Introduction

Robert Rauschenberg’s earliest artistic endeavors are far less known than his Combines (1954– 64) or his silkscreen paintings (1962–64), the works that brought him international acclaim when he won the grand prize for painting by a foreign artist at the Venice Biennale in 1964.¹ With hindsight, however, it is evident that the characteristics celebrated in those renowned works were percolating in the paintings and sculptures Rauschenberg made between 1948, when, on the G.I. Bill, he attended three art schools—the Kansas City Art Institute, Académie Julian in Paris, and Black Mountain College in North Carolina—and 1953, when he returned from his travels in Europe and North Africa and moved into a studio on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan. Already apparent are his insatiable curiosity, his openness to a range of artistic possibilities, and his method of generative collaboration. Rauschenberg’s early works exhibit in nascent form a challenge to the traditional demarcations between artistic media—not only painting and sculpture, but also drawing, printmaking, and performance. The works included in the present catalogue, made during this formative period, anticipate the expansive career that lay ahead of him.

When Rauschenberg enrolled at Black Mountain College, the experimental art school, in fall 1948, just before his twenty-third birthday, he “hardly knew what a painting was,” the artist Susan Weil recalled. “He was very naive about art.”² But this tells only part of the story. Born in 1925 in the oil refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg showed his creative bent early, drawing and participating in high school plays as a set and costume designer. Rauschenberg’s mother, Dora, was a skilled seamstress who instilled in him the appreciation for fabric that would be a mainstay of his art making. After serving stateside in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute for a year and a half, focusing largely on fashion design.³ On June 2, 1948, he embarked on his first overseas trip to study at Académie Julian, a magnet for American artists who perceived France as the center of the art world. It was there that he met Weil, who, unlike Rauschenberg, had grown up in a sophisticated and affluent cultural milieu, attending a private high school in Manhattan where Rufino Tamayo taught art. More than any formal training he received in Paris, it was Weil who introduced Rauschenberg to modern art. And it was Weil whom Rauschenberg followed to Black Mountain in October 1948 for the first of two life-changing stints there.

By contrast to the conventional instruction he received in Paris, Black Mountain’s unorthodox, interdisciplinary approach inspired Rauschenberg. From October 1948 to mid-June 1949, in addition to drawing and painting, he studied dance and textile construction and participated in student theater productions, making costumes and stage sets—all art forms that were integral to his later career. His primary purpose in attending Black Mountain, however, was to study with Josef Albers, who had brought with him to North Carolina the legendary, materials-based curriculum he had developed at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Although Rauschenberg described Albers’s criticism as “excruciating,” he considered the rigorous theorist his most important teacher: “What he taught me had to do with the entire visual world. He didn’t teach you how to ‘do art.’”⁴

It was two full years before Rauschenberg returned to Black Mountain. In the intervening time, he and Weil lived between Manhattan and her family’s home on Outer Island, Connecticut. During their first American summer together, Rauschenberg, in a letter to his parents, reported working on seven paintings, including a portrait of Weil with Aaron Kurzen, another of her high school art teachers, and one of Delores Fullman, her college roommate (5, 6). He also mentioned Church Painting (7), a large work he was making at his mother’s behest for the baptistry of the newly built Church of Christ in Lafayette, Louisiana, where his family had moved in 1948. That summer of 1949, Weil taught Rauschenberg how to make cyanotypes, prints created by placing objects onto light-sensitive blueprint paper and exposing them to the sun. The couple worked on cyanotypes together through 1951. These early collaborations are indicative of Rauschenberg’s interest in indexicality and foretell his fascination with both photography and printmaking.

In the academic year 1949–50, Rauschenberg and Weil attended the Art Students League of New York, taking classes in life drawing, painting, and composition with Morris Kantor and Vaclav Vytlacil. Rauschenberg’s few extant paintings from this time (8, 9, 10) reveal a varied style responsive to the lessons he was absorbing from Cubism, Surrealism, and early Abstract Expressionism. The next summer, Rauschenberg created his first known sculptures. Among the surviving examples is Greenhouse (11), consisting of found materials—twigs, a broken glass orb, and glass shards (possibly sea glass)—inserted into what appears to be a wire fishing trap to which he added white paint. This work is early evidence of the artist’s predilection for making evocative assemblages that combined discarded, mundane objects taken from his immediate surroundings with art materials.

