“Committing the Perfect Crime”: Sexuality, Assemblage, and the Postmodern Turn in American Art

Abstract

Should Love Come First? among Robert Rauschenberg's earliest collages, is a Rauschenberg image like no other. First, it exists only as a single photograph, since the actual work, dating from early in 1951, was overpainted by Rauschenberg into one of his celebrated Black Paintings. By that act, we can assume Rauschenberg didn't like the picture enough to keep as it was. Second, it is unique in the artist's oeuvre because it is melodramatic, confessional, and by and large legible according to a singular thematic—the thematic that gives it its title, ripped from the pages of a magazine: “my problem, should love come first?” Many works by Rauschenberg are broadly expressive, but none would ever again so blatantly, even aggressively trumpet an autobiographical theme. Moreover, I suggest, Should Love Come First? can be understood as a textbook example of why, in time, the medium of assemblage would for Rauschenberg prove vastly preferable to simple collage.