Photographs without Frontiers: Rauschenberg, Warhol, Hamilton and Photography

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the roles played by photographs in the creation of fresh images. After touching on the impact made by Northern European paintings and prints on the development of Renaissance art in Italy, it examines broadly the usefulness of works of art on paper – including photographs – in disseminating local styles and subject matter. The body of the paper examines how Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton appropriated photographic images in the 1950s and 1960s, and asks to what extent such borrowed images continued to resonate when imported into different milieus. In essence, the paper asks whether those images continued to ‘pierce’, ‘prick’ or ‘bruise’ the viewer in their new environments – to borrow terms Roland Barthes employed to characterise the effect of the punctum. The paper also suggests that on occasion the new work of art may supersede the regional nature of its source materials, giving the originating images a global currency that transcends their origins.

Keywords:

• Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904)
• Georges Demenÿ (1850–1917)
• Frank Powolny (1902–1986)
• Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008)
• Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)
• Andy Warhol (1928–1987)
• Charles Moore (1931–2010)
• Richard Hamilton (born 1922)
• Gene Conley (born 1930)
• Wes Santee (born 1932)
• Mick Jagger (born 1943)
• Rolling Stones
• Birmingham AL
• civil rights
• Kent State shootings
• LIFE
• Look
• Sports Illustrated

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jan Baetens, editor of this issue, for encouraging me to pursue this project and for making me aware of Michel Foucault's lecture ‘Of Other Spaces’ (see note 5 below). For their efficiency in helping me to collect and clear copyright for images in this article, I am indebted to Ruth Busby, Unda-Marina Froehling, Kerry Gaertner, Prem Kallia, Sara Martinez-Sarandeses, Alison Smith, Lucie Strnadova, Amy Wong and Jessica Yuon. Marc Bauman kindly gave permission to reproduce the photographs his father made of Gene Conley in 1955 for Look. Photographs from LIFE that are mentioned in this article but not reproduced can be viewed online (http://books.google.com/books/serial/ISSN:00243019); those from Sports Illustrated can be viewed at the SI Vault (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault). The title of my paper is intended to echo that of ‘Médecins Sans Frontières’, the humanitarian medical aid organisation that does so much important work in so many parts of the world.

Notes

1 – For an account of the export of Netherlandish painting to Italy, Spain and elsewhere during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Kim W. Woods, ‘Netherlandish networks’, in Locating Renaissance Art, ed. Carol Richardson, New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University 2007, 65–99.

2 – Louis de Cornemin, ‘À propos d'Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, de Maxime Du Camp’, La Lumière, 25 (12 June 1852), 98: ‘Nous n'avons plus besoin de […] tenter de périlleux voyages: l'héliographie, confiée à quelques intrépides, fera pour nous le tour du monde, et nous rapportera l'univers en portefeuille, sans que nous quittions notre fauteuil’.

3 – Sara Stevenson, ‘The Empire Looks Back: Subverting the Imperial Gaze’, History of Photography, 35:2 (2011), 142–56.

4 – Graham Smith, ‘Light that Dances in the Mind’: Photographs and Memory in the Writings of E. M. Forster and his Contemporaries, Oxford: Peter Lang 2007, 28.

5 – Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (‘Des espaces autres’), trans. Jan Miskowiec, in Diacritics, 16:1 (spring 1986), 22–7; reprinted in The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Nicolas Mirzoeff, London and New York: Routledge 1998, 229–36.

6 – Ibid., 233.

7 – Ibid., 229.

8 – Reprinted in Photography: Essays & Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall, New York: Museum of Modern Art (distributed by New York Graphic Society, Boston) 1980, 81–95. See also François Brunet, ‘Nationalities and Universalism in the Early Historiography of Photography (1843–1857)’, History of Photography, 35:2 (2011), 107–109.

9 – See, for instance, David Haberstich, ‘Photography and the Plastic Arts’, Leonardo, 6:2 (spring 1973), 113–19.

10 – Sara Stevenson, The Personal Art of David Octavius Hill, New Haven and London: published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press 2002, 150–1, figs 96 and 97.

11 – See, for instance, Susan Waller, ‘Censors and Photographers in the Third French Republic’, History of Photography, 27:3 (2003), 222–35.

