"The Guggenheim has had a long, fruitful relationship with Robert Rauschenberg," said Thomas Krens, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.  "We are delighted to be able to present the works of this pivotal twentieth-century artist and to demonstrate the range of his achievement."

Background
Robert Rauschenberg's art has always been one of thoughtful inclusion. Working with a wide range of subjects, styles, materials, and techniques, Rauschenberg has been called a forerunner of virtually every postwar movement since Abstract Expressionism. He has remained, however, independent of any particular affiliation. At the time that he began making art in the late 1940s, his belief that painting relates to both art and life presented a direct challenge to the prevalent Modernist aesthetic. The celebrated Combines begun in the mid 1950s brought real-world images and objects into the realm of abstract painting and countered sanctioned divisions between painting and sculpture. These works established the artist's ongoing dialogue between mediums, between the handmade and the readymade, and between the gestural brush stroke and the mechanically reproduced image. Rauschenberg's lifelong commitment to collaboration with performers, printmakers, engineers, writers, artists, and artisans from around the world is a further manifestation of his expansive artistic philosophy.

Born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1925, the artist began his formal art education following his discharge from the United States Navy in 1945. At Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, he studied with former Bauhaus master Josef Albers. It was also there that he solidified friendships with the composer John Cage and the dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Between 1949 and 1954, Rauschenberg introduced the mediums, materials, and motifs that have continued to occupy him. During this fruitful period, he worked in photography, made his first monoprints, and became involved in performance, participating in Cage's Theater Piece #1 in 1952. Early paintings, sculptures, and drawings already reflected what would become his long-standing commitment to extracting materials and images from his immediate environment.

Having settled in New York in 1949, Rauschenberg was introduced to the work of the Abstract Expressionists and began to incorporate free brushwork into his own paintings. Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953 is both a tribute to the painter Willem de Kooning and a conceptual gesture to move beyond the Abstract Expressionist example. Rauschenberg's first solo exhibition was held in May 1951 at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, which represented many of the Abstract Expressionists. Mother of God (ca. 1950), one of the few extant works from this exhibition, reveals Rauschenberg's concern early on with expanding the abstract idiom to include representational subjects such as maps, diagrams, and numerals. In his white and black paintings, made between 1951 and 1953, Rauschenberg further explored the Abstract Expressionist mode but deviated from its pictorial purity with references beyond the canvas. Pebbles and dirt were impressed into the dark pigment of the Night Blooming paintings (1951); the uninflected White Paintings (1951) became screens for light and shadow, responding to the conditions around them; and newspaper collage formed the ground of the black paintings (1951-53).

While traveling with the artist Cy Twombly in Europe and North Africa in 1952, Rauschenberg made collages on Italian shirtboards that introduced his method of combining disparate subjects and contain many of the motifs that have remained central to his work: animals, body parts, modes of transportation, fine art reproductions, lettering, and diagrams. It was also during this sojourn that Rauschenberg made the Scatole Personali, small, fetishistic assemblages of found materials. Like the Elemental Sculptures and series of Red Paintings, which he began on his return to New York in 1953, these works were laboratories for the later Combines.

For Rauschenberg there was a natural progression from the Red Paintings to Combines, as two-dimensional collage and eventually three-dimensional objects came to the fore. Odalisk (1955/1958), one of Rauschenberg's first true Combines, incorporates a stuffed rooster, electric lights, and a pillow with autobiographical materials, including one of his miniature blueprints. When the Red Paintings and early Combines were shown at Egan Gallery, New York, in December 1954, most critics were baffled by the works, which tested existing definitions of art. Expanding upon Marcel Duchamp's concept of the readymade, Rauschenberg gave new significance to such ordinary objects as a patchwork quilt or an automobile tire by juxtaposing them with unrelated items and placing them in the context of art. Rauschenberg was sustained through these years by an intellectual dialogue with Cage and Cunningham, as well as with the artist Jasper Johns, who shared his interest in deriving art from the commonplace.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the found image had become paramount in Rauschenberg's visual vocabulary. Reproductions from newspapers and magazines were incorporated into his drawings, prints, and paintings as he perfected techniques of solvent transfer, lithography, and silkscreening. The transfer drawings, produced simultaneously with the Combines, brought the element of collage onto a two-dimensional plane: found images were continuous with the picture surface and were mixed with freely drawn and painted areas. This admixture of figuration and abstraction remains a hallmark of Rauschenberg's style to the present day.