In June 1950, Rauschenberg and Weil married; that fall, they moved into a ground-floor apartment on West 95th Street that served as a shared studio, where they often painted over each other’s canvases.⁵ During this period, Rauschenberg was exposed to many of the artists who would become his mentors and collaborators. In the late summer, he had attended a performance of dances by Merce Cunningham, accompanied by the composer John Cage. In the contemporary art galleries on 57th Street, which he frequented with Weil, he admired the work of the Abstract Expressionists. In the winter, he saw Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Bicycle Wheel (1913; remade 1951), which he later declared “one of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture I’ve ever seen.”⁶

When he returned to the Art Students League for another semester in spring 1951, he took the opportunity to show his recent paintings—mostly limited in color, with predominantly white grounds—to the dealer Betty Parsons. Parsons surprised Rauschenberg by offering him a show at her gallery that May. While the works he presented in that first solo exhibition displayed some of the characteristics of Abstract Expressionism, their layered surfaces, incorporating printed matter and detritus such as bits of mirror and the artist’s own hair (16, 17, 18, 21), broke with that precedent. The Parsons exhibition was seen by the painter Jack Tworkov and the sculptor Philip Pavia, founding members of a vibrant society of artists and thinkers known as “The Club,” as well as by Cage. One painting, 22 The Lily White (14), was removed from the exhibition early so that it could be included in the famous “9th Street Show,” where Rauschenberg met his future dealer Leo Castelli.

During this period of artistic ferment, Rauschenberg met Cy Twombly, a fellow student at the Art Students League; at some point, the two began an affair. When Rauschenberg returned to Black Mountain shortly after the birth of his son, Christopher, in July 1951, Twombly was already there. Their marriage faltering, Rauschenberg and Weil largely led independent lives from then on. In that critical summer, Rauschenberg and Twombly took painting tutorials with Ben Shahn and Robert Motherwell, and Rauschenberg began the Night Bloomings, marking the beginning of a career-long practice of working in series. In these paintings, white celestial and plantlike forms contrast with tarry-black surfaces. The artist described making them outdoors, with a palette of “red lead, black, and enamel white.”⁷ While the canvases were still wet, he turned them over onto the ground, so that gravel, dirt, and insects adhered to them.⁸ Only three examples are extant (28, 29, 30); however, Rauschenberg later said that there had been at least twenty.⁹ Some he repainted and incorporated into Black Paintings; others were likely lost after the photographer Aaron Siskind drove a group of them to Chicago for an unrealized exhibition.¹⁰

In fall 1951, still at Black Mountain, Rauschenberg commenced the Black Painting series and completed the first iterations of the White Paintings. The latter are a series of five square or rectangular paintings comprising one, two, three, four, or seven panels and covered entirely in white house paint, devoid of any trace of gesture. Soon after their making, Rauschenberg approached Parsons to request that she exhibit them, but she declined. Afterward, the White Paintings took on another life. The following August, at least one of them was suspended from the ceiling during Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1 at Black Mountain, often described as the first Happening.¹¹ This was the genesis of Rauschenberg’s practice of untethering paintings from the wall.

Between 1953 and 1960, from “boredom or economic pressure,” Rauschenberg painted over all the original White Paintings.¹² One became a three-panel Black Painting (86); others served as grounds for Combines.¹³ Essential to Rauschenberg’s thinking about the White Paintings was that they were “never supposed to collect history or dirt”; indeed, they were “rebuilt and repainted many times.”¹⁴ Although remade, the newer versions were not reproductions or copies; they were always dated 1951, the year they were originally conceived and executed, and only one of each was supposed to exist at a time.¹⁵ The complete series was first exhibited in 1968, at Leo Castelli’s gallery on the Upper East Side.¹⁶ At that time, Minimalism and Conceptual art were at their height, and the White Paintings—modular works that prioritize the idea over the object, conceived nearly twenty years earlier—were understood by some critics as forerunners of those movements.

