A genre breaker

Robert Rauschenberg firmly believed that painting related both to art and life, and neither could be made, recounts GIRIDHAR KHASNIS

“A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist sticks to one medium or style,” wrote art critic and columnist Michael Kimmelman (The New York Times/ May 14, 2008) in the immediate aftermath of the American artist’s death due to heart attack at the age of 82. “He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked. His work gave new meaning to sculpture.”

In a career spanning more than five decades, Robert Rauschenberg rose to the top by making art in his own way and on his own terms. He was fiercely adventurous and never worried about failures. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

Known to be ‘a brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner’, Rauschenberg was the proud owner of a studio that clearly resembled a heap of junk. Filled with an unenviable assortment of soda bottles, cola cans, clocks, radios, newspaper clippings, fragments of clothing, furniture and even taxidermy-preserved animals, it was a place where things got miraculously integrated into artworks which he called ‘Combines’ or ‘collaboration of materials’.

Creation of Combines

It is a part of artistic folklore that Rauschenberg began work on his iconic Combines in the early 1950s by walking around the streets, picking commonplace objects from garbage cans and attaching them to his paintings. “An artist manufactures his material out of his own existence — his own ignorance, familiarity or confidence. I come to terms with my materials. They know and I know that we’re going to try to do something. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The nature of some of my materials gave me an additional problem because I had to figure out how they could be physically supported on a wall when they obviously had no business being anywhere near a wall. That was the beginning of the Combines.”
Among his memorable works that became icons of post-war modernism were Bed (1955), made of a real bed, quilt, sheet and pillow, partially slathered with paint, toothpaste, nail polish and pencil; Canyon (1959), in which the focus was on a stuffed bald eagle with wide-spread wings attached to a large canvas, which had among other things oil, metal photograph, fabric, wood on canvas, button, cardboard box, pillow, and paint tube; and Monogram (1955-59), which featured a stuffed Angora goat, whose face was covered with multi-coloured paint and whose body was girdled by an automobile tyre.

“Whenever he uses objects in a Combine, Rauschenberg always respects their integrity, never allowing them to serve merely symbolic ends,” observed Calvin Tomkins, art critic of The New Yorker. “The objects and fragments come through relatively intact, with strong overtones of their life in the real world, before they embarked upon their present life in art. And in his best works, they seem to belong, to be miraculously right, in the context of the painting.”

Rauschenberg made something remarkable out of the banal, wrote Dr Gerry Coulter, founding editor of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. “Beauty was never his concern — to make something interesting was far more important to him. In this he participates in a core development in twentieth-century art — the movement away from beauty.”

Milton to Robert

Rauschenberg led an extraordinary life. Born Milton Rauschenberg, he changed his first name in the middle of a night in 1947, at a bus station in Kansas City. As a young man he went to college to become a veterinarian. Drafted in the Navy during World War II as a male psychiatric nurse, he became interested in art after a chance visit to a gallery and dabbled with drawing and painting. After his discharge from the Navy in 1945 and a stint in Paris in 1948, he became serious about art.

The turning point came when he enrolled into Black Mountain College and came under the tutelage of German-born American artist and educator Josef Albers (1888 - 1976) who was, according to Rauschenberg, “a beautiful teacher and an impossible person.”

Rauschenberg’s early works received poor response. His Combines were dismissed as bad jokes and mocked upon; some critics even suggested that they be tossed into the river. It did not, however, take long for the New York art world to warm up to his works. By the early 1960s, his reputation was well established. In 1964, he became the US representative at the Venice Biennale, where he walked off with the international grand prize, the first modern American to win it. The prize did provoke a heated discussion amongst the members of the international jury. The French accused the Biennale of introducing American ‘cultural colonisation’, while the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano condemned the event as ‘the total and general defeat of culture’.

Rauschenberg’s reputation grew year after year. He was prolific, made thousands of art works and lost count of the number. When a stroke in 2002 left his right side paralysed, he learned to work more with his left hand and was helped by a troupe of assistants. Over time, critics and historians came to recognise that he was indeed a foundational figure in American art; that he helped spark the Pop Art movement; and that he stayed in the forefront of the art scene from the 1950s till the turn of the century. He is also routinely hailed as a genre breaker and category crosser.

For Rauschenberg, there was nothing as a poor subject. He felt sorry for people who thought things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles were ugly, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long.” He said that a pair of socks was no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric. “Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, colour etc, it appears as fact or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or an arrangement. Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two.”

When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research and other artists. He was once asked whether he was afraid of death. “There are moments in the day when I find it terrifying,” he replied. “I don’t ever want to go. I don’t have a sense of great reality about the next world. My feet are too ugly to wear those golden slippers. I’m working on my fear of it. And my fear is that after I’m gone, something interesting is going to happen, and I’m going to miss it.”