By Charlotte Kent 

The self-seriousness of American imperialism is its tragic flaw. Some artists recognize the need for humor to dispel and taunt the high-handed efforts that sometimes come with world-building. Such aspirations are gently derided with a wit that reveals the uncertainty of such pompous narratives. Robert Rauschenberg is the master. This spring, the Rauschenberg Foundation partnered with Mnuchin Gallery and Gladstone Gallery to present two distinct but connected exhibitions that portray the lightness and irreverence that is integral to his works’ continued success.

Exceptional Works, 1971-1999 at the Mnuchin Gallery presents works from fourteen different series. It could seem disparate and cobbled together, but Rauschenberg’s consistency of approach allows a material style to permeate across the different series. His approach to media and objects showed him possibilities for what he might produce. In the entrance to the gallery, an enormous, broken-down cardboard box from Leo Castelli Gallery is wittily titled Castelli / Small Turtle Bowl (Cardboard) (1971). One can imagine him seeing the huge securing container for some small delicate object and with amusement carting off the cardboard, tagged with the word “Small” in the left-hand panel of the box, to poke fun at the preciousness of the art world and the gallerist who launched his career by including him in the seminal Abstract Expressionism show, Today’s Self-Styled School of New York (commonly known as the “Ninth Street Show”) in 1951. 

Rauschenberg’s combinatorial style is unmistakable, evident across media. Having noticed that the cloth rags used to clean the lithographs in the print shop retained the imprint of the image, he introduced them into Untitled from the “Hoarfrost” series (1974–76). The veil of cloth over paper bags then reappears in sheer form for Mirage (Jammer) (1975), lain over a stunning silk square of mustard yellow with orange stripe from India. Another segment appears in Caucus (Spread) (1980), a large plywood work with solvent transfers of men scrambling for a baseball, on horseback, in wrestling gear, alongside decorative collage papers; this work is from the “Spread” series (1975–83) that frequently included additional objects so here we have a partial ladder leaning into the work with two metal fire buckets hanging from it. There’s humor in the disparate images and our attempt to make some sense of them, and the buckets suggest a dousing if we do so with too much intensity. 

Even the syncopated grid undermines self-serious interpretation. The eye moves across Favor-Rites (Urban Bourbon) (1988): from the food cart at the bottom, up and over to a five-pointed star, then drops through a silk-screened window into an ambiguous splatter of red and white heat-pocketed, acrylic paint. The motion hints at a narrative but getting closer, viewers find themselves reflected in the mirrored and enameled aluminum base, their face next to the printed ass of a Neapolitan garden statue covered in dick graffiti. It’s a distraction from and a funny addition to the silkscreen print of a photograph of a replica of Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women (1579–83). 

In 1985, Rauschenberg launched the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI), committing his lens over the next five years to travels in Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, China, Tibet, Japan, Cuba, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Malaysia, and Germany, because as he stated at an exhibition of the works in Tibet:

I feel strong in my beliefs, based on my varied and widely traveled collaborations, that a one-to-one contact through art contains potent peaceful powers and is the most non-elitist way to share exotic and common information, seducing us into creative mutual understandings for the benefit of all.

The statement is sincere but many of the works from this period have a playful relationality that stems from what he learned in communication with the people he met. Much of the left side of My Panare Dream with Yutaje / ROCI VENEZUELA (1985) is obscured by a brownish pigment covering photographs of boys and recalling use of annatto seeds in medicinal and ritual body painting in the Amazon (most notably still among the Wari’ people). Prints of foliage and trees on the right appear in various hues, with a blob of green and white paint seemingly blooming out of the bold red silk-screened branch, undercutting the indexical representation with a stronger gesture.

