Word: rauschenberg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Inside it, a symbolically charged event is the retrospective of some 160 works by Robert Rauschenberg, which opened last month at the National Collection of Fine Arts at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. (and will travel throughout 1977 to New York's Museum of Modern Art and to museums in San Francisco, Buffalo and Chicago). With his anarchic sweetness and prodigal talent, Rauschenberg, now 51, has for the best part of 25 years been the enfant terrible of American modernism: a permanent scalawag, handing out indulgences to all comers. He is a model...
...Rauschenberg is best known for having opened up the tracts of imagery that were occupied in the '60s by Pop art. But as one goes through the show, skillfully boiled down by the Smithsonian's curator of 20th century painting, Walter Hopps, from Rauschenberg's enormous and dispersed output of combines, paintings, silk screens, sculptures and prints, it becomes plain that there has not been much antiformalist American art that Rauschenberg's prancing, careless and fecund talent did not either hint at or directly provoke. It is to him that is owed much of the basic cultural assumption that...
...shallow coastal water, slicked with weed, taking the light like satin; and the pale sky, colored the rinsed blue of a Tiepolo ceiling. A pelican lumbers by, just airborne, printing its ragged prehistoric silhouette on the fabric of the scene. Once again, as for the past two decades, Rauschenberg's art drains back into its source, the world...
...trash can. "A protean genius," Art Historian Robert Rosenblum calls him. "Every artist after 1960 who challenged the restrictions of painting and sculpture and believed that all of life was open to art is indebted to Rauschenberg ? forever...
There are, of course, dissenting views. In the '60s, Rauschenberg was loathed in formalist quarters and suspected in others. His taste was always facile and omnivorous, a fact somewhat masked by Hopps' careful choice of works in the show. But mainly, it was the man's variety and good humor that jarred. He did not give a fig for the lines of high seriousness imposed by the hardcore New York art world. His reputation would look after itself; he would not tend it. Besides, Rauschenberg was a natural dissipater. The sight of him in his porcupine-quill leather jacket, erect...