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Rauschenberg's re-entry into continuous production as an artist, after the confusions of the '60s, came through prints. From the moment in 1962 when Rauschenberg made his first lithograph at Tanya Grosman's studio on Long Island, he was infatuated with the medium. The limestone was erotic to him: "It's got all the hardness of rock, but all the frailty and sensitivity of albino skin," he said. By the late '60s he was working with America's two best printers: Tanya Grosman on the East Coast and Kenneth Tyler, head of Gemini, the graphics studio, in Los Angeles. Tyler, who split from Gemini in 1974, is unequivocal in his opinion that "Rauschenberg is absolutely a master. I've talked with printers who've worked with Picasso, Miró, you name them—but their collaboration was very simple compared with Rauschenberg's. Work with him and you get his life, spirit, energy: he's the only two-way street in the art world."
Moreover, Tyler believes that Rauschenberg set out to give lithography the status of a major form. "He was prepared to commit any large-scale idea unselfishly to the print medium." A prime example was Booster, at the time the largest hand pulled lithograph ever made: 6 ft. long, printed from two stones. "In the technical sense," says Sidney Felsen, the present co-director of Gemini, "Bob's single biggest gift to lithography was the combining of photo images and hand drawing. But it goes beyond that. Bob's unique. He shies off predetermined ideas so he can react to his surroundings at any given moment. He goes into meditation—vacancy—so that whatever travels through his nostrils and head is exactly what he wants to put on that stone."
Printmaking has given Rauschenberg a luxuriant range of materials and surfaces. He went to France in 1973 to make a suite called Pages and Fuses at an old paper mill in Ambert; it consisted of molded and tinted paper with faint images embedded in its surface. In 1975 Rauschenberg and his group—printers, assistants, friends—traveled to India to make multiples of molded paper, bamboo, printed sari cloths and mud. But the delicacy of his touch produced its masterpiece in the Hoarfrost series he did with Gemini in 1974. The Hoarfrosts (TIME, Jan. 27, 1975) are sheets of silk, chiffon, taffeta, one hung over another. Each sheet is imprinted with images from Rauschenberg's bank. In Pull, 1974, the dominant one is of a diver vanishing into a pool, seen from above, swallowed in blue immensity like a man on a space walk. No reproduction can attest to the subtlety of its play between the documentary "reality" of collage and the vague beauties of atmosphere.
Rauschenberg still keeps a base in New York, a rambling 19th century five-story building complete with chapel, on downtown Lafayette Street, converted from its former life as an orphanage and now filled with mementos, drawings, plants, peripatetic assistants and an aged incontinent turtle, which he regards as his caretaker. But in recent years he has spent most of his time in a wooden frame house, built between 15 acres of palm jungle and the coarse shell beach on the island