There’s a temptation to assure the significance of a work by defaulting into seriousness, sifting through the semiotics to produce certainties, but Rauschenberg defies such efforts by never completely abandoning them either. As Hilton Als writes about Rauschenberg in the catalogue accompanying Venetians and Early Egyptians, 1972-1974 at Gladstone Gallery’s two locations in Chelsea: “you never leave stories with a moral behind, which makes you for better or worse a critic of the world, immersed in joy, sometimes, while keeping an eye on it.” On Captiva Island, Florida Rauschenberg returned to a kind of minimalism, though one more interested in disused objects and the deception of materials than any kind of essentialism. 

Between two wood trestles, a worn tire tread trails along the floor in Untitled (Venetian) (1973), its thickness like a brushstroke, the worn out edges as if from the feathery softness of bristles. It’s impossible to replicate and some archivist’s anxiety dream. A similar shape occurs with the pale white mosquito net hung between two chairs for Sant’Agnese (Venetian) (1973), with corked glass jugs hanging between the netting for no fathomable reason except as funny buoys or to make viewers like me nervous that something will break. Most of these works are monochromatic, creating a simple palette that allows the found or gifted objects he incorporates into these combines to emphasize form. A 16- foot-long work Untitled (Early Egyptian) (1973) with a bicycle at one end and several cardboard boxes, barely held together or dubiously stacked, suggests a temple ruin, but that grand notion dissipates as the twine and bucket and fabric introduce the elaborate architectural imagination of a character akin to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s little prince. 

The “Venetian” and “Early Egyptian” series were inspired by his travels. At the end of a corridor, Gladstone Gallery placed four tall cardboard boxes smothered in glue and encrusted with sand and shells, the detritus of his beachside landscape after so many years in New York City. They sit atop cardboard pedestals, referencing the four baboons—originally at the base of Luxor Obelisk—but positioned in the Louvre when early twentieth-century Parisians could not allow the monkeys’ significant male genitalia to grace a public monument along a very public walkway such as the Axe historique in Paris. The pink and orange backs of the four cardboard figures glow on the wall and make viewers peer behind, creating a peep show of nought. The day-glo paint covering the backs of some works reflects against the white wall, emanating a glowing hue that forcefully draws the eye. One wants to look at that side, as if the front of the painting were facing the wall and we are somehow positioned behind the frame. It’s all topsy turvy and questions the monumentality that sculpture so easily invokes.

Rauschenberg found materials and made of them art … is that not funny? How marvelously outrageous. Here’s a cardboard box. Beaten. Dilapidated. Here’s a stick. Here, some frayed fabric. From such detritus arises something gentle and beautiful. There is delight in making something from the abandoned and lost. Do we not often as artists and writers feels that way about our own lives? Rauschenberg’s is not a cruel wit, which is often what we presume when humor is mentioned. This is the laughter that bubbles up from recognition of the frailty and fallibility of being. We make monuments out of rare materials but when Rauschenberg does so from the mundane, he doesn’t elevate one material over another but shows the material basis for our intellectual constructions, as well, revealing an instability to the ideologies we adopt. That uncertainty, like shaky cardboard, means accepting the role that doubt can play in critical thinking. It’s funny that we ever thought otherwise. 

NEW YORK, NY.- Mnuchin Gallery is presenting Robert Rauschenberg: Exceptional Works, 1971-1999, the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to Robert Rauschenberg. On view from May 3-June 11, 2022, the show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a conversation on Rauschenberg between curator and critic Jeffrey Weiss and artist Kevin Beasley, with an introduction by Christopher Rauschenberg. 

Robert Rauschenberg is rightfully situated as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His use of found and experimental materials, collapsing of distinct artistic categories, and an eye towards collaboration and political activism have been inspiration for younger artists for generations. Paradoxically, the breadth of his multidimensional and perpetually ambitious oeuvre has yet to be adequately examined, and his later experiments have been given less acclaim as a result. With examples from fourteen different series, Robert Rauschenberg: Exceptional Works, 1971-1999 aims to provide a new avenue through which to appreciate this innovative artist. In juxtaposing these works, viewers can see how themes Rauschenberg first touched on in early works such as the White Paintings (1951) or the Combines (1954–64) remained anchors in his practice while evolving to meet each present moment. 