The Black Paintings, by contrast to the uninflected surfaces of the White Paintings, are textured, the paint applied generously and unevenly over collaged surfaces. Rauschenberg made the first group of Black Paintings at Black Mountain between fall 1951 and late August 1952, before he and Twombly embarked on a seven-month overseas trip. These earlier Black Paintings have grounds of newspaper that is sometimes partially legible, sometimes torn into fragments; in 1959, the artist explained that he had begun using newspaper in his work “to activate a ground so that even the first strokes in a painting had [their] own unique position in a gray map of words.”¹⁷

Rauschenberg and Twombly’s trip to Italy, North Africa, and Spain from August 1952 to April 1953 was funded in part by a grant Twombly received from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Rauschenberg made no paintings during his travels, just portable works. His practice of combining disparate motifs and materials, later realized on a larger scale in the Combines, is already present in a series he made at this time, Scatole e Feticci Personali (“personal boxes and fetishes”).¹⁸ These sculptures comprise found materials chosen either for the “richness of their past: like bone, hair, faded cloth” or for “their vivid abstract reality: like mirrors, bells, watch-parts, bugs.”¹⁹ When they were shown at Galleria dell’Obelisco in Rome in March 1953, the artist left several compartments of the boxes empty “for you to add bits of your own choice, to rearrange the contents, or to leave them in their emptiness. … The order and logic of the arrangements are the direct creation of the viewer.” While nearly forty works in the series are known to have been made, relatively few are extant. Some returned to New York with the artist, who had sold enough to pay his passage home, but the majority are lost. Rauschenberg later claimed to have followed the recommendation of a local Italian critic, in a scathing review of the Florence iteration of the show, to toss them into the Arno.²⁰

On his return to New York in April 1953, Rauschenberg moved into a studio in an industrial building with no plumbing at 61 Fulton Street, where he began work on his Elemental Sculpture series and on the second campaign of Black Paintings. These later Black Paintings—either entirely new works or reworked earlier ones—are more densely painted than those completed prior to his Italian sojourn. The newspaper grounds are mostly obscured and illegible. While the Black Paintings of the first group typically have a matte finish, many of these are glossy. One example (114) includes strips of newspaper dipped in black enamel that stand proud of the surface like thickly applied gestural brushstrokes, merging paint with collage.²¹

Reminiscent of the Scatole e Feticci Personali, the Elemental Sculptures are made from local materials—such as lumber scavenged from Con Edison, the gas and electric company—and often invite the viewer to rearrange or otherwise activate them. This period of Rauschenberg’s work was, to a large degree, about “people getting involved and touching.”²² In September 1953, most of the Elemental Sculptures, along with two White Paintings and at least seven Black Paintings, were shown in a solo exhibition at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery concurrently with an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Twombly.

Also in 1953, Rauschenberg made two collaborative works on paper that, because of their outsized importance in his artistic development, are included in the present catalogue, otherwise devoted to paintings and sculptures. The artist created Automobile Tire Print (104) on a rainy Sunday outside his Fulton Street studio, with the assistance of Cage and his Ford Model A. Around the same time, when Willem de Kooning granted the younger artist’s request for a drawing of his to erase, Rauschenberg undertook Erased de Kooning Drawing (105). Preceding these was another work on paper: This Is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time (ca. 1951–52; 37), a bound series of fourteen woodcuts that Rauschenberg made during his second stint at Black Mountain. These singular works on paper—two monoprints and a drawing—transcend their media and represent many of the concerns the artist would take up consistently for the remainder of his career: seriality, collaboration, and performative gestures.

The final paintings Rauschenberg made in 1953 again defied conventional methods and materials, redefining art in the process. Although the artist eventually called them “paintings,” most of them contained no paint at all. Each foregrounded a single material, such as clay, dirt, toilet paper, or gold leaf. While Rauschenberg claimed not to prioritize one material over another, history tells a different story. Only one dirt and one clay painting from this period (109, 110), and none of the toilet paper examples, are extant; many gold ones, however, have survived.²³ These were made with gold (and, more rarely, silver) leaf applied to an uneven ground of paper and, often, fabric on a canvas support. Most were set into handmade wood-and-glass frames left partially open on the sides to allow the gold leaf to move with the air currents.

In the early paintings and sculptures included in this catalogue and in two bodies of work that soon followed, the Red Paintings and the Combines, Rauschenberg’s dialogue with Abstract Expressionism is revealed as a crucial springboard from which he developed a novel approach to art making, whether in collage, assemblage, painting, or sculpture. Undoubtedly, the naiveté Weil observed in him as a young art student, in tandem with his fierce self-determination, allowed him to shrug off early criticism and embark on a creative path uninhibited by the conventions of mid-twentieth-century painting. Throughout his sixty-year career, paramount to Rauschenberg’s art making was the drive to discover the artistry in non-art materials. The work of art, for him, was not stagnant but dynamic, always engaging with people and the world in which they, and it, exist.