Painting: Most Happy Fella

Robert Rauschenberg is utterly open-minded in defining art. He has painted completely black pictures and completely white ones. Once he tried making pictures out of dirt packed in boxes; when grass sprang up, he was delighted. Wheedling a drawing out of Willem de Kooning, the dean of abstract expressionists, he laboriously erased it, and then boldly displayed it under the label Erased De Kooning Drawing, Robert Rauschenberg 1953.

The boyish, lean Texan, now 38, is thus the most relentless experimenter in U.S. art. Experiment has led him to make much coy or trashy art, but also it has eventually led him to such original and important work as Tracer (opposite page). He won the Venice Biennale this summer, and his works are now as well known in London and Tokyo as in New York. He and his friend Jasper Johns are the leading painters of their generation.

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. “Art,” he says, in what must be one of its broadest definitions, “is what things become when you use them.” His pictures provoke the thought, as an English critic put it, that if a viewer could “switch to Rauschenberg-vision, everything in the world would become a beautiful work of art. Even himself.”

“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 it.”

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.

Juxtaposed in Tracer are Army helicopters, a Rubens nude, a bald eagle, a street scene, all balanced in colorful harmonies and anchored by skeletal perspective boxes. As pure forms in relation, they make 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 me one of his poorest students.” Albers says he wasn’t quite.

Rauschenberg’s student years sound like the mishaps of the sorcerer’s apprentice. His photography became better known than his painting. He fiddled with exposing blueprint paper, and LIFE ran a “Speaking of Pictures” page of them in 1951. He married briefly. When that broke up, he wandered to North Africa, where he made fetishlike sculptures out of sticks, stones, boxes and rope, which he took to Italy. A Florence art dealer halfheartedly exhibited them, and a Florence art critic wholeheartedly panned them, suggesting that he throw the whole bunch into the river. Not uncharacteristically, Rauschenberg went to the banks of the Arno and did.

Returning to Manhattan loft life, Rauschenberg scoured the streets and junk shops for objects to add to his paintings. Stuffed roosters, pillows, Coke bottles, clocks and a telephone book popped out in his work. He even made his bed into a painting; having run out of canvas, he decided to paint on his quilt. “I just couldn’t get the paint to overcome the geometric patterns of the quilt,” explains the artist. “I decided I’ve got to admit it’s a quilt.” One admission led to another, so he added his pillow, and then some sheets. Hence Bed (see opposite page).

Another such adventure in the gap between art and life concerns a stuffed Angora goat with a tire around its tummy. Such agglomerations of oils and objects Rauschenberg calls “combines,” for they bridge the gap without being either side.

Frottage. Recently, Rauschenberg has stopped incorporating objects into his work. He uses images of them from newspapers, color comics and magazine pictures. He squirts lighter fluid on the pictures, presses them on his drawing paper, and transfers the images by rubbing on them with an inkless ballpoint pen—a technique called frottage. For big oils such as Tracer, he uses the silk-screen stenciling process to print photographs that strike him. “I feel it’s so wasteful not to use the images you find around you,” he says. In 1960 he finished 34 delicate frottage drawings to illustrate Dante’s Inferno, and by using multiple images achieved an effect that neither Botticelli nor Blake, Dore nor Dali, would have dreamed of: he put each entire canto on a single sheet of paper.

When he takes time off from painting, Rauschenberg is usually with the avant-garde Merce Cunningham ballet company. Ballet is an art form that he likes because “my scale has always been in sympathy with theatrical values.” He designs costumes, props and sets for them, even choreographed his own ballet, called Pelican, in which he wears a parachute and roller skates.

Last week Rauschenberg was with the ballet in Stockholm, halfway through a six-month world tour. He revisited a collage combine door that he gave the Swedish Museum of Art in 1961, and was pleased to find it in good repair—down to the last bottle cap and bread crumb. When the tour is over, he should find a nearly bare studio in Manhattan, since he asked a friend to throw out all the silk screens he made before leaving. “Art shouldn’t be a pillow you can fall asleep on,” says Rauschenberg, who makes art out of pillows. From the looks of things, it is doubtful he will be caught napping.