12 – See Françoise Heilbrun, ‘Impressionism and Photography’, History of Photography, 33:1 (2009), 18–25.

13 – Haberstich, ‘Photography and the Plastic Arts’, 113–19.

14 – For Rauschenberg's photographs, see Robert Rauschenberg Photographs, New York: Pantheon Books 1981; for Warhol's photographs, see Andy Warhol Photography, Pittsburgh: The Andy Warhol Museum and Hamburg Kunsthalle: Edition Stemmle 1999.

15 – Notable recent publications on Rauschenberg are Robert Rauschenberg Combines, organized by Paul Schimmel, with essays by Thomas Crow, Branden W. Joseph, Paul Schimmel and Charles Stuckey, and an afterword by Pontus Hultén, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: Steidl 2005; Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-avant-garde, An October Book, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2007; and Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press 2010.

16 – John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’, in Metro, 2 (May 1961), 44. Reprinted in Silence, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press 1973, 98–108; see 103. On Odalisk, see, in particular, Graham Smith, ‘Robert Rauschenberg's “Odalisque”’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 44 (1984), 375–82; and Roni Feinstein, ‘Random Order: The First Fifteen Years of Robert Rauschenberg's Art 1949–1964’, PhD dissertation, New York University 1990, 190–233.

17 – Three of these were published in ‘Speaking of Pictures …’, ‘Blueprint Paper, Sun Lamp, a Nude Produce some Vaporous Fantasies’, LIFE, 30:15 (9 April 1951), 22–4. The image in Odalisk is reproduced in Sam Hunter's, Robert Rauschenberg, Barcelona: Ediciones Folígrafa 1999, fig. 1.

18 – These figures relate to the original title of the combine. ‘Odalisque’ and the date ‘1955’ are embossed on a metallic label affixed at the top-left corner of the left side of the combine; this label was made with a ‘Dymo-Mite Label Maker’, which was introduced in 1958. Feinstein, ‘Random Order’, 229, n. 9, reports that Rauschenberg preferred the title Odalisk and thought of naming it that after the ancient Egyptian obelisk known as Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park, New York. In ‘Rauschenberg's “Odalisque”’, 380, I suggested that he intended to conflate the terms odalisque and obelisk while also combining physical and iconographic aspects of each. I mentioned also that Rauschenberg had exhibited in Rome in 1953 at the Galleria del Obelisco, a gallery named after the Obelisco Sallustiano in the nearby Piazza Trinità dei Monti.

19 – ‘Speaking of Pictures …’, ‘In Paris Young Lovers Kiss Wherever they Want to and Nobody Seems to Care’, LIFE, 28:24 (12 June 1950), 16–18. Nina Lager Vestberg discusses The Kiss at the Hôtel de Ville in her excellent article in this issue of History of Photography. Feinstein, ‘Random Order’, 199, records that the photograph in Odalisk is captioned ‘The killer kisses his wife when hears sentence – death’. It may be relevant that Stanley Kubrick's film noir The Killer's Kiss was released in 1955. On kiss scenes in classical Hollywood films and film stills, see Steven Jacobs, ‘The History and Aesthetics of the Classical Film Still’, History of Photography, 34:4 (2010), 383. Edvard Munch's prints and paintings entitled The Kiss are familiar to everyone, of course, as are Roy Lichtenstein's paintings with same title and Warhol's screenprint The Kiss (Bela Lugosi).

20 – In an early version, Venus can be seen as well as Mars. In Odalisk, two putti by Michelangelo take the place of Cupid in Veronese's picture.

21 – This photograph no doubt relates to boxing, but it is probable that it alludes also to the sexual activity known as fisting.

22 – For the erotic associations of the kilt, see Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus, Orlando, FL: Harcourt Inc. 1969, 172–3.

23 – The painting was destroyed in the nineteenth century, but the composition is well known from reproductive prints. Rauschenberg incorporated the stag and the second hound into Curfew (1958) (reproduced in Schimmel, Rauschenberg Combines, pl. 79).

