Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg
Untitled (Hotel Bilbao)
ca. 1952
paper collage and fabric collage on board
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Robert Rauschenberg
Untitled (Red Painting)
ca. 1953
oil paint and fabric collage on canvas
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Robert Rauschenberg
Untitled (Gold Painting)
ca. 1953
gold leaf and fabric collage on canvas
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Robert Rauschenberg
Yoicks
1954
oil paint, enamel and fabric collage on canvas
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Robert Rauschenberg
Satellite
1955
oil paint and paper collage on canvas, with stuffed pheasant
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Robert Rauschenberg
Summer Rental + 2
1960
oil paint and paper collage on linen
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Robert Rauschenberg
Reservoir
1961
oil paint and found objects on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Robert Rauschenberg
Wooden Gallop
1962
assemblage of mixed materials mounted on panel
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Robert Rauschenberg
Untitled
1963
oil paint and screenprint on canvas
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Robert Rauschenberg
St Louis Symphony Orchestra
1968
lithograph (poster)
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Robert Rauschenberg
Untitled
1968
lithograph
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Robert Rauschenberg
Yellow Body
1968
solvent transfer on paper, with added watercolor and gouache
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Robert Rauschenberg
Signs
1970
screenprint
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Robert Rauschenberg
New York Collection for Stockholm
1973
lithograph (poster)
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Robert Rauschenberg
Link
1974
pressed paper pulp with paper collage
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Robert Rauschenberg
Treaty
1974
lithograph
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Robert Rauschenberg
Fusion
1996
solvent transfer on paper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Voices from the Other World

Presently at our touch the teacup stirred,

Then circled lazily about

From A to Z. The first voice heard
(If they are voices, these mute spellers-out)

Was that of an engineer

Originally from Cologne

Dead in his 22nd year

Of cholera in Cairo, he had KNOWN

NO HAPPINESS. He once met Goethe, though.

Goethe had told him: PERSEVERE.

Our blind hound whined. With that, a horde

Of voices gathered above the Ouija board,

Some childish, and, you might say, blurred

By sleep; one little boy

Named Will, reluctant possibly in a ruff

Like a large-lidded page out of El Greco, pulled

Back the arras for that next voice,

Cold and portentous: ALL IS LOST.

FLEE THIS HOUSE. OTTO VON THURN UND TAXIS.

OBEY. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.

Frightened, we stopped; but tossed

Till sunrise striped the rumpled sheets with gold.

Each night since then, the moon waxes,

Small insects flit round a cold torch

We light, that sends them pattering to the porch . . .

But no real Sign. New voices come,

Dictate addresses, begging us to write;

Some warn of lives misspent, and all of doom

In ways that so exhilarate

We are sleeping sound of late.

Last night the teacup shattered in a rage.

Indeed, we have grown nonchalant

Towards the other world. In the gloom here,

Our elbows on the cleared

Table, we talk and smoke, pleased to be stirred

Rather by buzzings in the jasmine, by the drone

Of our own voices and poor blind Rover's wheeze,

Than by those clamoring overhead,

Obsessed or piteous, for a commitment

We still have wit to postpone

Because, once looked at lit

By the cold reflections of the dead

Risen extinct but irresistible,

Our lives have never seemed more full, more real,

Nor the full moon more quick to chill. 

– James Merrill (1959)