Writing in The New Yorker magazine, author and art critic Calvin Tomkins made reference to Bowdoin College Museum of Art exhibition This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today, which ran from June to October 2016.
Robert Rauschenberg, Self-Portrait (for “The New Yorker” Profile), 1964, ink and graphite on paper
The exhibition took its name from a work by twentieth-century artist Robert Rauschenberg, who is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Tomkins, however, chose a work not featured at the MOMA show to write about. He refers to it as Rauschenberg’s “tiny masterpiece” that he created for The New Yorker in 1964, and which was featured in the This is a Portrait show: a self-portrait consisting of the artist’s thumbprint next to his initials.
