robert rauschenberg 1925-2008

I've been thinking a lot about Rauschenberg since I learned of his death at 82 on Tuesday.  Because of my initial distaste for modern art (especially for combines that incorporated pieces of junk and dead animals) I'm sure if I encountered any of his work early on I would have moved on past it right quick.  But my epiphany in Barbara Hepworth's sculpture garden twelve years ago opened my mind to a lot of things, and interning in SFMOMA's multimedia lab soon thereafter solidified my admiration for Rauschenberg.  I remember our director taking us up to the second floor to spend an afternoon sitting in front of Collection, ostensibly to decide how to photograph the piece for the program we were working on, but really just to have fun teasing out every clue to the artist's process we could see.  Why that particular bit of newspaper?  Why the mirror?  Why those colors and shapes?  It's not a traditionally beautiful piece, and I confess I still feel a small shock of revulsion when I see it and certain others of Rauschenberg's works, but now Collection makes me smile.  Rauschenberg has changed my brain and the way I look at art in some fundamental way, and my life is richer for it.  The Guardian's Jonathan Jones is similarly appreciative:

For me, Rauschenberg's art is about love, history, politics. From my very first visits to the Tate Gallery (as it was called in those days), one of my favourite works there has been Rauschenberg's 1962 painting Almanac, a fractured montage of silkscreened news photographs that drift spectrally through mists of white paint. Rauschenberg's silkscreen paintings convey the dissonance and conflict of 1960s America - the space race, poverty, his native South - but in an allusive and unresolved way. Its simultaneous engagement with the rich epic of America, and its inability to find sense in it, is reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon's 1960s novels, The Crying of Lot 49 and V. Rauschenberg's 60s paintings mourn JFK; a great series of prints transpose Dante's Inferno to the political struggles of the decade. When I look at Rauschenberg, I see the terrible broken epic of modern America. No question, he will be remembered as one of his country's great artists. I'm headed for Tate Modern to toast Almanac.

I missed the opportunity to meet Rauschenberg when he made an appearance at the museum in the middle of my internship, but I remember admiring the amazing signature he had inscribed in my coworker's catalog.  All the stories about him made him seem like a generous and witty spirit, and his obituary closes with a tribute to his philanthropic efforts:

As Rauschenberg found acclaim (including the grand prize at the Venice Biennale of 1964) and financial security, he never forgot the earlier struggles and in 1970 he helped to found Change, an organisation devoted to providing emergency funds for artists.

My own copy of Robert Hughes's American Visions was recently ruined in a tragic flowerpot overflow and needs to be replaced, but this quote from it about Rauschenberg sums up why I'm still feeling a little sad today:

The Time magazine art critic, Robert Hughes, called Rauschenberg "a protean genius who showed America that all of life could be open to art ... he had a bigness of soul and a richness of temperament that recalled Walt Whitman".

The Guardian has some great images here, including a few of Rauschenberg at work.  Naked model + blueprint paper + sun lamp = awesome.  Bon voyage, Mr. Rauschenberg.