The Most Living Artist

In art, as in most other matters, the '70s have not yet been named. Historians looking back on American art in the '60s see movements and orthodoxies--Pop art, minimal art, conceptual art, Op art, color-field painting, doctrines about flatness and framing edge, proscriptions, mandates. The categories rattle briskly like punch cards in their slots. Art in the '70s is more polymorphous, less ambitious, harder to sort out. The present creed proclaims belief in the Either, the Or and the Holy Both.

During the 1960s, formalism conferred an almost messianic exclusiveness on taste. If one was "for" one kind of art, one was expected to be "against" others. Besides, a new class of collectors, anxious to commit their money only to sure bets--to what would be Historically Inevitable, to the mainstream of culture--wanted authorities. Not today. The American mainstream has fanned out into a delta, in which the traditional idea of an avant-garde has drowned. Thus, in defiance of the dogma that realist painting was killed by abstract art and photography, realism has come back in as many forms as there are painters.

From the cool, detailed gaze of photorealism on its plastic environment to romantic landscapists in Maine to the obsessive stare of the California painter who took seven years to finish a small picture of a few inches of sand, grain by grain, the variety is infinite. Photography has acquired a status unimaginable a decade ago. Meanwhile, abstract painters, released from the severity of their mission, are no longer embarrassed by pattern and decoration. As the desire to paint one's way into history recedes, a new subjectivity has replaced it, a free permit to import life whole into art through video, performance and participation. A broad and knowing eclecticism prevails.

Inside it, a symbolically charged event is the retrospective of some 160 works by Robert Rauschenberg, which opened last month at the National Collection of Fine Arts at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. (and will travel throughout 1977 to New York's Museum of Modern Art and to museums in San Francisco, Buffalo and Chicago). With his anarchic sweetness and prodigal talent, Rauschenberg, now 51, has for the best part of 25 years been the enfant terrible of American modernism: a permanent scalawag, handing out indulgences to all comers. He is a model of the joy of art.

Rauschenberg is best known for having opened up the tracts of imagery that were occupied in the '60s by Pop art. But as one goes through the show, skillfully boiled down by the Smithsonian's curator of 20th century painting, Walter Hopps, from Rauschenberg's enormous and dispersed output of combines, paintings, silk screens, sculptures and prints, it becomes plain that there has not been much antiformalist American art that Rauschenberg's prancing, careless and fecund talent did not either hint at or directly provoke. It is to him that is owed much of the basic cultural assumption that a work of art can exist for any length of time, in any material (from a stuffed goat to a live human body), anywhere (on a stage, in front of a television camera, underwater, on the surface of the moon or in a sealed envelope), for any purpose (turn-on, contemplation, amusement, invocation, threat), and any destination it chooses, from the museum to the trash can. "A protean genius," Art Historian Robert Rosenblum calls him. "Every artist after 1960 who challenged the restrictions of painting and sculpture and believed that all of life was open to art is indebted to Rauschenberg -- forever."

There are, of course, dissenting views. In the '60s, Rauschenberg was loathed in formalist quarters and suspected in others. His taste was always facile and omnivorous, a fact somewhat masked by Hopps' careful choice of works in the show. But mainly, it was the man's variety and good humor that jarred. He did not give a fig for the lines of high seriousness imposed by the hardcore New York art world. His reputation would look after itself; he would not tend it. Besides, Rauschenberg was a natural dissipater. The sight of him in his porcupine-quill leather jacket, erect but slightly, marinated with Jack Daniel's, cackling like a Texan loon and trying to get his arm around everyone at once, was too familiar.

Thus Rauschenberg did not always get the credit he deserved--not even for his altruism, which was without recent parallel in New York art circles. It was Rauschenberg who threw his reputation, and much of his time, behind the Artists' Rights movement and its steadily strengthening lobby for artists' royalties on the resale of paintings. It was Rauschenberg who, knowing the ponderousness with which foundations disgorge grants, set up and largely endowed Change, Inc.--a fund from which artists with urgent cash trouble could get small sustaining grants within a matter of days. He could afford to help: his recent Hoarfrost multiples sell for up to $4,000 each; the 1962 silk-screen Barge could well command $500,000 on the market today. "Bob has put more of his money and time back into the art world than any artist alive," says one of his acquaintances. "He needs to believe in an art community. It's straight out of St. Paul--'We must love one another or die.' "

