The Most Living Artist

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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