During a trip to Cuba in 1952, Robert Rauschenberg began to experiment with transferring printed images to paper, marking a shift from three-dimensional collage and assemblage to two-dimensional imagery. Later, in 1958, Rauschenberg started to focus on his transfer works in earnest, using printed ephemera from magazines and newspapers as source material. He transferred these to paper by applying a chemical solvent to their surface, placing them face down onto the paper and rubbing with a ballpoint pen. An inverted transfer of the images appeared, complete with striations made by the pen. Rauschenberg worked into these transferred images with graphite, gouache, watercolour, and crayon, giving the ‘paintings’ a spontaneous, handmade look and equating the source material and artist’s hand on the same two-dimensional plane. 

In ‘Bryce Baby’, Rauschenberg used as source material a copy of the Miami Herald from Wednesday 4 September 1968. At the bottom of the canvas, we can make out an American Football player, who appears in the paper with the caption ‘Elusive Halfback Jack Harper’. To the right of him is a beagle, which the Herald captions ‘High Water in Glades Handicaps Bird Dog Season... hunter puts dog through exercise session paces’, in an article about the annual Marsh Hen hunt. There is also a strip image of cars for sale, from the classified section and, opposite on the left, we can make out two male busts. These are wrestlers Jose Lothario and Joe Scarpa, in a Championship Wrestling advertisement for the ‘Southern Tag Team Title Match’, to be held that evening at the Miami Beach Auditorium. 

‘Bryce Baby’ has the emphatically gestural and handmade quality characteristic of Rauschenberg’s transferred source images, including intentional slippages and irregularities, while hand-painted and drawn areas that disrupt the continuity of the picture surface. In combining everyday sources and subjects with the artist’s hand, Rauschenberg attempted to collapse the boundary between art and life, arguably the central aim of his practice: ‘Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap’  (Robert Rauschenberg, 1959).