Word: rauschenbergs
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Truth in Garbage. Rauschenberg has been called a neo-Dadaist, a belated abstract expressionist, a junk assemblagist, a pop artist, a hyper-cubist, even an anti-artist and, of course, a nut. "Great!" he says. "I like that. I'm only concerned when the critics stop changing their minds and get a fix on me." Getting a fix is hard because change is the essence of his experimentation. Yet at the heart of Rauschenberg's work is a clear conviction that a heightened order of truth can be found in everything and anywhere, even in the garbage dump...
...Painting relates to both art and life," Rauschenberg once said. "I try to act in the gap between the two." For him, painting must neither seek the illusion of being something nor become the projection of the self onto the canvas, as it was for Abstract Expressionists Pollock and Kline. Nor is painting social protest to a man of always sunny disposition: "I like society and don't want to leave...
Helicopters & Rubens. It is this attitude that made Rauschenberg a primordial pop artist, and now allows him to transcend pop's implicit danger of banality. He has reopened the question of whether or not artists-after 50 years of peering into the unconscious mind-can again approach the everyday world of facts, events, objects and images, rip them from their common contexts and give the familiar an unfamiliar beauty...
...amusing pictorial sense-the ethereal blue nude seated on a parti-colored pedestal. There is no hidden allegory-no esoteric relationship between the birds and the helicopters. No set of footnotes is needed to explain the picture. Still, the images come from the real world and therefore evoke, as Rauschenberg's dealer, Leo Castelli, puts it, "something deeper, more visceral than pure optics...
Sorcerer's Apprentice. Born in Port Arthur, Texas, of German and Cherokee Indian parentage, Rauschenberg served as a naval corpsman until the end of World War II. A talent for sketching led him to the Kansas City Art Institute, then on to Paris. In 1948 he read in TIME that the greatest art disciplinarian in the U.S. was Josef Albers, and returned to study with him at North Carolina's Black Mountain College. "I consider Albers the most important teacher I've ever had," says Rauschenberg, "and I'm sure he considers...