From: Rich <rich.rlindsay@gmail.com>
Subject: SITE:RIP:Robert Rauschenberg
To: onehundredonehours@yahoo.com
Date: Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 2:52 PM
Perhaps you already know this.
If not:
May 14, 2008
Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82.
He died of heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the artist's gallery in Manhattan.
Mr. Rauschenberg's work gave new meaning to sculpture. "Canyon," for
instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas.
"Monogram" was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted
panel. "Bed" entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint,
as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of
postwar modernism.
A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage
performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr.
Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one
medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the
mediums in which he worked.
Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell
and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and
sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking,
sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and
technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art
and life.
Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art
onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he
emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between
artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning
and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism,
Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a
signal role.
No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham
and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view,
collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American
culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, "Beauty is now
underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look."
Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg's
efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be
the stuff of art (this wasn't itself new), but that it could be the
stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential
poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated. "I
really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or
mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly," he once said, "because they're
surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them
miserable."
The remark reflected the optimism and generosity of spirit that Mr.
Rauschenberg became known for. His work was likened to a Saint Bernard:
uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in
person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities
for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic
politicians.
A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a
charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that nevertheless
masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional
approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by
making quirky small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the
street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later
years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast
international, ambassadorial-like projects and collaborations.
Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, Fla.,
these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he
worked on a project that grew literally to exceed the length of its
title, "The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece." They generally did not live
up to his earlier achievements. Even so, he maintained an equanimity
toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he
believed, and risk sometimes meant failure.
The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things
— was always what mattered most to him. "Screwing things up is a
virtue," he said when he was 74. "Being correct is never the point. I
have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she
re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I
wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting
idea."
This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once
said, "to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of
art."
He "keeps asking the question — and it's a terrific question
philosophically, whether or not the results are great art," Tworkov
said, "and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists."
That generation was the one that broke from Pollock and company. Mr.
Rauschenberg maintained a deep but mischievous respect for these
Abstract Expressionist heroes like de Kooning and Barnett Newman.
Famously, he once painstakingly erased a drawing by de Kooning, an act
both of destruction and devotion. Critics regarded the all-black
paintings and all-red paintings he made in the early 1950s as spoofs of
de Kooning and Pollock. The paintings had roiling, bubbled surfaces
made from the torn scraps of newspapers embedded in paint.
But these were just as much homages as they were parodies. De
Kooning, himself a parodist, had incorporated bits of newspapers as
flotsam in pictures, and Pollock stuck cigarette butts to canvases.
Mr. Rauschenberg's "Automobile Tire Print," from the early 50's —
resulting from Cage's driving an inked tire of a Model A Ford over 20
sheets of white paper — poked fun at Newman's famous "zip" paintings.
At the same time, Mr. Rauschenberg was expanding on Newman's art.
The tire print transformed Newman's zip — an abstract line against a
monochrome backdrop with spiritual pretensions — into an artifact of
everyday culture, which for Mr. Rauschenberg had its own transcendent
dimension.
Mr. Rauschenberg frequently alluded to cars and spaceships, even
incorporating real tires and bicycles, into his art. This partly
reflected his own restless, peripatetic imagination. The idea of
movement was logically extended when he took up dance and performance.
There was, beneath this, a darkness to many of his works,
notwithstanding their irreverence. "Bed" was gothic. The all-black
paintings were solemn and shuttered. The red paintings looked charred,
with strips of fabric, akin to bandages, from which paint dripped, like
blood. "Interview," which resembled a cabinet or closet with a door,
enclosing photographs of toreros, a pinup, a Michelangelo nude, a fork
and a softball, suggested some black-humored encoded erotic message.
There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt
in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half
remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected places; bits and pieces
of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In
bringing these things together, the art implied consolation.
Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to
grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer
Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to
"Monogram" and "Bed" in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum,
one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg's reputation: "To her,
all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just
as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no
meaning, and that made it ugly.
"So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed,
it might sound very much like what she'd been saying. For instance, she
had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture
of 'The Blue Boy' on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she
had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the
skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by
this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning
to understand."
Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port
Arthur, Tex., a small refinery town where "it was very easy to grow up
without ever seeing a painting," he said. (In adulthood he renamed
himself Robert.) His grandfather, a doctor who immigrated from Germany,
had settled in Texas and married a full-blooded Cherokee. His father,
Ernest, worked for a local utility company. The family lived so
frugally that his mother, Dora, made him shirts out of scraps of
fabric. Once she made herself a skirt out of the back of the suit that
her younger brother was buried in. She didn't want the material to go
to waste.
For his high school graduation present, Mr. Rauschenberg wanted a
ready-made shirt, his first. All this shaped his art eventually. A
decade or so later he made history with his own assemblages of scraps
and ready-mades: sculptures and music boxes made of packing crates,
rocks and rope; and paintings like "Yoicks" sewn from fabric strips. He
loved making something out of nothing.
He studied pharmacology briefly at the University of Texas
in Austin before he was drafted during World War II. He saw his first
paintings at the Huntington Gallery in California while stationed in
San Diego as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps, and it
occurred to him that it was possible to become a painter.
He attended the Kansas City Art Institute on the GI Bill, traveled
to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he met Susan Weil,
a young painter from New York who was to enter Black Mountain College
in North Carolina. Having read about and come to admire Josef Albers,
then the head of fine arts at Black Mountain, Mr. Rauschenberg saved
enough money to join her.