Milton Rauschenberg (he changed his name to Robert as a young man) was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas, a shabby, humid oil-refinery town on the Gulf of Mexico. His father, Ernest Rauschenberg, was the son of an immigrant doctor from Berlin who had drifted to southern Texas and married a Cherokee. Port Arthur was no cultural center. Its symphony orchestra was the jukebox, the comics its museum. The nearest thing to art one could see was the cheap chromo-litho holy cards pinned up in the Rauschenberg living room (the whole family was devoutly active in the local Church of Christ). Decades later Rauschenberg would allude to the gaudy iconic nostalgia of those cards in early combines like Collection, 1953-54, and Charlene, 1954. His education was spotty. He went to public schools in Port Arthur and graduated from high school there in 1942. "I excelled in poor grades," Rauschenberg remembers. He is still an execrable speller. In the fall of 1942 he enrolled in a pharmacy course at the University of Texas in Austin, but Rauschenberg's fondness for animals spoiled that vocation. "I was expelled within six months for refusing to dissect a live frog in anatomy class." By then, however, America was at war and Rauschenberg entered the U.S. Navy. He was shunted off to the Navy hospital-corps school in San Diego as a mental-hospital nurse. Rauschenberg spent 2 1/2 years, the rest of the war, working in various hospitals in California. "This is where I learned how little difference there is between sanity and madness--and realized that a combination of both is what everyone needs."

Whenever he got a pass that gave him a few days off from the cuckoo's nest, Rauschenberg would simply head for the nearest highway and start thumbing rides to anywhere. On one of these time-killing trips, Rauschenberg heard about the cactus garden at the Huntington Library in San Marino. He went there --and found that the library had paintings in it, the first "real" paintings he had ever seen: Sir Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse and Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy. These suave, bright ghosts of Georgian culture stupefied Rauschenberg. He had never in his life looked at a work of art as art, and the first thing that struck him was "that someone had thought these things out and made them. Behind each of them was a man whose profession it was to make them. That just never occurred to me before."

So Rauschenberg decided he would paint. He found some pigments and brushes. There was no privacy in the barracks, and to be seen painting would have provoked endless ridicule. One night Rauschenberg locked himself in the latrine with a scrap of cardboard on his knee and secretly made his first daub, a portrait of a Navy buddy. Thirty years later, he still thinks of that illicit first night as exemplary. "There always ought to be an element of secrecy, of criminality, about making art," he says. "But if you're successful, it's hard to maintain. We all get comfortable in the end. That's what happens to rascals."

Discharged from the Navy in 1945, Rauschenberg decided to study art. He signed up as a student at the Kansas City Art Institute under the G.I. Bill of Rights. Every spare dime was set aside for a trip to Europe, the statutory voyage to Mecca, which he made in 1948. "I was certain that one had to study in Paris if one was an artist. I think I was at least 15 years late." He did study, briefly, at the Academic Julian; but since he spoke not a word of French, the instruction had little effect. He felt unfocused, self-indulgent and queasy, surrounded by an already academized modern tradition that he could not grasp.

But in the school he met his future wife, an American student named Susan Weil. They went back together to the U.S. in the fall of 1948. Rauschenberg had read a TIME article about the pioneer abstractionist Josef Albers, the veteran of the Bauhaus who was teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Albers was held in awe as a theorist and a disciplinarian: an inspired Junker. Discipline was what Rauschenberg felt he needed.

Rauschenberg turned out to be one of the most successful artists Albers ever taught, but Albers loathed his work. "I don't want to know who did that," he would say as he entered the classroom, pointing at Rauschenberg's latest effort. Years later, when questioned about Rauschenberg, the old maestro snapped: "To date I have had something like 600,000 students; I can't be expected to remember all of them." Rauschenberg, in turn, was alarmed by his teacher. His unsystematic, jackdaw mind could not come to grips with Albers' imposing and rigorous thought. "Albers had a marvelous system," he recalls. "Facts plus intimidation. I felt crushed. I would have done anything to please him; that was where the pain lay. Albers disliked my work exceedingly. I felt I could never do anything worthwhile. I had no background and no damn foreground either."

