Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962-64

With their silkscreened images culled from magazines and newspapers, Rauschenberg's often monumental collages take the viewer on a roller-coaster ride through the America of the early 1960s. Astronauts, Army helicopters, JFK and baseball players, mixed with allusions to Velazquez and Duchamp, are a vibrant testament to this artist's propensity ``to consider the world as one gigantic painting.'' Feinstein, curator of an exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum which this volume catalogues, convincingly interprets the paintings as an open-ended, associative dialogue about the ubiquitous role of the mass media in American life, with the technological present overwhelming the past. Throwing light on the smaller, lesser known, black-and-white silkscreen experiments that led to the artist's enormous, colorful canvases, Feinstein also belabors the familiar point that Rauschenberg was at the forefront of postmodernism, manipulating the image bank of culture. Tomkins's informal journalistic essay profiles the artist at work making the silkscreens. (Apr.)