The exhibition’s earliest work is Castelli / Small Turtle Bowl (1971) from the Cardboard series (1971–72), made shortly after his consequential move to Captiva, off the coast of Florida. Here, the choice of found cardboard illustrates many things at once: a continued preference towards readymade, readily available materials, and a fascination with the history of each chosen object; a reflection on consumerism and globalization; and Rauschenberg’s personal experience of moving and traveling. These themes continue and morph in the Hoarfrost (1974–76) and Jammer (1975–76) series, both of which are represented in the exhibition. Each take hung and draped fabric as their starting point, but to different ends. The Hoarfrosts, such as Untitled (Hoarfrost) (1974), revisit the solvent transfer technique Rauschenberg first developed while traveling with Cy Twombly in the early 1950s, imparting faint and haunting imagery onto the fabric. Meanwhile, the series title is pulled from Dante’s Inferno, a nod to his earlier body of Dante Drawings (1958–60) also made with the solvent transfer process. As the Hoarfrosts evolved into the Jammers—whose name is taken from the term “windjammers,” again inspired by his move to Captiva—Rauschenberg radically removed nearly all imagery to allow the fabric to take center stage. Inspired by a visit to India in 1975, the Jammers make plain Rauschenberg’s turn towards a global outlook that would culminate in the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) project (1984–91)—represented in this exhibition by My Panare Dream With Yutaje / ROCI VENEZUELA (1985).

By Deborah Solomon

Which one is better for making art: living in the city among gifted friends or isolating on an inconveniently located island? Robert Rauschenberg famously tried both. In 1970, at age 45 and acclaimed for his alchemical ability to turn detritus into art, he felt tired of living in Manhattan. He purchased property in Captiva, off the sandy west coast of Florida, and embarked upon the second half of his enormously inventive and influential career.

Rauschenberg’s later paintings and sculptures have never had the visibility of his earlier work, which is perhaps inevitable in a culture that romanticizes youthful creativity. But the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which acquired much of the artist’s work upon his death in 2008, at 82, is inviting us to take a closer look and collaborating on several concurrent exhibitions at major galleries here and in Europe.

The main event is at the Gladstone Gallery, which is offering a revelatory look at works from the artist’s Venetian and Early Egyptian series (1972-74), with an emphasis on a group of sculptures fashioned from the unlikely material of cardboard shipping boxes. A second show at the Mnuchin Gallery, by contrast, offers a broad survey of three decades of work (1971 to 1999) and bears the vague, self-promotional title, “Exceptional Works.”

The show at Gladstone, which is spread between two locations in Chelsea, brings together 16 sculptures (and one work on paper) that continue the artist’s trademark penchant for recycling. To walk in is to be astounded that so much commanding sculptural form, so many columns and pyramids, can rise up from such flimsy materials. Here is a world constructed from rags and shredded rubber tires and especially brown cardboard boxes, some of them coated with sand as if to simulate stone building blocks, others flattened into irregular polygons and left in their naturally wavering corrugated state.

In truth, they bring us a new Rauschenberg, allowing us to see how an artist who began his career as a Texas-born heir to European Dada and Kurt Schwitters’s scrap-paper collages evolved, in the early ’70s, into an inspired post-Minimalist sculptor. He dispensed with collage, and other imagistic content to make airy assemblages that ingeniously challenge the cold steel surfaces and macho posturing that had overtaken American sculpture.

So in place of Donald Judd’s famous metal boxes, Rauschenberg embraced a witty and ephemeral alternative — namely, the cardboard box. In lieu of the massive tonnage of Richard Serra’s stacked blocks or plates of steel, Rauschenberg arranged his boxes into vertical or horizontal configurations that are almost weightless and whose installation does not require the virile drama of flatbed trucks and riggers and cranes.

