Rebel’s Reward

Let it be said on Rauschenberg’s behalf that he does not seem to have sought out these awards or even to have valued them unduly, and if he continued to accept them long after he ceased to need the money or acclaim, that was largely because he was an affable extrovert who didn’t like to say no to anyone. But there is a paradox at the heart of his career, and it is implicit in every work on view in his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (a show that began at the Tate Modern and moves hereafter to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was, if nothing else, the most sincerely radical figure in the history of American art. Inspired in equal measure by Dada and the hyperformalism of the New York School, he seemed game for anything in his quest to expand the accepted boundaries of visual culture. In the 1950s his embrace of chance and spontaneity led him to drive a car over some sheets of typewriter paper and declare that the residual tire tread was a painting. On another occasion, with the consent of Willem de Kooning, he took one of the older painter’s drawings and erased it and then claimed the erasure as a new work of art. A decade later he was pioneering performance art by racing around a stage in roller skates and a spacesuit, with a parachute flapping at his back.

Traditionally, such a person might plausibly end up selling aluminum siding. And yet, after a few lean years at the very beginning of a career that spanned six decades, the honors started to pour in. They never stopped. By the time he hit 50, Rauschenberg was smiling, under a banner reading “The Joy of Art,” on the cover of Time, that pillar of American mid-cult.

How can it be that an artist as disruptive as Rauschenberg should be so promptly embraced—and not only by the artistic mainstream, but also by the general run of American museumgoers? That is a mystery the MoMA exhibition does not even acknowledge, let alone dispel.

Part of Rauschenberg’s success had to do with his persona. Unlike such fellow vanguardists as Jasper Johns, who preferred to let his severe, repressed canvases speak for themselves, and the extraterrestrial Andy Warhol, whose very insubstantiality was his shtick, Rauschenberg united the prestige of the avant-garde with an all-American folksiness that reached beyond the borders of the art world. A native of Port Arthur, Texas, who never lost his southern twang (as Johns did), Rauschenberg could be seen as a Whitmanesque character, a bohemian and probably a lefty, but at least an all-American lefty. For all his forays into Buddhism and all his visits to China and Italy and Morocco, he was committed, as few artists before or after him, to recording the American scene. In the silkscreen paintings that are probably his best-known works, he sought to capture and record the hyperkinetic visual bombardment of modern American life, juxtaposing images of a bald eagle and a lunar module, army helicopters and JFK poking the air, in a matrix of tasteful abstract-expressionist gestures and smudges.

Few figures in postwar art have left behind a legacy as abundant, as varied, or as perplexing as Rauschenberg’s. If, on a scale of spiritual and visual consequence, the two antipodes of postwar American art are Warhol and Rothko, then Rauschenberg stands somewhere in the middle: If he never sought the luminous beauty of Rothko, with his spiritual longings, neither was he a lightweight like Warhol. You don’t need to be one of his most fervent admirers to suspect that there is something to his art and that it is important.

Yet even if you are a fervent admirer, it is difficult to overlook, amid all his spasmodic hyperactivity, a hit-or-miss quality. Despite an intermittent and fortuitous harvest of pleasant visual effects, Rauschenberg’s work ultimately fails to satisfy.

Some of his achievements are—to this critic, at any rate—undeniably fine. Perhaps his best single painting is Yoicks! from 1954, a work that recalls, and may have influenced, Johns’s American flag paintings, begun in the same year. It is very much a work in the manner of the New York School, the school of Pollock, Motherwell, and de Kooning, in the cadent intervals of orange and ochre stripes, and in its painterliness, the textured richness of its painted surface. And yet its restraining of gesture presages a future rebellion against that school, an allusive quest for something beyond the act of painting itself that, in the context of that time, hinted at dangerous heresies.

This early painting could stand as the gateway to Rauschenberg’s entire career. Artistically, he embodied something of a divided self, appealing simultaneously to two mutually exclusive factions of the art world. Emerging as he did out of the New York School, he could produce lovely square feet of painterliness, such as you find in Curfew and Summerstorm, from 1958 and 1959 respectively. At the same time, in some of his silkscreen paintings, and especially in the three-dimensional works, his clamorous need to communicate some message, however inarticulately, or his Dadaist leap into absurdity itself represented a brutal and total rejection of form.

But the MoMA exhibition was not mounted to question or examine Rauschenberg’s achievement so much as to celebrate it. And although the MoMA exhibition does contain a substantial body of work, the viewer must be constantly on guard to determine to what extent that substantiality is real and to what extent it is a function of familiarity. Put another way, we must ask ourselves whether we are merely responding to the fact that these works, icons of recent art history, look famous and expensive. Having passed repeatedly through the rooms of this exhibition, I find that although Rauschenberg did indeed achieve beauty, it was too intermittent to support the reputation he enjoys, and that such beauty as he achieved, in comparison with that of Pollock and Rothko, was not, in the end, beautiful enough.

James Gardner’s latest book is Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City.