PAST PERFECT TENSE
Sculpture provides most of the crowd-pleasing spectacle at MoMA’s group exhibit Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends. There’s a stately standing screen that once served as the backdrop for a Merce Cunningham dance. There’s a framed set of (real) bed linens with a (real) pillow. And there’s a stuffed goat, smeared with paint, with a car tire hung around its belly. These pieces are all sly, sophisticated fun.
But Rauschenberg’s most affecting works are his paintings, particularly those he completed in the late 1950′s, called Combines, that incorporate things: calendars, signs, textiles, feathers, and, most famously, cuttings from magazines and newspapers. These canvases have a quiet, luminous charisma. Though layered with found images and paint marks, they remain spare, uncluttered, with broad areas of primed canvas showing through. Though they have assertive, expressive brushwork across the top, they maintain a cool temperature. They are composed judiciously, with just enough elements to weigh themselves down. Many don’t have a visual center of gravity, organized instead by stringing elements, floating, along a high horizon or a vertical spine. Although collaged, they present a continuous seamless finish. Their materiality, their thingness, is subsumed in their pristine organization.
These paintings are, like all good paintings, about the surface. And they are also, more deeply, about time. There is a haunting elegaic tone to them. Despite their avant garde form-making and media-mixing, they are, in their composition and coloring, respectfully silent. Their blank backgrounds and newspaper cuttings have yellowed over the decades, giving each work great grace. These paintings, from the most robust, revolutionary era of American art, now seem ancient, nostalgic, recalling a pre-machine, premodern age. More than any other modern art they are testimony to craft, to the cooperation of the hand and the eye.
Robert Rauschenberg, Factum II, 1957, Mixed media, The Museum of Modern Art. Photo courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.