24 – ‘Gene Conley: The Milwaukee Whip’, produced by Tim Cohane, photographed by Frank Bauman: Look, 19:10 (17 May 1955), 78–82. Conley's dynamic, serpentine pose, balancing on one leg with the other projecting dramatically before him, is echoed on the opposite side of the construction by a photograph of a harp. Moreover, Conley's rigid right leg and the harp's vertical post both find a visual and structural counterpart in the wooden post that supports Rauschenberg's construction.

25 – Rauschenberg incorporated two related images into Painting with Grey Wing' (1959) (Schimmel, Rauschenberg Combines, pl. 92). Crow (‘Rise and Fall’, Rauschenberg Combines, 236) writes of those that they ‘recount a sequence in which an athletic young man practices some exercise before a sternly watchful older man who stands in the background, his hat pulled low over his brow’. In ‘Rauschenberg's “Odalisque”’, 376, I suggested that the figure in white was a sports official, whereas Feinstein (‘Random Order’, 199) implausibly described the scene as representing ‘a group of young men in business suits, their hands raised as though taking an oath’.

26 – ‘Rauschenberg's Refusal’, in Schimmel, Rauschenberg Combines, 257–83 (280–1).

27 – Reproduced in Phillip Prodger, Tom Gunning and Iris B. Gerald, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, New York: Oxford University Press 2003, 237, 4–7. On links between gymnastics and manliness in France at the end of the nineteenth century, see Fay Brauer, ‘“Bulging Buttocks”: Picturing Virile Homosexuality and the “Manly Man”’, in Masculinities: Gender, Art and Popular Culture, Ian Potter Centre, E-Publications: Melbourne 2004, unpaginated.

28 – For brief discussions of Small Rebus, see Andrew Forge, Robert Rauschenberg, New York: Harry N. Abrams 1972, 15–16; Rosalind Krauss, ‘Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image’, in Robert Rauschenberg, October Files 4, ed. Branden W. Joseph, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press 2002 (1979), 50–2; Caroline A. Jones, ‘Coca Cola Plan or, How New York Stole the Soul of Giuseppe Panza’, in The Legacy of a Collector: The Panza di Biumo Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art 1999, 38–9; Schimmel, ‘Autobiography and Self-portraiture in Rauschenberg's Combines’, Rauschenberg Combines, 222; Crow, ‘Rise and Fall: Theme and Idea in the Combines of Robert Rauschenberg’, Rauschenberg Combines, 230–3; and Crow, ‘Southern Boys go to Europe: Rauschenberg, Twombly, and Johns in the 1960s’, in Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections, Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 2001, 52–3.

29 – Credited to Hy Peskin, a staff photographer with Sports Illustrated, the photograph accompanies the feature ‘Santee's Overwhelming Saturday’: Sports Illustrated (12 March 1956), 22–5.

30 – This diagram can be traced to an article published by the distinguished American neurologist Moses Allen Starr in the New York scientific journal Popular Science Monthly for October 1889. 3333See M. Allen Starr: ‘The Old and the New Phrenology’, The Popular Science Monthly (October 1889), 739, fig. 5; see also M. Allen Starr, ‘Some Curiosities of Thinking’, The Popular Science Monthly (April 1895), 725. Starr's schema had its origins in a diagram known as ‘Charcot's bell’ (‘le schéma de la cloche’), which was developed in 1884 by Jean-Martin Charcot, director of the Saltpêtrière clinic near Paris, to explicate the concept ‘bell’: Désiré Bernard: De l'aphasie et de ses diverses forms, 2nd edition, Paris 1889, 37, fig. 4.

31 – ‘Gymnastic Gyrations’, Sports Illustrated, 2:12 (21 March 1955), 34–5. The photograph is credited to Fernand Fonssagrives, another regular contributor to the magazine. Fonssagrives was the husband of Lisa Fonssagrives, who became Helmut Newton's wife and model.

32 – Eugene Dwyer, Pompeii's Living Statues, Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press 2010, 87–8, fig. 25.

