Photems and 20×24 Polaroids
December 3, 1987 – January 3, 1988
Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas; d. 2008, Captiva, Florida) navigated a six-decade career with an irreverent and innovative approach to images, mediums, and disciplines. Early immersion in avant-garde experimentation at Black Mountain College, North Carolina and the crucible of late Abstract Expressionist New York prepared his controversial breakthrough at Leo Castelli gallery in 1958. Rauschenberg’s Combines (1954–64) embodied visual harmonies and cacophonies using found materials and objects, including disused household items, commercial products, construction refuse, and printed matter. Shrugging off aesthetic orthodoxies, especially the tenets of medium specificity, his wildly inventive art gained acclaim and notoriety in equal measure. The Jewish Museum in New York presented his first retrospective exhibition in 1963. Rauschenberg then received the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1964. Subsequent touring retrospectives were organized in 1976 by the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; in 1997 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and in 2016 by Tate Modern, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Photography was braided into Rauschenberg’s work and sensibility from the start. His first artworks to enter a museum collection were two photographs: Untitled (Interior of an Old Carriage) (ca. 1949) and Untitled (Cy on Bench) (ca. 1951), acquired by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in 1952. Rauschenberg sought and captured the eccentric assemblages he treasured, his so-called “random order,” through the lens and in the frame. After his camera was stolen in the mid-1960s, he resumed photography in 1979, and continued steadily at sites around the world for the next two decades. In addition to presenting the photographs themselves, Rauschenberg also treated his camerawork as an archive and palette, deploying his images via silkscreen, re-photography, and inkjet transfer.
Images are courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and copy image files of the 20×24 Polaroid prints are by James Nelson.