Time + Ties

Having read about Josef Albers in Time magazine, Robert Rauschenberg followed Susan Weil, his future wife, to Black Mountain College in 1948. Yet his encounters with the domineering head of the art curriculum were fraught with tension. Albers heartily disapproved of the freewheeling young artist, whose personal and aesthetic demeanors were antithetical to Albers’ rigid formalism.

Nevertheless, Rauschenberg learned much from Albers, especially in regard to color theory and the combination of different materials and textures, as exemplified in Time + Ties. By juxtaposing imagery drawn from various photographs, newspaper images, and other media, Rauschenberg unifies Time + Ties with animated brushwork, a strategy that amplifies the painting’s immediacy and evokes the rapid pace of modern life.