Watermark 1973

Robert Rauschenberg made this collage, Watermark, using offset lithography and screenprint. The piece is a layering of images and textures, like memories fading in and out. Look at the way Rauschenberg lets the images bleed into each other; the pink on the left seems to stain the paper, giving the whole piece an ethereal quality. It's like he's not trying to hide the process, but rather celebrating the happy accidents that can happen when you let materials do their thing. I’m drawn to the collage in the middle ground, with all the figures. The area is full of busy marks, but if you look closely, it reveals itself as an actual scene of people. That ghosted horse near the bottom also really captures a sense of movement, even though it is still. Rauschenberg, like his contemporary, Jasper Johns, understood that art is not about perfection, but about the messy, beautiful process of making. He gets away from the traditional and formal styles associated with painters before him, and introduces an attitude of free experimentation and ambiguity.