Accident

Rauschenberg worked in a variety of media, often juxtaposing seemingly unrelated objects from everyday life. To create this print, he collaged an unexpected assortment of images, including a reproduction of a painting by the eighteenth-century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (bottom right) and a baseball player (left) culled from an old printing plate discarded by the New York Times. The images are connected by painterly swaths of printer's ink, reminiscent of the gestural brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism. Rauschenberg produced the composition on a lithographic stone, which cracked during the printing process. Instead of abandoning the broken stone, he embraced this chance happening and printed the lithograph with the fracture. He also placed the chips of the broken stone at the base of the crack, rendering the defect a central feature of the print.