John Moores prize exhibition in Liverpool, and for biennials in Cairo, Sharjah, Alexandria and Belgrade. He was curator of 'New British Art'. at the Orion Gallery in Ostend (April-June 2001), of 'New Classicism: Artists of the Ideal', at Palazzo Forti, Verona (April-September 2002), and of 'Gods Becoming Men' at the Frissiras Museum, Athens [July-September 2004). He has recently become the curator of the new Bermondsey Project Space in London S.E.1