The Gladstone exhibition opens with the artist’s Venetian series, which he named for a city he loved. In the summer of 1964, he became the first American artist to win the top prize at the Venice Biennale. In those days, the jury’s deliberations were seen by the art world as roughly tantamount to a papal conclave and led to assertions about New York’s pre-eminence as an art capital.

The city of Venice evoked in the sculptures (which were actually created back home in the studio in Captiva), is the Venice of canals, a metropolis of stone and water and boats gliding by. Rauschenberg always had a boyish fascination with transportation. References to cars, planes and bicycles run through his work, and his definition of artmaking had less to do with secluding oneself in a studio and plumbing one’s innermost emotions than in venturing into the object-strewn world, an inspired wanderer.

He relished physical movement, whether that meant foreign travel or 15 footsteps across a dance stage. For years he designed sets and costumes for the leading lights of avant-garde dance, including Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown, and relished artistic collaborations. “The best way to know people is to work with them,” he once said.

One striking sculpture at Gladstone, “Untitled (Venetian),” 1973, wrests a sense of nautical adventure from materials that might wash up on a beach. An 11-foot-long piece of driftwood, with four ragged cardboard boxes skewered onto one end, leans against a wall, where it meets a curtain of ivory-colored lace that tumbles down and forms a right angle with the floor. At first the piece looks a little haphazard. But when you stand back, it suggests a makeshift boat, a triangle silhouetted like a tall sail against the open air.

Some of the works here have the traditional vertical oomph of sculpture, but others are amusing ground huggers. Surely no sculpture defines the word baggy more than “Untitled (Early Egyptian),” 1974, in which a row of 11 brown paper bags stand up on the floor with their sides touching, like so many repeating rectangular blocks. But Rauschenberg inverts Judd’s cubic geometry into a kind of domestic comedy. A long strip of gauzy fabric weaves over and around the bags, sometimes veiling their openings and variously conjuring rococo frills, the female anatomy, and a sneaking suspicion that supermarkets-are-us.

As a prismatic bonus, the backs of several sculptures have been painted in solid neon-bright colors. When you peek behind them, you see glowy rectangles of orange or red reflected on the wall, mini-Dan Flavins minus the electric cords.

The best works in the show can put you in mind of Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse and other leading American sculptors who sought to rescue contemporary art from the ice storm of Minimalism. Oddly, the critic Hilton Als, writing in the catalog accompanying the show, elects to place Rauschenberg in a different lineage, claiming that his later sculptures came out of Arte Povera, or “poor art,” that scrappy “ism” that flourished in Italy in the late 1960s and attached a special significance to materials of no significance — paper, burlap sacks, and so on.

Yet Rauschenberg surely shaped Arte Povera more than it shaped him. In the 1950s, long before the critic Germano Celant coined the term Arte Povera, Rauschenberg was finding his poetry in the forlorn and discarded, repurposing yesterday’s newspapers and bedsheets and tin cans into something all-new. His outlandish caprine sculpture, “Monogram” (1955-9), which lives at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, is dominated by an actual stuffed goat that is sometimes described as the artist’s alter-ego, and it is hardly irrelevant that goats are known as extra-curious mammals with a nose for scrap heaps.

The second show, at the Mnuchin Gallery, is a staid and more predictable affair, emphasizing paintings over sculptures and Rauschenberg’s return to collaged imagery. Most of the later paintings come out of his pioneering silk-screen paintings from the early 1960s, with their disjunctive patchwork of magazine cutouts and his own photographs. Some of the paintings, especially those on aluminum, do not advance his innovations so much as memorialize them with a solemnity that can feel slightly empty.

Still, Rauschenberg never lost his hankering for improvisation and no artist was ever better at banging mismatched objects into compelling configurations. The sculptures at Mnuchin have more energy than the paintings, and one defining piece, “The Ancient Incident (Kabal American Zephyr)” (1981), mesmerizes with its symmetry and strangeness. Shaped roughly like a pyramid with stepped sides, it stands about 7 feet high and in place of the usual costly sculptural materials (bronze, marble) makes do with assorted pieces of worn-out furniture. Two rough-hewed stepladders are positioned back to back a few feet apart, creating a door-shaped space between them, while overhead, a pair of curved-arm Windsor chairs appear almost magically levitated.

