Ten Favorites: Robert Rauschenberg, Asheville Citizen, 1952

This transitory experiment in MoMA’s collection by Robert Rauschenberg simply sends my mind reeling. In a way, my citing of the Picasso collage, the De Kooning, and The Burri as my favorites make way for this Rauschenberg, a painting that (in the spirit of his working method) he probably made in a day. However, the work is right on the historical button.

Let’s think about what is going on here. We basically have a dense black field of oil paint on two panels with a copy of North Carolina’s Asheville Citizen newspaper pasted on top, the text rotated ninety degrees. In Asheville in late 1951, Rauschenberg was back at Black Mountain College from New York, making work and getting to know John Cage, the photos of Aaron Siskind, and Joseph Albers, whose rigor would guide his ethic but not his aesthetic. Earlier that summer, Rauschenberg had just presented his White Paintings at Betty Parson’s gallery, which Cage would call “landing strips” for shadows and dust. “Today is their creator,” Rauschenberg told Parsons and their white surfaces were known as surfaces ready to receive, process, and complicate visual information.

In Asheville Citizen, you can feel Rothko and those moody Ab Exers milling around New York, finally receiving the attention they felt they deserved, but you can also feel why Rauschenberg is fundamentally a different sort of artist. Sure, you can sense the presence of Betty Parson’s Barnett Newman’s show that Rauschenberg must have seen in 1950, but in the density of Asheville Citizen’s black field, you can see perhaps why Rauschenberg would have sought out Burri a few months later on a trip to Italy, an artist known for himself bringing the world literally onto the canvas. Rauschenberg’s use of an entire newspaper, uncropped and uncut in contrast to Dada or Picasso’s collages, is something new, a deapan presentation of the news as object and image, an item to be shifted into an awkward position which forces you to look at an ordinary thing in new way. This is different sort of thing than both Ab Ex painters and Picasso alike. Rauschenberg is neither representing nor expressing anything, but instead using the stuff of the world to lead your eye not to high concepts but to street material.

This work seems to be the crux of Rauschenberg – instead of expressing (which he does in his work but not on purpose), he wants to move your eye around, to make you look at everything like a traveler does in a foreign country. The newspaper of Asheville Citizen would soon give birth to the multimedia of the Combines. Rauschenberg, John Cage, and poet Frank O’Hara were all kindred spirits attempting the same thing in different arts – letting the ordinary dazzle instead of ornately embellishing it through aesthetics.