By 1962, Rauschenberg was exploring the transfer technique in his editioned prints. He made his first lithograph at ULAE (Universal Limited Art Editions), West Islip, New York, during that year and in 1963 won the Grand Prize at the prestigious International Exhibition of Prints, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. Printmaking has remained central to Rauschenberg's art-making practice due to the medium's inherent reproducibility and the wide range of effects it enables him to achieve.

The silkscreened painting series made between 1962 and 1964 used a commercial means of reproduction and emphasized media subjects, thus identifying Rauschenberg with Pop art. The photomechanically produced screens allowed him to transcribe on a large scale his own photographs as well as images taken from the popular press. Subjects range from the billboards, for example in Untitled (1963), to army helicopters. Parallel to his investigations in other mediums, Rauschenberg restricted his palette to black and white in the earliest silkscreened paintings, introducing color once the series was well under way.

Rauschenberg's growing reputation as the leading artist of his generation was secured by his first solo museum exhibition, held in 1963 at the Jewish Museum in New York, and the Grand Prize for Painting awarded him the following year at the Venice Biennale. For the remainder of the decade, Rauschenberg devoted himself primarily to printmaking as well as to collaborative ventures in performance and technology-based art that emphatically moved him outside the studio.

During the 1960s, Rauschenberg's involvement in theater put him at the cutting edge of avant-garde dance. Not only did he augment his work, begun in the mid 1950s, as a set, costume, and lighting designer for the dance companies of Cunningham and Paul Taylor, but he worked as a choreographer and performer as well, largely through his involvement with the Judson Dance Theater, a loose collective of dancers and artists. As is characteristic of his art-making practice in all mediums, Rauschenberg's performance works incorporated the everyday and the unexpected: dancers often used ordinary, untrained movements, while stage sets were sometimes composed of found objects, Combines, and live decor in which human activity and stage props were indistinguishable. In his first choreographed piece, Pelican in 1963, for example, performers wearing roller skates and parachutes were referred to by one critic as human combines, and were accompanied by a sound collage including car horns, crickets, and telephones.

Fostering working relationships between artists and engineers was the founding principle of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), an organization established in 1966 by Rauschenberg with, among others, Bell Laboratories research scientist Billy Klüver. Electric and electronic devices, in the form of light bulbs and radios, had been incorporated into Rauschenberg's Combines already by the mid 1950s. It was through collaborations with engineers in the 1960s, however, that Rauschenberg was able to integrate light, sound, and motion into large-scale, interactive environments. Technological wizardry transformed sculptural works, such as Oracle (1962-65) and Soundings (1968) into highly performative installations, often triggered into action by audience participation.

With his move in 1970 from New York to Captiva, an island off the Gulf Coast of Florida, Rauschenberg cleared his palette. Retreating from urban imagery, he now favored an abstract idiom and the use of natural fibers, such as fabric and paper. The Cardboards (1971) and Venetians (1972-73) reveal his fascination with the inherent color, texture, and history of found materials. The beautiful and disparate effects of fabrics, ranging from cotton to satin, are explored in the Hoarfrosts (1974-75) and Jammers (1975-76). Collaborations at paper mills in France and India resulted in works in which paper pulp itself was elevated to an art form.

A mid-career retrospective was mounted in 1976 by the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., when Rauschenberg was selected to honor the American Bicentennial. Having the opportunity to reexamine his early work, the artist returned to past concerns. His Spreads (1975-82) and Scales (1977-81) incorporate transferred and screened images and assemblage, sometimes in room-scale installations.

Rauschenberg's early interest in photography was renewed in 1979 with his first collaboration with the Trisha Brown Company. His set design for Glacial Decoy (1979) comprised projections of his own black-and-white photographs. Several photography projects followed, including In + Out City Limits (1980-81), Photems (1981/1991), and Chinese Summerhall (1982-83), all of which reveal Rauschenberg's preference for common, street-level subjects. From this point forward, images incorporated into Rauschenberg's work in all mediums were drawn exclusively from his own photographs.