Yet one of the Bauhaus-type exercises Albers assigned to his students was the root of Rauschenberg's later practice: they had to find "interesting" discarded objects--anything from old tin cans to bicycle wheels to stones--and bring them into class as examples of accidental aesthetic form. Moreover, the stringent color exercises that Albers set would ultimately have a lot to do with the severe paintings Rauschenberg made between 1951 and '53: all-white and then all-black panels, the latter painted over a wrinkled mulch of newspaper, with no relationships of color. Twenty-five years ago, these pictures looked absurd; today they seem prescient. Art history has caught up with them, and the work of some of the most admired younger American painters--Robert Ryman's all-white paintings, Brice Marden's monochrome slabs of encaustic--can be traced back to them. "Albers," says Rauschenberg, "did give me a sense of discipline that I couldn't have worked without."

But there was a more general sense of ferment at Black Mountain, because the composer John Cage and his friend Merce Cunningham, the dancer-choreographer, were among the innovators living there. If it can be said that advanced art in America through the '50s and early '60s had one single native guru, that man was Cage: at once the most avant-garde and the most transparent of composers, the Marcel Duchamp of music, the man who erected combinations of silence and random sound into an aesthetic strategy in order to give art the inclusive density of life. It was Cage's example that prompted Rauschenberg to formulate his much-quoted remark that "painting relates to both art and life... I try to act in the gap between the two."

A painter could not compete with the saintly and difficult presences of Cage and Cunningham, but one could collaborate, and Rauschenberg did. Through the '50s and early '60s he designed sets and costumes for Cunningham's dance troupe. To a remarkable degree, Rauschenberg eventually made himself the conduit through which some of the big money made in the '60s by new art, including his own, was siphoned to the "profitless" avantgarde, that of dance and music. In doing so, he felt he was only paying his dues, for when Rauschenberg moved to New York in the fall of 1949 he joined the group of dancers and musicians gathered around Cage, Cunningham and Morton Feldman; they, more than the New York painters, gave him his first sense of a real community of artists. "All we had in common was our excitement and poverty. I didn't feel at home with the motivations of the painters who were around--though I liked the work well enough. There was a lot of self-pity in the air, a sense of being mistreated by the world. I never felt that. I had the feeling from my early church background that, well, it's you who decided to live this life, and that's the moral choice. Cage and I used to sell our books to eat. There were times when I felt miserable. But having to decide, Is this what you want to do?' each day--that put a lot of joy into the work too."

There was seldom enough money to buy proper materials, so Rauschenberg used improper ones. Blueprint paper in wide sheets cost $1.75 a roll; he and Susan Weil (they were married in 1950, and their son Christopher was born the following year) spread the stuff out on the floor of their apartment, strewed it with pattern-objects like fishnets and doilies, and one lay down naked on it while the other went over the paper with a portable sun lamp, making giant prints. Only one of the works survives: the blue roentgen ghost of a nude, eerily transparent. Later, Rauschenberg put a similar motif--a sectional X ray of his own body--in the largest and most spectacular of his lithographs, Booster, 1967.

In these blueprints, two themes of his mature art appeared. The first was collaboration: he worked with his wife on them, as he would work with others in theater, dance and printing. "Ideas aren't real estate; they grow collectively, and that knocks out the egotistical loneliness that generally infects art."

The second, equally important, was the idea that a painting's surface was an impartial collector of images. Anything could be dropped on the blueprints and leave its mark. Soon afterward, Rauschenberg made grass paintings--bundles of soil and plant matter held together with chicken wire, from which seedlings sprouted. (The last of these modest forerunners of earth art perished of cold and thirst in his loft down by the Fulton Street docks in 1954.) The results of this clownish exercise, as it looked then, would be of capital importance to modern art.

By now Rauschenberg was living in the middle of a junk-crammed environment--Manhattan--a place that every week threw away more artifacts than were made in a year in 18th century Paris. An afternoon's stroll could furnish him with a complete "palette" of things to make art with: cardboard cartons, striped police barriers, sea tar, a stuffed bird, a broken umbrella, a shaving mirror, grimy postcards. These relics were sorted out in his studio, glued to surfaces, punctuated with slathers of paint. They emerged as large-scale collages, to which Rauschenberg gave the name combines. At first they were relatively flat. Collection was almost an orthodox collage: layers of souvenir-like junk half-effaced by swaths and spatters of bright red paint. (Rauschenberg liked color to have the same "given" quality as a found object; discovering some unlabeled cans of house paint on sale for 50 each, he opened them and painted with whatever color he found inside.)

