Cliché-Verre: Hand Drawn, Light Printed,

1983

In this lithograph Rauschenberg uses one printmaking technique to demonstrate another. A bicycle wheel, a ruler, a jar, plants, and cut-up sheets of film are represented through a process known as cliché-verre, a photographic method first used in the mid-nineteenth century. For this work, designed for a 1980 group exhibition of cliché-verres at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the artist layered objects onto the surface of photosensitive film; their differing levels of translucency created variations in tone when the film was exposed to light. He then used the resulting print—a clichéverre— as a negative to create a lithographic stone printing matrix, which he printed on clear plastic to simulate the transparency of the original base.