Word: rauschenberg
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...retrospective show of the work of Robert Rauschenberg, which fills the uptown and SoHo branches of New York City's Guggenheim Museum and, as if that were not enough, the Ace Gallery in SoHo as well, is too big, too profuse, too sprawling--too damned much all round--to take in with any sort of ease. Curated by Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, its bulk (some 400 works in all media) creates the fatigued impression that everything in Rauschenberg's vast and uneven output has been dumped into the hopper and left for the individual viewer to sort out. Which...
...invigorating too, in the end. "Energy," wrote William Blake, "is eternal delight," and there has never been anything in American art to match the effusive, unconstrained energy of Rauschenberg's generous imagination. Compared with the more pursed, hermetic and self-reflexive Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg is and always has been a gusher. He loves the sound, smell, grunge and look of the street. He doesn't look at his sources in American vernacular--photos, movies, and junk of all kinds--with anything resembling irony or distance. He is in it up to the neck and wants...
Hopps compares him in a catalog essay to Charles Willson Peale, the artist of the Revolutionary War period who created the first American museum, a highly personal wunderkammer of his own portraits of American heroes mixed with natural-history specimens. When you think of Rauschenberg giving new life to a stuffed angora goat in Monogram, 1955, or repeatedly silk-screening the effigy of John F. Kennedy, there's some truth to this. But his closer affinity is with an equally polymorphous ancestor, Walt Whitman, the entranced celebrant of American variety...
...Rauschenberg became to American art in the 1950s and '60s what Whitman was to American poetry in the 1880s--the Great Permitter, with his declared hope to "act in the gap between art and life." This, one wants to say, is the artist of American democracy, yearningly faithful to its clamor, its contradictions, its hope and its enormous demotic freedom, all of which find shape in his work. Other American artists have had this ambition--one thinks of Robert Henri and the Ashcan painters at the turn of the century--but none fulfilled it so well...
...with an array of institutions, artists and collectors, the program encourages ambassadors to become their own art dealers, selecting works that strike their aesthetic fancy. Among the most chosen artists in the diplomatic service: Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast, Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, Jacob Lawrence, Morris Louis, Andrew Wyeth, Robert Rauschenberg, Dale Chihuly and Helen Frankenthaler. Says director Roselyne Swig: "Our ambassadors see the works as an invaluable outreach tool...