Artwork details

Artist

Title

Last Turn-Your Turn

Description

Last Turn-Your Turn is a lithograph Rauschenberg created in support of the Earth Summit ’92, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The summit focused on legislation to reduce global warming. Rauschenberg highlighted the idea of individual responsibility asking, “What can the individual do?” He believed that without individual commitment, legislation cannot be effective. He said, “once the individual has changed, the world can change.”

At the top, Rauschenberg wrote a pledge signed by thousands at the summit: “I pledge to make the earth a secure and hospitable place for present and future generations.” He used straightforward visual vocabulary for an urgent social statement to reach the widest range of people.

Date

1991

Medium

Lithograph

Edition

200

Signature

Signed

Sheet

28 x 28 inches

Status

Available

Price

Price on request

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg, an American born in 1925, started producing painterly prints in the early 1960s that contained pictures he cut out of magazines and newspapers. Nearly ten years prior, he had created pieces he dubbed “Combines,” which are fusions of painting and sculpture that embrace the noise of daily life and contrast the solitary canvases of abstract expressionism. The ordinary was also introduced in Rauschenberg’s prints in a variety of ways, such as the water ring left by a drinking glass, the embossment from a coin, or the traced contour of a cane. By reintroducing representation into the avant-garde, the artist revived a vibrant visual language. “What he invented above all was…a graphic surface that let the world in again,” wrote art historian Leo Steinberg.