Albers, a disciplinarian and strict modernist who, shocked by his
student, later disavowed ever even knowing Mr. Rauschenberg, was on the
other hand recalled by Mr. Rauschenberg as "a beautiful teacher and an
impossible person."
"He wasn't easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so
excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it," Mr.
Rauschenberg added. "Years later, though, I'm still learning what he
taught me."
Among other things, he learned to maintain an open mind toward
materials and new media, which Albers endorsed. Mr. Rauschenberg also
gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing
tool.
For a while, he moved between New York, where he studied at the Art
Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, and Black
Mountain. During the spring of 1950, he and Ms. Weil married. The
marriage lasted two years, during which they had a son, Christopher,
who survives him along with Mr. Rauschenberg's companion, Darryl
Pottorf.
Mr. Rauschenberg experimented at the time with blueprint paper to
produce silhouette negatives. The pictures were published in Life
magazine in 1951; after that Mr. Rauschenberg was given his first solo
show, at the influential Betty Parsons Gallery. "Everyone was trying to
give up European aesthetics," he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse.
"That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors
and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If
I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It's the only thing you
can count on. Because life doesn't have any other possibility, everyone
can be measured by his adaptability to change."
Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show. Aside from
that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to
host Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the
only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called
Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs
and that, as Cage was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could
stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he
decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of
thank you, painting it all-black, being in the midst of his new,
all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused.
"We both thought, 'Here was somebody crazier than I am,' " Mr.
Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white
paintings, which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage's famous
silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33
seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg's
paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and
backdrops for ambient, random events like passing shadows. "I always
thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well,
hypersensitive," he told an interviewer in 1963. "So that people could
look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the
shadows cast, or what time of day it was."
Kicking around Europe and North Africa with the artist Cy Twombly
for a few months after that, he began to collect and assemble objects —
bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in
Rome who exhibited them under the title "scatole contemplative," or
thought boxes. They were shown in Florence, where an outraged critic
suggested that Mr. Rauschenberg toss them in the river. The artist
thought that sounded like a good idea. So, saving a few scatole for
himself and friends, he found a secluded spot on the Arno. "'I took
your advice,'' he wrote to the critic.
Yet the scatole were crucial to his development, setting the stage
for bigger, more elaborate assemblages like '"Monogram.'' Back in New
York, Mr. Rauschenberg showed his all-black and all-white paintings,
then his erased de Kooning, which de Kooning had given to him to erase,
a gesture that Mr. Rauschenberg found astonishingly generous, all of
which enhanced his reputation as the new enfant terrible of the art
world.
Around that time he also met Mr. Johns, then unknown, who had a
studio in the same building on Pearl Street where Mr. Rauschenberg had
a loft. The intimacy of their relationship over the next years, a
consuming subject for later biographers and historians, coincided with
the production by the two of them of some of the most groundbreaking
works of postwar art.
In Mr. Rauschenberg's famous words, they gave each other "permission
to do what we wanted.'' Living together in a succession of lofts in
Lower Manhattan until the 1960's, they exchanged ideas and supported
themselves designing window displays for Tiffany & Company and
Bonwit Teller under the collaborative pseudonym Matson Jones.
Along with the combines, Mr. Rauschenberg in that period developed a
transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers
and magazines with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a
pencil. The process, used for works like "34 Drawings for Dante's
'Inferno'," created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and
secretive. Perhaps there was an autobiographical and sensual aspect to
this. It let him combine images on a surface to a kind of surreal
effect, which became the basis for works he made throughout his later
career, when he adapted the transfer method to canvas.
Instrumental in this technical evolution back then was Tatyana
Grossman, who encouraged and guided him as he made prints at her
workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions, on Long Island; he also began
a long relationship with the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles,
producing lithographs like the 1970 "Stoned Moon" series, with its
references to the moon landing. His association with theater and dance
had already begun by the 1950s, when he began designing sets and
costumes for Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown
and for his own productions. In 1963, he choreographed "Pelican,'' in
which he performed on roller skates wearing a parachute and helmet of
his design to the accompaniment of a taped collage of sound. This
fascination both with collaboration and with mixing art with
technologies dovetailed with yet another endeavor. With Billy Klüver,
an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, he started Experiments in
Art and Technology, a nonprofit foundation to foster collaborations
between artists and scientists.
In 1964, he toured Europe and Asia with the Merce Cunningham Dance
Company, the same year he exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in
London and the Venice Biennale
as the United States representative. That sealed his international
renown. The Sunday Telegraph in London hailed him as "the most
important American artist since Jackson Pollock.'' He walked off with
the international grand prize in Venice, the first modern American to
win it. Mr. Rauschenberg had, almost despite himself, become an
institution.
Major exhibitions followed every decade after that, including one at
the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, another at the Guggenheim in 1997
and yet another that landed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005.
When he wasn't traveling in later years, he was in Captiva, a
slender island off Florida's Gulf coast, living at first in a modest
beach house and working out of a small studio. In time he became
Captiva's biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town
house in Greenwich Village back in New York. He acquired the land in
Captiva by buying adjacent properties from elderly neighbors whom he
let live rent-free in their houses, which he maintained for them. He
accumulated 35 acres, 1,000 feet of beach front and nine houses and
studios, including a 17,000-square-foot two-story studio overlooking a
swimming pool. He owned almost all that remained of tropical jungle on
the island.
"I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I
stop," he said in an interview in the giant studio on Captiva in 2000.
"At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words
interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to
think up ideas. I'm not one. I'd rather accept the irresistible
possibilities of what I can't ignore."
He added: "Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else's
aesthetics. I think you're born an artist or not. I couldn't have
learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages
your limitations."