33 – All thirty-four drawings are reproduced in colour in Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, ed. Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1997, 156–67, figs. 128–61. For contemporary discussions of the drawings, see Dore Ashton, ‘Rauschenberg's Thirty four Illustrations for Dante's Inferno’, Metro, 2 (May 1961), 52–61; and Dore Ashton and Robert Rauschenberg, Rauschenberg: Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante's Inferno, New York: Harry N. Abrams 1964. For the extraordinary exhibition history of the series between February 1964 and April 1967, see Ikegami, The Great Migrator, 206–8.

34 – ‘True Temper Pro Fit’, Sports Illustrated, 8:20 (19 May 1958), 8–9. Reproduced in Ikegami, The Great Migrator, fig. 2.11. Calvin Tomkins ‘Moving Out’, The New Yorker (29 February 1964), 39–105, was the first to link Rauschenberg's Dante to this advertisement.

35 – ‘Melbourne: A Human Story’, Sports Illustrated, 6:1 (7 January 1957), 37.

36 – Sports Illustrated, 8:19 (12 May 1958), 20. Ikegami, The Great Migrator, 81 was the first to make this connection.

37 – Sports Illustrated, 8:19 (12 May 1958), 3.

38 – Joseph, Random Order, 180 and 187. The solvent transfer process was also essential to Rauschenberg's exploration of lithography, which he began in 1962. See Calvin Tomkins's article, ‘The Skin of the Stone’, in The Scene: Reports on Post-modern Art, New York: Viking Press 1976, 78–80.

39 – For Foucault's concept of the heterotopia, see note 5 above. This idea may owe something to Barthes's perception of the coexistence of ‘l'ici’ and ‘l'autrefois’ in photographs, a concept he had articulated in ‘Rhétorique de l'image’ four years before Foucault published his lecture. See Roland Barthes, ‘Rhétorique de l'image’, Communications, 4 (1964), 40–51; and ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ in Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang 1977, 38–9. This notion is consistent with Rauschenberg's practice of laying translucent fabric over collaged images. In Odalisk, for instance, the photograph that serves as a predella to the right side of the box is partly hidden by a strip of gauze. See also Laura Auricchio, ‘Lifting the Veil: Robert Rauschenberg's Thirty-Four Drawings for Dante's Inferno and the Commercial Homoerotic Imagery of 1950s America’, in The Gay '90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies, ed. Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel and Ellen E. Berry, Genders 26, New York and London: New York University Press 1997, 143–4; and Lisa Wainwright, ‘Robert Rauschenberg's Fabrics: Reconstructing Domestic Space’, in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed, London: Thames and Hudson 1996, 193–205.

40 – See, in particular, Roni Feinstein with a contribution by Calvin Tomkins, Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings 1962–64, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Bulfinch Press, Little, Brown and Company 1990.

41 – Ibid., 75–6. Works of art include Peter Paul Rubens's Venus at her Toilet, Diego Velázquez's Rokeby Venus, Jean-Antoine Houdon's sculpture depicting George Washington, and Louis Guillaume's painting showing General Robert E. Lee surrendering to General Ulysses S. Grant.

42 – ‘What's it worth to feel like a man? If you won't settle for less the Army's the place for you’, LIFE, 51:25 (22 December 1961), 134.

43 – LIFE, 53:17 (26 October 1962), 76–7. Feinstein, The Silkscreen Paintings, 98, n. 23 credits Robert Hughes with the observation that Mili's photograph consciously echoed Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase of 1912.

44 – For an account of the development of Rauschenberg's global identity, see Ikegami, The Great Migrator, passim.

45 – An analogy exists in the fragments of text that Picasso, Braque and their contemporaries incorporated into their cubist collages. See Robert Rosenblum, ‘Picasso and the Typography of Cubism’, in Picasso in Retrospect, ed. Roland Penrose and John Golding, London: Praeger 1978, 49–75.

46 – John Drebinger, ‘National All-Stars Win in Twelfth, 6–5’, The New York Times (13 July 1955), 1 and 29.

47 – He was also featured prominently in ‘The National League flag goes up for grabs’, LIFE, 41:12 (17 September 1956), 151–4 and 158–60.

48 – Kathryn R. Conley, One of a Kind: The Gene Conley Story, Longwood, FL: Advantage Books 2004.

49 – For Bannister's account of the race to break 4 minutes, see his First Four Minutes, London: Putnam 1955.

