The Invincible Robert Rauschenberg

by Phyllis Tuchman

MAY 16, 2008 TAGS: ARTS, SCULPTURE, PAINTERS ADD A COMMENT

Though artist Robert Rauschenberg was 82 years old when he died of heart failure on May 12, he had seemed invincible. Incapacitated by a stroke in 2002, confined to a wheelchair on Captiva, an island off Florida, and unable to use his right arm and hand, he had nonetheless directed his assistants and so had found a way to continue his work.

Moreover, his paintings and sculptures were ubiquitous, on view in museums and galleries around the globe and lately shown to great acclaim in touring exhibitions devoted to different phases of his work. His quirky, unorthodox combines entered American art history books before he’d turned 40.

Rauschenberg was America’s answer to France’s Jean Cocteau. Whatever he tried to do, he mastered with grace and ease. He’ll be remembered for so much -- his colorful paintings, eccentric sculptures, inventive drawings and prints, photographs, stage designs and costumes for choreographers Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and Trisha Brown, and for co-founding Experiments in Art and Technology. He was also a generous benefactor to artists in need.

A good-looking guy with a big grin, a glint in his eye, and a slight twang, Rauschenberg once said he worked in the gap between art and life. His paintings featured sculptural components and his sculptures appropriated painterly properties, such as creamy smears of pigment. Some of his most popular works from the 1950s include a four-sided construction with a stuffed bird, a painting on which a stuffed eagle perches, and a sculpture comprising a stuffed Angora goat encircled by a large tire. Canvases he executed during the 1960s with silkscreened photographs, set askew and overlapping, are peppered with stop signs, astronauts parachuting to earth, water towers, baseball players, even a gesturing John F. Kennedy. At times, Rauschenberg’s America resembles an updated version of Camelot.

Born on Oct. 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, a small refinery town in Texas near the Louisiana border, Milton Ernest Rauschenberg lived an American dream. His parents were poor fundamentalists who didn’t dance, drink, or play cards. At the University of Texas in Austin, the teenager was studying pharmacology when World War II began. Drafted during spring 1944, he ended up, as a pacifist, working in the Navy Hospital Corps in San Diego.

On a visit to the Huntington Art Gallery, outside Los Angeles, Rauschenberg found a new direction, and American art history gained one of its most indomitable practitioners. Here the young neuropsychiatric technician saw his first oil paintings. One of them, Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, was familiar. Back home, it had been reproduced on a calendar. Painting pictures, he realized, was something a person could do.

After he was discharged, Rauschenberg set off to become an artist. Starting fresh, he changed his first name to Bob, eventually becoming known as Robert. Taking advantage of the G.I. Bill, he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute; then at the Academie Julian in Paris; and, back in the States, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Abstract Expressionism was the movement du jour, and though Black Mountain was a training ground for budding avant-gardists, a proto-Minimalist style was practiced there. Josef Albers, late of the Bauhaus, ran the fine arts program, and composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham were in residence. From the latter two, Rauschenberg learned to use chance and random accident as creative tools.

From Black Mountain, Rauschenberg made his way to New York. For a while, he attended the Art Students League. He was good enough to get a solo show in 1951 at the gallery where Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko exhibited their paintings. But his work was still tentative and unresolved.

Other horizons opened up when he hooked up with Cy Twombly, and as a couple the men traveled to Rome, Casablanca, Tangier, and Spain. When they returned to New York, they joined the downtown art scene. (After Twombly and Rauschenberg broke up, Rauschenberg lived for many years with painter Jasper Johns.)

Rauschenberg painted some all-black panels. He made some all-white ones (which would later be reconstructed by abstractionist Brice Marden). And then he made “Erased de Kooning Drawing” from a work on paper measuring 25-inches-by-22-inches that Willem de Kooning, the Abstract Expressionist, had given him. It was covered, Rauschenberg later recalled, with “charcoal, lead, everything. It took me two months and even then it wasn’t completely erased.” With this body of work, the young artist achieved recognition that he would maintain for the rest of his career.

Rauschenberg embodied the kind of exuberance one associates with the best of 20th century America. He was a personality, inspiring, the sort of artist willing to jump off a high dive blindfolded. For younger generations — from the Pop painters through Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami -- he was a shining beacon of bravery and creativity. Time and again, he incorporated not just the stuff of everyday life — clocks, say, and ladders — but also actual refuse found on lower Manhattan’s gritty streets. Though he made a name for himself as an abstractionist, Rauschenberg preferred to arrange images of people and places on canvas as if they were so many squares of color.

Above all, Rauschenberg’s art is fun. Like "Rebus," a work from the mid-1950s, it is often puzzle-like, allowing viewers to figure out their own stories. From cardboard boxes, he could fashion his elegant “Cardbirds.” Or, on pale, diaphanous cloths, he could create his mysterious “Hoarfrost” pictures.

Over the last few days, critics and bloggers have been naming what they consider to be Rauschenberg’s most important paintings and sculptures. Many of these were made during the 1950s and ’60s, so it gives the illusion that his work drops off after those decades. But if you look at a book filled with his art or visit a retrospective at a museum, you can’t help but notice how consistent he was and how amazing was his range. He maintained the high standards he set for himself throughout his career, and all the while put before us his vision of joy, playfulness and dazzling imagination.

Rauschenberg speaks about "Erased de Kooning Drawing."