Word: rauschenbergs
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...collective memory of the New York art world, the decade 1955-64 has an almost magical air: a bath of transformations. Rauschenberg entered it as a frog and emerged a certified prince holding the first prize of the 1964 Venice Biennale. By 1955 the achievement of the abstract expressionists?Pollock, Gorky, de Kooning, Still, Rothko, Kline, Motherwell?was recognized across the Atlantic, and the aesthetic colonization of Europe by New York art began in earnest. In this momentous shift of taste, energy and locus, a younger generation of American artists would be the legatees. Its symbolic twins, its Castor...
They met around the end of 1954. Both felt like hicks. Johns came from South Carolina and was painfully shy; Rauschenberg, especially when flown with bourbon, was wont to describe himself as "white Taixas trash." By this time, Rauschenberg's marriage had mutated into friendship, and there had been a divorce in 1953. In 1955 Rauschenberg moved into a loft in the building in lower Manhattan where Johns had his studio. They supported themselves by doing window displays for Tiffany and Bonwit Teller...
...Marey. The image stutters backward through technological time. But then it also looks like the grief-stricken Adam and Eve in Masaccio's Expulsion from Eden, and that turns the enormous grainy effigy of John Kennedy (then dead), with its repeated pointing hand, into a type of vengeful deity. Rauschenberg has had great moments of social irony. "The day will come," Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his journal in 1861, "when all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written in the popular press; and images of this god will...
...Rauschenberg was riding in one of these gondolas, through the mighty hoo-ha raised by his winning the first prize at the Venice Biennale. Few now doubted that art's center had migrated to New York, and this ignited an orgy of chauvinism on both sides of the Atlantic. Some forms of success, Degas once said, are indistinguishable from panic. This was one. Rauschenberg was now a celebrity, almost the Most Famous Artist in the World. His critics were quick to blame him for every crassness that attended the promotion...
...somnambulists mysteriously avoid bumping into the coffee table, Rauschenberg dealt with fame. His instinctive response to being promoted as a culture hero was to stop making one-man art. He went back into the group, and through the rest of the '60s he worked on all manner of collaborative projects: multimedia events, dance, liaisons between art and science. Of course, the group had expanded greatly by now. It contained artists who wanted to work collectively, but there were also dozens of people who simply wanted a piece of Rauschenberg, from saber-toothed politicians' wives and Park Avenue art groupies...