50 – See, for instance, Auricchio, ‘Lifting the Veil’, in The Gay '90s, 119–54; and Kenneth E. Silver, ‘Master Bedrooms, Master Narratives: Home, Homosexuality and Post-War Art’, in Not at Home, 216–17.

51 – Reproduced in Andy Warhol A Retrospective, ed. Kynaston McShine, The Museum of Modern Art: New York 1989, figs 134–6.

52 – On Warhol's silkscreen processes, see Marco Livingston, ‘Do it Yourself: Notes on Warhol's Techniques’, in McShine, Warhol A Retrospective, 69–73. Sam Wagstaff recorded in a letter of 1984 to the author that Warhol ‘called any screen print on paper […] a drawing’. The passage, in which Wagstaff discusses the portfolio ‘Ten Works by Ten Painters’, published in 1964 by the Wadsworth Atheneum, reads in full: ‘10 × 10 were all cut in North Haven [Connecticut] by a commercial screen printer from designs made by the artists. In that sense I suppose one could say that only the Warhol is an original. Though that's complicated, too, because he called any screen print on paper, as opposed to canvas which was painting, a drawing. Curious these Chinese. Rheinhardt said my surface (screened) was better than his’. On Wagstaff, see James Crump, ‘Art of Acquisition: The Eye of Sam Wagstaff’, Archives of American Art Journal, 46:3–4 (2007), 5–13.

53 – On the commemorative aspect of Warhol's representations of Marilyn Monroe, see Tom Crow, ‘Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol’, October Files 2, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press 2001, 48–66 (51–3).

54 – Reproduced in McShine, Warhol A Retrospective, 72, fig. 15. Livingstone credits the photograph to Gene Kornman (Eugene Korniman), but Frank Powolny is named as the photographer in Marilyn Monroe and the Camera, New York: teNeues 1989/2000, 79. See also Andy Warhol Photography, 54, for two differently cropped versions of this studio still. A variant of these images was catalogued as by Powolny in Christie's Sale 5435, Lot 30, London, South Kensington, on 26 November 2008.

55 – McShine, Warhol A Retrospective, fig. 199.

56 – Ibid., figs 199–212 and 252. Marilyn × 100 is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.

57 – Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Frayda Feldman and Jörg Schellmann, New York: Abbeville Press 1985, 22–31.

58 – ‘The Spectacle of Racial Turbulence in Birmingham’, photographed for LIFE by Charles Moore: LIFE, 54:20 (17 May 1963), 25–36 (30–1).

59 – McShine, Warhol A Retrospective, figs 275–77.

60 – Feldman and Schellmann, Warhol Prints, 3.

61 – In the portfolio entitled Flash – November 22, 1963 (1968), Warhol employed eleven images appropriated from newspapers and television to create a haunting record of media coverage in the 4 days from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, on 22 November 1963, to his funeral, on 25 November.

62 – See Richard Hamilton, London: Tate Gallery 1992, 166–8. For the prints, see The Prints of Richard Hamilton, prepared by Richard S. Field, Davison Art Center, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University 1973, cat. no. 23, 24 and 30; and Richard Hamilton: Prints 1939–83, London: Edition Hansjörg Mayer in collaboration with Waddington Graphics 1984, cat. nos 67, 68 and 81–4. For Keith Richards's account of the events leading up to this episode, see Keith Richards with James Fox, Life, New York, Boston and London: Little, Brown and Company 2010, 209–10 and 225–9.

63 – Accessible at TimesOnline (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/).

64 – Richard Hamilton, 166.

66 – Field, The Prints of Richard Hamilton, 39.

65 – Ibid., pls 48–54; Field, The Prints of Richard Hamilton, cat. nos 23 and 24; and Richard Hamilton: Prints 1939–83, cat. nos 67 and 68.

67 – Ibid., 40.

68 – Ibid., 54.

70 – Quoted from Field, The Prints of Richard Hamilton, 48–9.

69 – Ibid., cat. no. 31.

71 – Richard Hamilton, 51.

72 – See Rudolf Wittkower's classic paper, ‘Imitation, Eclecticism, and Genius’, in Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Earl R. Wasserman, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1965, 143–61.