Word: rauschenberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...course, the roots of Rauschenberg's combines are fixed in the history of collage and particularly in the work of the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. Rauschenberg remembers being "amazed" by the Schwitters collages he saw at the Museum of Modern Art, and he was particularly influenced by the way they were composed on a horizontal-vertical grid. "He wasn't using diagonals. I hate diagonals!" The effect shows in works like Rebus. 1955?a curiously fugitive image despite its size, full of airy space and images of flight: the winds from Botticelli's Birth of Venus, photographs...
...Rauschenberg stretched his bed quilt over an improvised frame, added a pillow, and covered both with streaks and drips of paint. The result, Bed, 1955, was to become one of the objets de scandale of American...
Because of the aggressive distinctness of some of the things in Rauschenberg's work, it was assumed by his best interpreters that the combines could carry no symbolic, still less narrative meaning. "There are no secret messages in Rauschenberg," wrote the late art historian Alan Solomon in 1963, "no program of social or political dissent transmitted in code...
Certainly, Rauschenberg's combines have no political content worth looking for. Virtually no "major" American art of the '50s did?the mood was one of apolitical quietism, and it was assumed that art had no chance of reforming the world. Yet a number of the combines do seem, at this distance, to be "coded." The title of Odalisk, 1955-58, directs us to a favorite image of those two sultans of French art, Ingres and Matisse?the harem nude. Rauschenberg parodies that: the box on its post alludes to a human figure; a torso, teetering on its absurd harem cushion...
...Rauschenberg's combines, like the work of his friend and mentor Marcel Duchamp, are seeded with such puns, parallels and quirks of meaning. Like Duchamp, he was given to embedding a kind of ironic lechery in his images?the supreme example being Monogram, 1959. Monogram remains the most notorious of Rauschenberg's combines: a stuffed Angora goat, girdled with a tire. The title is self-fulfilling?it is Rauschenberg's monogram, the sign by which he is best known?but why did it become so famous? Partly because of its unacknowledged life as a powerful sexual fetish. The lust...