Remembering Robert Rauschenberg (1928–2008)

Abstract

remember what we were talking about, probably not much of significance at that hour— when he announced: “You know, I had no choice.” I had no inkling what he was referring to because the comment arrived at the table wholly unconnected. I was stumped. Bob sensed my puzzlement, and after a long pause he added: “I had to be an artist.” Once I had digested this unexpected declaration, which seemed so simple yet so honest and profound, I asked him to elaborate. It wasn’t so much a calling, he mused, just how he knew that this was the way he was going to spend his life. And then I thought about it. Having organized his last retrospective (the third and largest), I know the chronology of Rauschenberg’s career well (he used to joke that I could even recall the registry numbers his studio assigned every work). Rauschenberg had never pursued any career path other than that of an artist, and yet his choices were built more on blind passion, with a dash of serendipity and naivete, than any broader understanding of what an artist’s career path should be. He had arrived at his “non-chosen” job fully formed. Becoming an artist certainly wasn’t easy, especially in the years immediately following World War II when Bob should have, like most other American males, situated himself in some suburban community poised to reap the benefits of the postwar boom years. What is especially remarkable about his sense of fate and his resultant international success is that he had arrived at his profession without much cultural exposure or artistic encouragement during his Texas upbringing. At a memorial service this past October, 1,500 friends and associates gathered in two auditoriums of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to celebrate Rauschenberg’s life. Chuck Close (just one of fifteen speakers on an impressive roster of admirers and followers ranging from Merce Cunningham to Dennis Hopper to former president Bill Clinton) asked us all to take one minute and think about all of the art made in the second half of the twentieth century. After the time elapsed, Close asserted that absolutely none of that art flashing through our mental slide projectors could have been realized without Robert Rauschenberg—an achievement that trumps even Pablo Picasso’s. According to Bob, it all came quite naturally. He accomplished his work with tremendous ease in the greatest variety of materials and mediums and with greater diversity than that of any other artist of the last sixty years. He never looked backward, yet all of his art was imbued with a distinct American vocabulary. I first met Bob (only formally called Robert, and only Milton, his birth name, by his mother, Dora) at his studio on Captiva, an island off Fort Myers, Florida, around 1990. Appreciation