The Shooting of George Wallace

The Shooting of George Wallace clearly shows the influence of great American Pop artist/printmakers such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, with their repeated motifs, collaged photographic and popular images, often set within a larger grid-like composition. Lecturing extensively in America, Rothenstein would have been aware of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement and the dramatic assassination attempt in 1972 on Governor George Wallace, a staunch supporter of segregation, which left him paralysed and wheelchair-bound.

The young black man on the left of the image, whose hands we cannot see, wears clothing reminiscent of prison uniforms, while the girl’s smiling face on the carrier bag invokes mass media and billboard advertising. The angular forms of the easel to the right are ghostly reminders of the stark forms of the electric chair foregrounded in Warhols’s prints and paintings of the same period.

Rothenstein’s later prints of the 1980s are, by contrast, characterised by a more light-hearted mood, a vibrant palette and a repeated visual vocabulary of familiar, more domestic motifs, such as birds, flowers and vessels. Examples of which were included in Ben Uri’s exhibition, No Set Rules (2015), bringing together selected works on paper from the Schlee Collection, Southampton and Ben Uri Collection, London.