The motif of two chairs recurs in Rauschenberg work, though its meaning changes depending on the context. In this case, the chairs are notably unusable. They’re too high up and precariously balanced for anyone to sit on, and they face each other without leaving an inch of room for a person’s legs. But who would want to lounge in a chair anyway if instead you could walk in the charged space beneath it? Throughout his life, Rauschenberg, a self-diagnosed dyslexic, was too restless and to sit down. He preferred to keep moving. “The Ancient Incident” is, in effect, a humble, do-it-yourself version of an old temple gate, capturing Rauschenberg’s dream of crossing thresholds, not knowing what lies on the other side.

Robert Rauschenberg: Venetians and Early Egyptians, 1972-1974

Through June 18, Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street and 530 West 21st Street, Chelsea; (212) 206-9300; gladstonegallery.com.

Robert Rauschenberg: Exceptional Works, 1971-1999

Through June 11, Mnuchin Gallery, 45 East 78th Street, Manhattan; (212) 861-0020; mnuchingallery.com.

By: Linda Yablonsky

Robert Rauschenberg counts among the few artists who truly were legends in their own time. Yet history has been kinder to him than the secondary market. If collectors are willing to pay a premium for his silkscreen and combine paintings, they attach greater value to the work of his peers Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly.

That is partly why Rauschenberg’s namesake foundation has released a number of unknown or under-exposed works for sale through a trio of high-level galleries: Gladstone and Mnuchin in New York, and Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg. Each is presenting a different body of work in a separate environment, producing a separate exhibition catalogue to go with it.

While such collaborations between competitors are not unheard of—in 2020, Pace, Gagosian and Acquavella jointly represented the Donald B. Marron Family Collection in a private sale—they are rare, especially when the involve exhibitions. The question is: can this three-pronged strategy effect real change in the perception of an artist best known for his paintings, but whose restless experimentalism and fondness for scavenging junkyards took him well beyond painting. His appropriations of existing materials and collaborations with scientists and choreographers led to work in collage, performance, film, sound, set and costume design, and kinetic sculpture?

According to Allan Schwartzman, the adviser and private curator who masterminded the rollout, “Sometimes it takes a while for the art market to catch up with history.” Arguably, it’s Rauschenberg more than anyone who continues to influence succeeding generations of artists, some of whom get more attention in the market than their inspiration.

“I can’t think of an artist more prescient than Bob,” says Kathy Halbreich, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s director. As an example, she cites the current interest in appropriation, textiles, clay, performance, film, technology and the environment among artists of varying ages and sensibilities who pay a debt to Rauschenberg every time they go into their studios.

Dozens who flocked to Gladstone’s two spaces in Chelsea for last month’s opening of Robert Rauschenberg: Venetians and Early Egyptians, 1972-1974 were visibly moved by what they saw: seemingly fragile yet revelatory sculptures of rope, cardboard and timber, each containing a multitude of ideas. Most of these works had hardly been seen in public since their making, if at all. It didn’t seem possible that, at this late date, so much that was historic had gone unnoticed. “I spent a lot of time with these works in the warehouse,” Schwartzman says, “but seeing them in the gallery was a whole other experience.”

That sense of wonderment infused the atmosphere at the dinner that followed, where the reigning spirit of Rauschenberg’s inventiveness and openness to others had many beneficiaries around the room. Perhaps most striking was the absence of collectors among the 85 artists, curators and writers; not that they don’t deserve a place at the table, but the flow of conversation was notably relaxed, possibly because it grew from common ground.

Indeed, one could draw a direct line from Rauschenberg to such disparate talents in attendance as Rachel Harrison, Matthew Barney, Gedi Sibony, Richard Aldrich, Ugo Rondinone, Paul Chan and Precious Okoyomon, who was accompanied by her lap dog, Gravity. Also seated at the dinner was Rauschenberg’s son and only child Christopher, a photographer, whose mother is the printmaker and painter Susan Weil.

