A major Rauschenberg retrospective comes to SFMOMA.
In a series of early prophetic works, Robert Rauschenberg and soonto-be wife Susan Weil created ghostly white photos — silhouettes of themselves on exposed blueprint paper. In one of them, which measures close to 7 feet tall, one member of the couple appears to balance upside down atop the other, their heads and hands playfully and eerily conjoined.
Large, jaunty and seductively arresting, qualities the artist would achieve throughout his protean career, these acrobatic pieces bear another important sign of things to come. In both process and result — Rauschenberg and Weil shared the roles of model and maker — the double portraits spring from an impulse to collaborate and connect that forms the single most important through line in this artist’s extraordinary, ever-changing output.
From the famous “Erased de Kooning Drawing,” in which he both puckishly defied and meticulously paid tribute to his abstract expressionist contemporary, to his performance work with Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Trisha Brown and others, to his globe-spanning Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, which propagated new work with artists, poets and ordinary people in 10 countries, Rauschenberg was engaged in a kind of perpetual conversation.
The exchange wasn’t only or even primarily with other art and artists. The transformative heart of Rauschenberg’s work came from a drive to blur the boundaries between art and life, the invented and the actual. When he flooded his silkscreens with images of JFK and rocket launches snatched from newspapers, magazines or TV; when he affixed a taxidermied bald eagle to a painting (“Canyon”) or made an Angora goat encircled by a rubber tire
the centerpiece of a combine (“Monogram”); when he riveted road signs and car parts together in a sculpture (“Stop Side Early Winter Glut”), he was pursuing an omnivorous communal imperative.
“Rauschenberg’s references to other media aren’t just tricks,” critic Robert Hughes wrote. “They’re an integral part of the way he connects the language of his images to that of a wider world.” To Rauschenberg, as he put it himself, painting was “both art and life. Neither can be made.” Invention and living were essentially and inextricably joined.
Bay Area viewers will soon tap into the sprawling Rauschenberg network with the opening of a major retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Previously mounted in slightly different forms at London’s Tate Modern and the New York Museum of Modern Art, “Robert Rauschenberg: Erasing the Rules” runs Nov. 18 to March 25 at SFMOMA.
Comprised of 170 works, the show covers the artist’s six-decade career in chronological fashion. For several reasons, San Francisco can claim special ownership of this or any Rauschenberg exhibition. It was here, in 1976, that the artist received his first retrospective. And then in 1998, thanks to a bequest from Phyllis Wattis, SFMOMA purchased 14 works from the artist’s holdings, including “Erased de Kooning Drawing” and “Automobile Tire Print,” a 22½foot rendering of just that.
The latter was created in 1953 when Rauschenberg directed John Cage to drive a Model A Ford, one back tire painted black, along a strip of glued-together drawing papers furled out on Fulton Street in New York. It was simultaneously an Automobile Age commentary, a kinetic piece of abstract art and a jape at Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings.
Like everything involving Rauschenberg, meanings are multiple, fluid and unstable. That’s even true for curators installing the show. With “Hiccups,” a 1978 work of zippered-together panels, the artist left it up to the installer how to arrange and connect the piece. The same principle governs the six interchangeable silkscreens of “Shades.” “It’s the mixup that matters,” said SFMOMA associate curator of painting and sculpture Sarah Roberts, “the surprising juxtapositions you find.”
Born in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg (1925-2008) studied pharmacology at the University of Texas and was drafted into the Navy in 1943. During a leave, he later said, Rauschenberg had his breakthrough moment at the Huntington Library’s art collection in Southern California. Encountering works by British artists Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence and Thomas Gainsborough (“Blue Boy”) made him decide to become an artist.
Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris. But it wasn’t until he followed Weil to Black Mountain College in North Carolina that his artistic juices started flowing in earnest. Studying under Josef Albers, the formidable abstract painter, instilled a kind of torque between order and freedom in Rauschenberg.
After separating from and then divorcing Weil, Rauschenberg embarked on important relationships, both artistic and romantic, with painters Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns. The art came in a rush of different styles and modes. Rauschenberg’s rollered-on White Paintings inspired Cage’s infamously silent piano work, “4’33.” The Black Paintings and Red Paintings, which incorporated scraps of newsprint, referenced Cubist collages by Picasso and Braque while remarking darkly on the present moment.
His voluptuous silk screens and thornily congested combines, bristling with found images and objects of all sorts, helped loosen the stranglehold of Abstract Expressionism and moved American art toward the lively new frontiers of pop art, conceptualism, even an environmental consciousness (his paintings made with live grass, an installation of bubbling mud). His Experiments in Art and Technology sought to bridge the divide between artists and scientists, an initiative echoed in today’s digital art realm.
After decamping in 1970 to Captiva Island, off the coast of Florida, Rauschenberg continued to innovate, working with cardboard boxes, metal and silkscreens. He reconnected with Cage after a long hiatus and reached out to a wider world with his cultural exchanges.
Today, almost a decade after his death, it’s a critical commonplace that Rauschenberg made an awful lot of work, especially later on, that didn’t register as strongly as what came before. “For a great artist, he made remarkably little good art,” wrote the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, who went on to celebrate a “brainstorming excitement” that “caught a wave of history” and bore lasting influence.
Rauschenberg, whose fame and wealth never went to his head, cofounded one organization that advocated for artists’ royalties when their works were resold and another that helped beginning artists pay their medical bills. Such actions flowed from the same embracing generosity of spirit that informs so much of his work.
“Ideas are not real estate,” Rauschenberg said. Art wasn’t about private ownership to him. After winning the Venice Biennale grand prize in 1964 at age 39, the youngest American at the time to do so, Rauschenberg scrapped the screens he’d used to avoid the risk of repeating himself. He discarded or gave lots of other pieces away. Writing in 1987, Barbara Rose said Rauschenberg “is simply too much for many people. He has too much energy, he is too wideranging in his activities, and too ambitious in his conceptions of the role of art in the artworld.”
Peel away the veil of doubt, and there could hardly be a more ringing endorsement of an artist whose workings, methods, exuberance and connective spirit knew no bounds.
Rauschenberg “is simply too much for many people. He has too much energy, he is too wide-ranging in his activities, and too ambitious in his conceptions of the role of art in the artworld.” Barbara Rose, Rauschenberg scholar, in 1987 book