Now, let’s get to Rauschenberg…

Following Marcel Duchamp, who is soon to have a major retrospective in New York and Philadelphia, Rauschenberg opened up what qualified as art. In his memorial essay, Lewis put it this way: “To Rauschenberg, almost anything could be art, and art could be almost anything. … [He] crossed media and created new ones as often as other artists clean their brushes.” Rauschenberg, whose work served as a precursor to pop art, confounded just about everyone when he asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing to erase, then presented the nearly effaced sheet as his own work of art. This kind of conceptual leap often turns off the uninitiated, but the idea that an artist could paint with images—one of Rauschenberg’s next innovations—didn’t bother Greg. In fact, he was immediately captivated, and had a lot of questions.

As we walked through the Guggenheim show, we lingered over one of Rauschenberg’s Red Paintings, from 1953-54, which he made after returning to New York from a second stint at the famed Black Mountain College. The painting features blocks of wood on the top and bottom, a gesture that allowed us to talk about the artist’s combines. Greg had read about Monogram—the goat with a tire around its middle standing on a painted, collaged surface—and he seemed to know about MoMA’s Bed, from 1955. The myth of that painting is that Rauschenberg had been living hand to mouth and lacking in art supplies, and that he woke up and painted on his bed. He may have used his quilt and pillow in the combine, but the painting is only 6 feet and 3 inches tall, and less than 32 inches wide, which means either Rauschenberg slept on a cot, or the bed is meant to be another example of capturing life as it is lived in his art.

The centerpiece of the Guggenheim show is Barge, from 1962-63, a 32-foot-wide work of art with black-and-white images silk-screened to the surface. Like many of the exhibition’s other works, it deals with Rauschenberg’s interest in found images. Barge itself is worth the trip to the Guggenheim, but the show also features a number of different ways in which Rauschenberg tried to adapt images from the “real” world into his art. There’s an example of one of his “revolvers”—a contraption holding five clear acrylic discs, printed with images in colors of cyan, yellow, and magenta. Although you’re not allowed to touch it, the Guggenheim displays the work with a push-button control box that rotates the discs to create different arrangements of the layered images.

Barge (1962-63), displayed at Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: Ariel Ione Williams/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Greg wasn’t as fascinated with that work as I was. He wanted to talk about Rauschenberg’s process. Did he make sketches? What were the alternatives to the works we were seeing? I pointed out that the silk-screen technique Rauschenberg used—there’s a great example of a piece from when the artist switched to working in dye transfer—was also Andy Warhol’s signature style. And yet, the works look nothing like each other.

In many ways, the Guggenheim show highlights one pole of Rauschenberg’s work—namely, the many ways in which he assembled images. But a short walk uptown, to the Museum of the City of New York, provided a window into a very different aspect of the artist. Rauschenberg, after all, was also an accomplished photographer; his first works to enter MoMA were photographs, and he continued to take pictures and use them in his art throughout much of his working life.

Since New York City is the museum’s subject, the exhibition, Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures of the Real World, focuses on his photography in the metropolis, although Rauschenberg took pictures everywhere. Greg, whose first love is music, noted how Rauschenberg riffed on his own images, spotting the way the artist scaled, flopped, and juxtaposed his work with familiar signs and symbols. Sometimes, Rauschenberg printed these images on aluminum and copper (though we don’t see examples of the latter), and he created light boxes that allowed him to layer images on clear sheets that roll down like shades in front of a light source.

The light boxes are particularly interesting. There are a couple more of them on view at the Gemini G.E.L. studio, at Joni Moisant Weyl gallery in Chelsea, which is holding a show of prints, lithographs, and cardboard works. There, too, you can see many more examples of the artist’s extraordinary range of ideas and experiments, including Booster, from 1967, a seminal collaboration between Rauschenberg and Gemini G.E.L.

I can’t think of another artist who seems to be both ubiquitous and somewhat forgotten. After touring these very different facets of Rauschenberg’s art and output, I came away conflicted. Was there no conventional retrospective because the artist had become less relevant or fallen out of favor? Or was this fragmented, distributed tribute in keeping with Rauschenberg’s protean artworks? Greg didn’t care about any of that. The afternoon had opened up a new way of looking at the world.

That will do it for today. On Sunday, we’ll have another great piece from our partners at Air Mail—this one an appreciation of Frank Gehry by the great Paul Goldberger. Look for it in your inbox that evening.

Until then,
M

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