Rauschenberg, Robert
born: 1925 PortArthur, Texas

died: 2008 Florida

Robert Rauschenberg has become one of the major Amercan artists ofthe postwar period. In his early "combine paintings," PortArthur, done in 1953-1954, Dadaism celebrated a revival, and the emergence Texas of Pop Art was anticipated. After a comparatively academic course of studies in the US and Paris, Rauschenberg turned his back on the - Abstract Expressionism that then dominated the art scene. Instead of refusing to address the realities around him he began to quote things and events from the mundane environment, to integrate real objects into his paintings, and, concomitantly, to inquire into the nature af human perception. Rauschenberg's Odalisque alludes to the painting of that title by jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, of 1808 (Paris, The Louvre). As we walk around the three-dimensional piece, a multiplicity of associations come to mind: The pierced, crushed pillow recalls the beautiful silk . cushion on which the nude in Ingres's painting sits. A stuffed but still proud rooster, perhaps standing for a papagallo or macho male, per atop a box whase rickety, temporary character cannot be belied. The exquisitely decorated salons of the neoclassical era have evidently been reduced here to a makeshift container illuminated by flickering light, suggesting same sleazy bordello. On the other hand, the box has been interpreted as symbolizing the adalisque's body. The collages of pin-up girls might indeed be the successors of Ingres's lavely ladies, and the are confronted with icons of exaggerated masculinity - boxers, baseball players, bullfight scenes. In his three-part work Allegory Rauschenberg showed his close affinity with Kurt Schwitters. The inclusion af an actual, red umbrella and a piece of battered sheet metal expanded the visual means at artists' disposal. By combining brushwork in the mode of Action Painting, callaged paper, torn fragments of posters, fabric and metal, Rauschenberg produced a whole that is both rife with tension and strangely homogeneous, a work that straddles the borderline between object and painting. The combine-painting Wall Street represents the world-renowned financial center not in terms of its familiar image of soaring office build ings but in terms of its sleazy side. The artist has integrated elements of the anything-but-idyllic downtown life of New York: a barrier running right across the picture and connected to a worn fire hose, which extends into the surrounding space, linking pictorial world with real world. This endeavor to bridge the gap between art and life is even more apparent in the contemporaneous work Black Market. Rauschenberg wanted to release museum visitors from their role of passive observers and encourage active participation in the work. On the floor beneath the combine-painting of found objects he placed a suitcase, filled with everyday utensils, rubber stamps, and stamp pads. Onlookers were invited to exchange one of the four objects for something they had brought with them, and to record the swap on the painting (hence the "black market" reference). By including viewers in the work's process of emergence, the gap between viewer and artist could be overcome, thought Rauschenberg. Yet since his own drawings, also in the suit- case, were soon found missing, the experiment had to be abandoned. In the early ig6os Rauschenberg began to experiment with new techniques, especially with serigraphy and offset printing. An example of the former is Axle, which focusses on events of the year 1964, the most notorious and harrowing of which was surely the assassination of john F. Kennedy. Bibte Bike is part of the series Borealis, executed for the most part between 1989 and 1991. With this sequence the artist once again expanded both the range of his media and his technique of a multiple superimposition ofvisual levels. The slightly reflecting surface ofthe metal plates was treated with acid, and partially painted and printed over. Rauschenberg allowed the acid to flow across the surface or distributed it in a manner akin to paint on canvas. The title Borealis refers to the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, which the artist saw for the first time on a trip to Sweden. The play of light in the atmosphere rerninded him of the rainbow opalescences of his torrosion paintings. The dark-hued and yet shimmering Bible Bike, stringently composed yet overlain with violent gestural brushwork, is ambivalent in terms of style and message. Though at first glance the beauty of the colors seems to triumph over the debris of civilization pictured, a closer view reveals the corrosively destructive source of the iridescent surface effects.
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