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Whistle Stop (Spread)
Artist
Robert Rauschenberg
(American, 1925 - 2008)
Date1977
MediumCombine painting, mixed media on five panels
DimensionsOverall: 84 1/8 x 180 1/2 x 8 in. (213.68 x 458.47 x 20.32 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase and Commission, The Benjamin J. Tillar Memorial Trust
Object number1977.13.A-F
Status
Not on viewSignedVerso: "Whistle Stop '77 (Spread) (1-5 parts) Rauschenberg."
Copyright© Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
Label TextWhistle Stop (Spread), 1977, belongs to the Spreads series Robert Rauschenberg produced from 1975 to 1982. Each Spread is composed of wood panels covered with a variety of materials, including acrylic paint, printed images, and fabric collage along with found objects such as lights, buckets, or fans. The fifteen-foot-long Whistle Stop contains approximately fifty reproductions of photographs and illustrations the artist clipped from books, magazines, and newspapers, affixing them across five panels with a solvent transfer-printing technique. The images range from those of Abraham Lincoln to comic strips, arrowheads, and a lunar landscape. Whistle Stop also includes two doors that give the piece an architectural quality, and the flashing red light attached to the right panel suggests the railroad station of a “whistle-stop” town at which trains stop only on signal.
Several of the reproductions in Whistle Stop—such as those featuring an oil tanker, the sea, a lobster, birds, and fish—relate to Rauschenberg’s childhood in Port Arthur, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico. But other images in the work have little to do with that environment, except perhaps in offering a contrast to and perhaps an escape from it: mountains with snow, a map of Africa, Native American ruins. The meaning of the work remains open ended, however. The array of elements in Rauschenberg’s art triggers associations and meanings personal to each viewer.
Several of the reproductions in Whistle Stop—such as those featuring an oil tanker, the sea, a lobster, birds, and fish—relate to Rauschenberg’s childhood in Port Arthur, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico. But other images in the work have little to do with that environment, except perhaps in offering a contrast to and perhaps an escape from it: mountains with snow, a map of Africa, Native American ruins. The meaning of the work remains open ended, however. The array of elements in Rauschenberg’s art triggers associations and meanings personal to each viewer.