Robert Rauschenberg, 1925 - 2008.

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82....

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he... 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.

Updated through 5/16.

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."

Michael Kimmelman, New York Times.

Inevitably, perhaps, Rauschenberg's probings and testings of the boundaries, to say nothing of his perennial high spirits, quick wit, and apparent self-confidence, left a number of his fellow artists feeling that he was a nice kid and all that but not, when you came down to it, a serious artist. He was not out to change the course of painting or to create a masterpiece, and he certainly was not interested in expressing the deeper emotions, his own or the age's.... It was tempting to dismiss his dirt paintings as bad jokes or pranks. What else, in God's name, could you think about his wanting to erase a de Kooning drawing? The implications were so blatantly Freudian, the act itself so obviously a symbolic (if good-natured) patricide. The interesting thing was that de Kooning agreed to it.

"Nobody believes it yet, but the whole idea just came from my wanting to know whether a drawing could be made out of erasing," Rauschenberg rather plaintively explains. "I went to Bill and told him I'd been working for several weeks trying to do that, to use the eraser as a drawing tool. I'd been trying with my own drawings, and it didn't work, because that was only fifty percent of what I wanted to get. I had to start with something that was a hundred percent art, which mine might not be; but his work was definitely art, he was the clearest figure around so far as quality and appreciation were concerned. I couldn't use the drawings I'd stolen from him, because the process required his cooperation. Bill was uncomfortable with it at first. We talked about it for quite a while - I'd gone to his studio on Tenth Street. He said he understood the idea but he didn't like it much. But finally he agreed to cooperate. He had several portfolios of his drawings, and he went to the first one and looked through it, and said, 'No, I'd miss one of these too much.' He took up another, but that one had drawings that were unfinished, that he wanted to work on some more. He went to the third portfolio, and said he was going to give me something really hard, and he did. It was a drawing done partly with a hard line, and also with grease pencil, and ink, and heavy crayon. It took me a month, about forty erasures, to do it. But in the end it really worked. I liked the result. I felt it was a legitimate work of art, created by the technique of erasing. So the problem was solved, and I didn't have to do it again."

The result is a white sheet of paper bearing the faint, ghostly shadow of its former markings, and Rauschenberg still owns it. He keeps it in a gold-leaf frame bought specially for that purpose, with a label that he hand-lettered himself. It reads:

Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, 1980.

See also: the Wikipedia entry.

Updates: Online viewing tip. Michael Sippey's found four minutes on Erased de Kooning Drawing.

The NYT now has an extensive "Times Topics" section.

"I'm no art expert, but I know what I like, and going back as far as I can remember, I've always liked Robert Rauschenberg," writes Phil Nugent, who has a story to tell about a rolled-up Rauschenberg in the back of a museum. Anyway: "William Faulkner once gave an interview to Paris Review where he recalled the writing of his first novel Mosquitoes and said something like, 'I discovered at once that writing was fun.' It was easy to imagine Rauschenberg saying something similar about the process of making art."

Robert Rauschenberg: Travelling '70 - '76 is on view at the Haus der Kunst in Munich through September 14.

Updates, 5/14: "What he passed on to everyone who came after was an idea of art as a very free-wheeling transaction with the world," writes Richard Lacayo in Time. "Marcel Duchamp may have staked out something like this position sooner, but Rauschenberg gave it a more raucous charm. That so many artists have used it since as permission to make lazy, slapdash work is beside the point. Frequently so did he. But every time you see anyone doing anything that isn't supposed to be art - and calling it art - Rauschenberg is there."

The "hasty version of art history in which Rauschenberg was no more than a 'pop art pioneer' leaves out everything that matters," argues the Guardian's Jonathan Jones:

The real story goes more like this. In America in the 1940s, for reasons ranging from the influence of European modernists living in New York during the Second World War, to ambitious gallerists and collectors, to the far more significant underlying forces of growing imperial power, the shock of the Nazi Holocaust, the spectre of the Hiroshima bomb and the awareness that Europe might be culturally exhausted, there was an artistic revolution. Jackson Pollock led a breakthrough by abstract painters into the public eye: and it was while these Abstract Expressionists were establishing themselves that Rauschenberg started making his radical art that poised itself between the poesie of Abstract Expressionist painting and the blunt materials of everyday American life.

[...]

We've lost one of the greatest artists of the modern world.

"The saddest thing to contemplate on his death - after a life well lived - is not his passing, but to note how little of his optimism, and his ability to synthesize the new into revolutionary thought, appears to remain in the generation that experienced his greatness in its heyday," blogs Joshua Mack for ArtReview. A ferocious argument follows.

"Something inherently theatrical about Robert Rauschenberg's talent - always evident in his radical feeling for color, light, composition and new ingredients and juxtapositions - prompted him to his boldest and freshest conceptions when he worked onstage," writes Alastair Macaulay in the NYT. "From the early 1950s until 2007 he designed for dance. And in the late 50s and early 60s, when he first came to fame, he was recurrently (at times constantly) occupied in dance theater."

"[W]hen I was reading JG Ballard's stories and essays in back numbers of New Worlds, Rauschenberg was one of a handful of artists who seemed to depict in visual terms what Ballard was describing in words." And John Coulthart quotes a passage from Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New.

"No great thinker, Rauschenberg had instinctively allied himself with the post-Duchamp vanguard; a slosher of paint without much regard for the colour, he came to be an artist of fine discrimination; not much of a reader, he embarked on a series of illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy (now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York), involving the silkscreened mass media images he was by now deploying in all his work combined with non-representational marks in paint or pencil." Michael McNay in the Guardian.

Update, 5/15: Picking up on Mark Feeney's obit in the Boston Globe, Joshua Glenn places Rauschenberg in the context of his (Glenn's) work-in-progress "Guide to America's Recent Generations." You have to wonder what Jonathan Jones would make of this.

Updates, 5/16: In the NYT, David Byrne recalls Rauschenberg's design for the Talking Heads's Speaking in Tongues, eventually released as "a limited, but very large, 50,000-copy edition." And he remembers, "he spoke in constant puns and metaphors, like a stream-of-consciousness poet, and one had to suspend traditional forms of speech, understanding and discourse and go with the flow. It was liberating, if you could hang in there, and never mundane. Conversation was like one of his pieces: a crazy mishmash of images, multiple layers and references, and a spray of allusions that were simultaneously silly, profound and beautiful - he was the Neal Cassady of the art world."

"New York's Rauschenbergs summarize his most influential innovations as well as his volcanic, sometimes compulsive productivity." Roberta Smith tours the city.

Posted by dwhudson at May 13, 2008 8:42 AM