According to Halbreich, “artists don’t always like talking about what came before them, but that night they all did. LaToya Ruby Frazier came from Chicago just to see this work, which came out of a life, not a production”.

I was seated beside Eric N. Mack, a young textile artist who claims Rauschenberg as a spiritual mentor, especially after Mack was given the artist’s studio during his foundation residency in Captiva, Florida. “I did the best work of my life there,” he told me. Indeed, he recently signed with a prominent gallery in Chelsea.

Speaking to the commercial prospects of the Rauschenbergs currently on show—large wall-bound works at Mnuchin, the post-minimalist sculptures at Gladstone, and little-known appropriations on clay at Ropac made in over a decade’s worth of trips to Japan—Schwartzman admits: “It’s hard for a market to grab hold of an artist whose work doesn’t register as iconic. In Rauschenberg’s case, it’s the combines, but the diversity and nimbleness of his creativity is vast, and these exhibitions open the door to him in a fresh, clear, contemporary way that the market can connect to.”

Halbreich adds: “I believe in artists, and if artists are interested in another artist, people pay attention.”

• Robert Rauschenberg: Venetians and Early Egyptians,1972-1974, Gladstone Gallery, New York, until 18 June; Robert Rauschenberg: Exceptional Works, 1971-1999, Mnuchin Gallery, New York, until 11 June; Robert Rauschenberg: Japanese Clayworks, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, until 9 July

By: Nate Freeman

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation decamped from Gagosian seven years ago for a trio of galleries around the world: Pace, Thaddaeus Ropac, and Luisa Strina, the oldest contemporary art gallery in Brazil. Now the foundation’s shaking things up once again, opting to stage several big Rauschenberg shows at both Chelsea locations of Gladstone Gallery, the Upper East Side townhouse that’s home to Robert Mnuchin’s Mnuchin Gallery, and Ropac’s gallery in Salzburg.

By: Eileen Kinsella

Despite Robert Rauschenberg’s status as a towering figure in postwar American art, there is an undeniable gap between him and his peers. In both the public imagination and the marketplace, he has been overshadowed by figures like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns.  

Now, the Rauschenberg Foundation, which the artist established before his death in 2008, is hoping to ignite the enthusiasm of art lovers and buyers alike. This spring, the foundation is collaborating with three galleries—Gladstone and Mnuchin in New York and Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg—for focused shows that will “make visible the stylistic diversity and conceptual continuity of this radically inventive artist,” the foundation said in a statement.

By: Melanie Gerlis

Three major galleries are joining forces for a transatlantic showing of lesser-known late works by American heavyweight Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008). Thaddaeus Ropac, a longtime gallery partner of the artist’s foundation, will open a show in Salzburg (April 8-July 9) followed by New York’s Gladstone Gallery and Mnuchin Gallery at the beginning of May.

Each show will be of different bodies of work from the foundation, all of which have had limited exposure. Ropac has two related series of Clayworks, made on and from ceramic in the 1980s. Rauschenberg created these in Japan, which he first visited on tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1964. Gladstone Gallery has two bodies of sculptural works — The Venetians (1972-73) and Early Egyptians (1973-74) — while Mnuchin will show key works from 14 of Rauschenberg’s series made between 1971 and 1999.

Most works are for sale, confirms the foundation’s adviser, Allan Schwartzman, who says Rauschenberg is about much more than the Combines and silkscreen paintings for which he is best known. “He was extraordinarily inventive throughout his life, unbound by any style, medium, imagery or treatment of surfaces,” Schwartzman says. He believes Rauschenberg is “the most undervalued artist of the postwar period”.

Last year’s Macklowe auction makes the point: Rauschenberg’s “Crocus” silkscreen (1962) may have sold for an above-estimate $11mn, but this was considerably below prices made for artists such as Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.