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Credit Blossom (Spread) (work of art)

Artwork Info

Created
1978
Nationality
American
Birth/Death
1925-2008
Dimensions
84 x 108 x 2 inches (213.4 x 274.3 x 5.1 cm)

Credit

Purchased with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest), and the State of North Carolina
©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Culture
American North Carolina

About

A formidably gifted renegade, Robert Rauschenberg uses materials in imaginatively nontraditional ways. In 1955 he made a painting out of his own bed (titled Bed, it is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York), and nearly twenty-five years later, he constructed-rather than painted-Credit Blossom (Spread) out of a worn quilt and fabrics, printed with images appropriated from the media.

In addition to the decorative pleasures of its primary colors and patterned surface, Credit Blossom bears witness to contemporary life. The multiple clock faces (which the repeating patterns in the quilt somewhat resemble) insist that time rules. The artist also pairs contrasts: the natural and the technological, the homespun and the factory-fabricated, the supposedly simpler past and the undeniably complicated present.

tags: textile, change, order, part/whole, subjectivity, pattern, North Carolina

Images

  • Credit Blossom (Spread) Robert Rauschenberg Painting

    Credit Blossom (Spread)

    A formidably gifted renegade, Robert Rauschenberg uses materials in imaginatively nontraditional ways. In 1955 he made a painting out of his own bed (titled Bed, it is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York), and nearly twenty-five years later, he constructed-rather than painted-Credit Blossom (Spread) out of a worn quilt and fabrics, printed with images appropriated from the media. In addition to the decorative pleasures of its primary colors and patterned surface, Credit Blossom bears witness to contemporary life. The multiple clock faces (which the repeating patterns in the quilt somewhat resemble) insist that time rules. The artist also pairs contrasts: the natural and the technological, the homespun and the factory-fabricated, the supposedly simpler past and the undeniably complicated present.