Stoned Moon - Ape 1970 HS

Year1970

Hand SignedPencil Signed, Dated And Numbered 

Condition Mint 

Framed with Glass 

Purchased fromOther 

Story / Additional Infon July 1969, Robert Rauschenberg was invited by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to Cape Canaveral, Florida (then known as Cape Kennedy), to witness the launch of the historic Apollo 11 mission. Asked by the NASA Art Program to commemorate the first manned spaceflight to the moon, Rauschenberg enjoyed unrestricted access at NASAs Florida facilities. This trip profoundly impacted the artist, who came away from the experience energized and with a renewed sense of optimism after having been deeply disillusioned for several years by the course of the Vietnam War and the growing social unrest in the United States.

After the launch, Rauschenberg began work on Stoned Moon (1969-70), a series of thirty-four lithographs that juxtapose hand-drawn passages with imagery that pairs the lush Florida landscape with the crisp industrial aesthetic of the space race. (SFMOMA holds twenty-nine of these prints.) Created in close collaboration with the master printers at Los Angeles based print studio Gemini G.E.L., the Stoned Moon works are alternately colorful and subdued, and they range in size from just over two feet to more than seven feet in height. The largest and most complex, Sky Garden, represents an extraordinary technical achievement in printmaking, requiring two lithographic stones, four aluminum plates, and a silkscreen to produce the scale and visual effects the artist sought. At eighty-nine inches in height, Sky Garden was the largest hand-pulled lithograph ever created when it was printed in 1969.

Mind-boggling in scale, visual variety, and artistic ambition, Rauschenbergs Stoned Moon portfolio resonates with the sensory overload of the Apollo launch experience. The individual prints in the series are filled with scenes of astronauts, space suits, complex machinery, and various regional ephemera (tourist maps, orange crate labels, etc.), emphasizing the interconnectedness of nature, mankind, and the astonishing scientific and technological achievements of the space program. 

Certificate of AuthenticityArt Brokerage 

LID122487

Robert Rauschenberg - United States

Art Brokerage: Robert Rauschenberg American Artist: Robert Rauschenberg was a prominent member of the American Post-War avant-garde. The artist's sculpture-painting hybrids known as Combines, broke through the two dimensionality of the canvas at a time when Abstract Expressionism dominated the scene. His seminal Neo-Dada work, Erased de Kooning (1953), consisted of ritualistically wiping out an original drawing he purchased from the famed painter. "I don't really trust ideas, especially good ones," he once said. "Rather I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown." Born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg on October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, TX, he was drafted into the Navy during World War II where he served as medical technician in San Diego. After the war, he used the GI Bill to travel to Paris to study at the Académie Julian, where he met his future wife Susan Weil. He and Weil went on to attend the Black Mountain College in North Carolina alongside John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Have settled in New York in 1949, Rauschenberg began questioning the nature of painting through works such as Bed (1955) and Monogram (1955–1959), which utilized commercial imagery and mass produced objects. Many of the artist's ideas foresaw the emergence of Andy Warhol and Pop Art in the 1960s. The artist died on May 12, 2008 in Captiva, FL. Today, Rauschenberg's works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others. Listings wanted.