Of course, the roots of Rauschenberg's combines are fixed in the history of collage and particularly in the work of the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. Rauschenberg remembers being "amazed" by the Schwitters collages he saw at the Museum of Modern Art, and he was particularly influenced by the way they were composed on a horizontal-vertical grid. "He wasn't using diagonals. I hate diagonals!" The effect shows in works like Rebus. 1955--a curiously fugitive image despite its size, full of airy space and images of flight: the winds from Botticelli's Birth of Venus, photographs of a bee, a dragonfly, a mosquito and a fly's eye. Gradually the objects became more dominant. Rauschenberg stretched his bed quilt over an improvised frame, added a pillow, and covered both with streaks and drips of paint. The result, Bed, 1955, was to become one of the objets de scandale of American art.

Because of the aggressive distinctness of some of the things in Rauschenberg's work, it was assumed by his best interpreters that the combines could carry no symbolic, still less narrative meaning. "There are no secret messages in Rauschenberg," wrote the late art historian Alan Solomon in 1963, "no program of social or political dissent transmitted in code..."

Certainly, Rauschenberg's combines have no political content worth looking for. Virtually no "major" American art of the '50s did--the mood was one of apolitical quietism, and it was assumed that art had no chance of reforming the world. Yet a number of the combines do seem, at this distance, to be "coded." The title of Odalisk, 1955-58, directs us to a favorite image of those two sultans of French art, Ingres and Matisse--the harem nude. Rauschenberg parodies that: the box on its post alludes to a human figure; a torso, teetering on its absurd harem cushion. The sides of the box are plastered with pinups and reproductions of classical nudes. Finally, the stuffed chicken on top of the box reminds us that one of the many French terms for an expensive courtesan is a poule de luxe.

Rauschenberg's combines, like the work of his friend and mentor Marcel Duchamp, are seeded with such puns, parallels and quirks of meaning. Like Duchamp, he was given to embedding a kind of ironic lechery in his images--the supreme example being Monogram, 1959. Monogram remains the most notorious of Rauschenberg's combines: a stuffed Angora goat, girdled with a tire. The title is self-fulfilling--it is Rauschenberg's monogram, the sign by which he is best known--but why did it become so famous? Partly because of its unacknowledged life as a powerful sexual fetish. The lust of the goat, as William Blake remarked in a somewhat different context, is the bounty of God, and Monogram is an image of copulation.

In the collective memory of the New York art world, the decade 1955-64 has an almost magical air: a bath of transformations. Rauschenberg entered it as a frog and emerged a certified prince holding the first prize of the 1964 Venice Biennale. By 1955 the achievement of the abstract expressionists--Pollock, Gorky, de Kooning, Still, Rothko, Kline, Motherwell--was recognized across the Atlantic, and the aesthetic colonization of Europe by New York art began in earnest. In this momentous shift of taste, energy and locus, a younger generation of American artists would be the legatees. Its symbolic twins, its Castor and Pollux, were Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

They met around the end of 1954. Both felt like hicks. Johns came from South Carolina and was painfully shy; Rauschenberg, especially when flown with bourbon, was wont to describe himself as "white Taixas trash." By this time, Rauschenberg's marriage had mutated into friendship, and there had been a divorce in 1953. In 1955 Rauschenberg moved into a loft in the building in lower Manhattan where Johns had his studio. They supported themselves by doing window displays for Tiffany and Bonwit Teller.

Yet they had surprisingly little in common as artists. Johns' work was oblique, carefully thought out, exquisitely modulated (the encaustic surfaces of his flags and targets and maps are among the loveliest pieces of pure painting done in the 20th century); the product of a high and guarded intelligence, it bristled with irony and paradox. It was all about indirection: the difficulty of seeing anything clearly, of naming anything right. The formal enigmas of Johns' art were wholly unlike the sunny, ebullient appetites of Rauschenberg. Johns made one look and think; Rauschenberg made one look and look. Rauschenberg breathed out, Johns in. This came to work against Rauschenberg, for what the higher '60s criticism most liked in art was to discern internal systems in a work. As Art Critic Brian O'Doherty remarked, "Johns provided everything the New York critical intelligence requires to requite its own narcissism."

