8/6/2023 0 Comments Eloquent evenings ryan![]() ![]() The head of the art program was the German Bauhaus émigré Josef Albers, whose rigorous lessons in the aesthetic effects of combined materials and juxtaposed colors were imprinted on Rauschenberg, though to ends hardly orthodox. In 1948, he and Weil entered the creative crucible of Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina-just missing the presence there of Willem de Kooning, Cage, the dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller, who had erected a geodesic dome on the campus. Bill staked him to art studies in Kansas City and in Paris, where he met the painter Susan Weil. In 1944, he became a neuropsychiatric technician in the Naval Hospital Corps, in San Diego. He was seventeen when he enrolled at the University of Texas to study pharmacology. ![]() He was a dyslexic son of evangelical parents in Port Arthur, Texas (a place whose other escapees include Janis Joplin). But the example of his nimble intelligence and zestful audacity affected the sense of vocation-thoughts and motives, doubts and dreams-of subsequent generations, to this day. For a great artist, he made remarkably little good art. Rauschenberg’s work, in mediums that range from painting and photography to a big vat of bubbling gray mud (“Mud Muse,” 1968-71), is uneven, and it lost pertinence and drama in his later decades. They complicate what art has been, is, and can be, for people who are inclined to ponder those matters-in this case, most of the innovative artists of the past sixty years. Eschewing taste, they are neither good nor bad, as art. Once done, things like that needn’t-mustn’t, really-ever be done again, but they register. Of course, anything may feel inevitable after it has happened, but some things feel more consequentially so than others.Įarly in his career, Rauschenberg specialized in talismans of destiny, such as, in 1951, a series of uninflected all-white paintings that inspired the composer John Cage, a friend, to create “4'33" ”: a pianist not playing a piano for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds. While creating the universe, did God have in mind that, at a certain point, a stuffed goat with a car tire around its middle would materialize to round out the scheme? It came to pass, in New York, with “Monogram” (1955-59)-goat, tire, and also paint, paper, fabric, printed matter, metal, wood, shoe heel, and tennis ball-which is now on view at the Museum of Modern Art, in “Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends,” an immense retrospective of the protean artist, who died in 2008, at the age of eighty-two.
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