The main audience Rauschenberg found in the '50s lay among his fellow artists, the younger ones who would diversely shape the "look" of the '60s: James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, Jean Tinguely--the happening makers, the creators of Pop art. Says Rauschenberg: "We were relieved of the responsibility the abstract expressionists had. They had fought the battle of showing there was such a thing as American art; we didn't have that problem. We were undistracted by things we couldn't imagine, like art collectors and taxes. There was a very strong sense of just getting up and doing something."

Nothing could be farther from the truth than the often-raised notion that Rauschenberg was engaged in some Oedipal battle against abstract expressionism. This idea was fostered by one of his best-known gestures, that of erasing a de Kooning pencil drawing. Actually, de Kooning gave Rauschenberg the drawing for that purpose; as far as the younger artist was concerned, it was an act of homage to de Kooning. Indeed, the painted areas of Rauschenberg's combines, with their spattering bravado of touch, are a meditation on the abstract expressionist legacy: they extend rather than reject it.

The surfaces of Rauschenberg's combines were meant to seem unselective: each was a rendezvous where the common images of the day could display themselves without having to listen to judgments from an artist on their relative "importance." In that sense, they contained no junk: all the stuffed birds and tires were, so to speak, in Paradise. But could the same hospitable casualness of images be rendered without those objects? In 1959-60 Rauschenberg made a set of illustrations to Dante's Inferno. He found that newsprint, wetted with lighter fluid and then rubbed, will transfer a grey ghost of itself to paper. This opened his work to a stream of image-quotation, cold from the press. In the "Dante drawings," Virgil, the Guide, appears alternately as Adlai Stevenson and a baseball umpire; Dante is a nondescript figure in a towel, which Rauschenberg found in a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED ad; centaurs turn into racing cars, and demons into gas-masked soldiers.

The next step was to print large images on canvas with silk screens. The silk-screen paintings that Rauschenberg made between 1962 and '65 had a brilliantly heightened documentary flavor. The canvas trapped images, accumulating them. One was reminded of the shuttle and flicker of a TV set as the dial is clicked: rocket, eagle, Kennedy, dancer, oranges, box, all registered with the peacock-hued, aniline-sharp intensity of electronic color. The subject was glut.

The best of the color silk-screen paintings, like Retroactive I, 1964, are such soaring bel canto that one is apt to skip over the odd resonance of their images. Consider the red patch in the lower right corner: a silk-screen enlargement of a stroboscopic photo by Gjon Mili of a walking nude, done in imitation of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which was itself based on an earlier sequential photo by Marey. The image stutters backward through technological time. But then it also looks like the grief-stricken Adam and Eve in Masaccio's Expulsion from Eden, and that turns the enormous grainy effigy of John Kennedy (then dead), with its repeated pointing hand, into a type of vengeful deity. Rauschenberg has had great moments of social irony. "The day will come," Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his journal in 1861, "when all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written in the popular press; and images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him, but established, fixed once and for all by photography. On that day civilization will have reached its peak, and there will be steam-propelled gondolas in Venice."

In 1964 Rauschenberg was riding in one of these gondolas, through the mighty hoo-ha raised by his winning the first prize at the Venice Biennale. Few now doubted that art's center had migrated to New York, and this ignited an orgy of chauvinism on both sides of the Atlantic. Some forms of success, Degas once said, are indistinguishable from panic. This was one. Rauschenberg was now a celebrity, almost the Most Famous Artist in the World. His critics were quick to blame him for every crassness that attended the promotion of Pop art.

As somnambulists mysteriously avoid bumping into the coffee table, Rauschenberg dealt with fame. His instinctive response to being promoted as a culture hero was to stop making one-man art. He went back into the group, and through the rest of the '60s he worked on all manner of collaborative projects: multimedia events, dance, liaisons between art and science. Of course, the group had expanded greatly by now. It contained artists who wanted to work collectively, but there were also dozens of people who simply wanted a piece of Rauschenberg, from saber-toothed politicians' wives and Park Avenue art groupies to eager, ineffectual students. It was not as freaky or snobbish a mix as the circus that Andy Warhol accumulated, but it had its distractions. "Dozens of people ripped Bob off for money and time," a friend from the '60s recalls, "and he knew it, but he never said a word against them."

His most absorbed collaboration was with Billy Kluever, a Swedish laser-research scientist from Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1966 they started a nonprofit foundation named E.A.T., or Experiments in Art and Technology. Its announced purpose was "to catalyze the inevitable active involvement of industry, technology and the arts." E.A.T. grew out of "Nine Evenings," a series of multimedia happenings held in New York in 1966. Its biggest project was the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan, which drew on the talents of Film Maker Robert Breer, Sculptor Forrest Myers, Artist Robert Whitman and a dozen others.

Rauschenberg's re-entry into continuous production as an artist, after the confusions of the '60s, came through prints. From the moment in 1962 when Rauschenberg made his first lithograph at Tanya Grosman's studio on Long Island, he was infatuated with the medium. The limestone was erotic to him: "It's got all the hardness of rock, but all the frailty and sensitivity of albino skin," he said. By the late '60s he was working with America's two best printers: Tanya Grosman on the East Coast and Kenneth Tyler, head of Gemini, the graphics studio, in Los Angeles. Tyler, who split from Gemini in 1974, is unequivocal in his opinion that "Rauschenberg is absolutely a master. I've talked with printers who've worked with Picasso, Miro, you name them--but their collaboration was very simple compared with Rauschenberg's. Work with him and you get his life, spirit, energy: he's the only two-way street in the art world."

Moreover, Tyler believes that Rauschenberg set out to give lithography the status of a major form. "He was prepared to commit any large-scale idea unselfishly to the print medium." A prime example was Booster, at the time the largest hand pulled lithograph ever made: 6 ft. long, printed from two stones. "In the technical sense," says Sidney Felsen, the present co-director of Gemini, "Bob's single biggest gift to lithography was the combining of photo images and hand drawing. But it goes beyond that. Bob's unique. He shies off predetermined ideas so he can react to his surroundings at any given moment. He goes into meditation--vacancy--so that whatever travels through his nostrils and head is exactly what he wants to put on that stone."

Printmaking has given Rauschenberg a luxuriant range of materials and surfaces. He went to France in 1973 to make a suite called Pages and Fuses at an old paper mill in Ambert; it consisted of molded and tinted paper with faint images embedded in its surface. In 1975 Rauschenberg and his group--printers, assistants, friends--traveled to India to make multiples of molded paper, bamboo, printed sari cloths and mud. But the delicacy of his touch produced its masterpiece in the Hoarfrost series he did with Gemini in 1974. The Hoarfrosts (TIME, Jan. 27, 1975) are sheets of silk, chiffon, taffeta, one hung over another. Each sheet is imprinted with images from Rauschenberg's bank. In Pull, 1974, the dominant one is of a diver vanishing into a pool, seen from above, swallowed in blue immensity like a man on a space walk. No reproduction can attest to the subtlety of its play between the documentary "reality" of collage and the vague beauties of atmosphere.

Rauschenberg still keeps a base in New York, a rambling 19th century five-story building complete with chapel, on downtown Lafayette Street, converted from its former life as an orphanage and now filled with mementos, drawings, plants, peripatetic assistants and an aged incontinent turtle, which he regards as his caretaker. But in recent years he has spent most of his time in a wooden frame house, built between 15 acres of palm jungle and the coarse shell beach on the island of Captiva, in the Gulf waters that lie south of Tampa, Fla. There, equipped with two lithographic presses, he presides over a working commune of printers and friends, whose timetable has become adjusted to his: breakfast at noon, swim, work all afternoon and evening, dinner never earlier than midnight. "You can't imagine," he cackles, "how many disturbances I miss out on down here." This landscape offers the clue to his recent work, beginning with the Hoarfrosts and continuing through Jammers, a series of delicate sewn constructions of silk, twine and rattan cane. They are without pretension, and hardly displace air at all. They read as a shimmer of color, sails in the light. Off the beach, past the rattling leaves of the sea grapes, two ambiguous planes meet: the shallow coastal water, slicked with weed, taking the light like satin; and the pale sky, colored the rinsed blue of a Tiepolo ceiling. A pelican lumbers by, just airborne, printing its ragged prehistoric silhouette on the fabric of the scene. Once again, as for the past two decades, Rauschenberg's art drains back into its source, the world.

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