During the 1980s, Rauschenberg undertook two long-term projects. The first, The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece, is a work-in-progress, begun in 1981. This multipart work now consists of nearly 200 components measuring 1,000 feet and will span a quarter mile or more when finished. Retrospective in character, this piece is replete with references to his life and career, presenting past motifs and techniques as well as current trends in his art.

Between 1984 and 1991, the artist was actively engaged in Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI). The project was a tangible expression of his belief in the power of art and artistic collaboration to bring about social change on an international level and the culmination of his long-term commitment to human rights. For the project, Rauschenberg traveled to eleven countries around the world, exploring diverse cultures and local art-making practices. By mounting an exhibition of his work in each country, often where artistic experimentation had been suppressed, he sought to spark a dialogue and to achieve a mutual understanding through the creative process.

ROCI gave rise to an extraordinary and diverse body of work that, in turn, launched the metal painting and sculpture series begun in the mid 1980s. Having first painted and screened on copper for ROCI Chile in 1985, Rauschenberg over the next decade explored in several subsequent series the use of metal as a support for paint, tarnishes, enamel, and screenprinted images. Imagery and found objects often referred to Rauschenberg's travels, while reflective metallic surfaces mirrored the immediate surroundings of the works. The metal paintings have a wide range of effects, from the brilliantly colored enamels of the Urban Bourbons (1988-95) to the dark monochrome of the Night Shades (1991). The corroded browns and blue-greens of the Borealis series (1989-92) are reactions of the tarnishing agents, used as paints, against the brass, bronze, and copper grounds. Gluts, begun in 1986, are made from scrap-metal objects, such as gas station signs and automobile parts, that often lose their original identities when transformed into wall and freestanding sculptures.

Since 1992, Rauschenberg has used an Iris printer to make digital color prints of his photographs. It is this technology that allows for the high-resolution images and luminous hues in the recent large-scale works on paper, the Anagrams (1995-97)and the Anagrams [A Pun] (1997-present). In 1996, he transferred Iris prints to wet plaster in the Arcadian Retreats, a fresco series that provided him with an entirely new avenue of exploration. As he did nearly half a century ago, Rauschenberg continues to approach his art with a spirit of invention and with a quest for new materials, technologies, and ideas.

Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective encompasses the full breadth of this artist's remarkable achievements. The exhibition unfolds chronologically, in the museums second and third floor galleries, highlighting Rauschenberg's painting and sculpture while capturing his practice of working simultaneously in diverse mediums. Featured also are Rauschenberg's work as a draftsman, photographer, and printmaker, as well as his significant collaborations in the performing arts and technology-based work. Finally, The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece is shown for the first time in an uninterrupted space.

Julia Blaut, Assistant Curator

Exhibition Curators
The guest curators of the exhibition are Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, both of The Menil Collection, Houston. Walter Hopps was curator of Rauschenberg's mid-career retrospective at the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., in 1976, and of the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s, which traveled to the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in 1992-93.

Hopps and Davidson have organized Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective in collaboration with a curatorial team at the Guggenheim Museum that includes Nancy Spector, Curator, who is responsible for the segment of the exhibition devoted to Rauschenberg's performance-related activities; Julia Blaut, Assistant Curator; and Joan Young and Elizabeth Carpenter, Project Curatorial Assistants.

Catalogue
A fully illustrated, 632-page catalogue published by the Guggenheim Museum and distributed through Harry N. Abrams Inc. will accompany the exhibition.  It includes an introduction by Walter Hopps and essays by Trisha Brown, Ruth Fine, Billy Klüver with Julie Martin, Rosalind Krauss, Steve Paxton, Nancy Spector, and Charles F. Stuckey.  It is available in hardcover ($75) and softcover ($45) from the Guggenheim Museum Shop or by calling 800-329-6109.

Tour
Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective travels to The Menil Collection, Contemporary Arts Museum, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (February 13 - May 17, 1998); the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (June 27 - October 11, 1998); and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (November 21, 1998 - March 7, 1999).

Corporate Sponsors

Sponsorship Support In New York:

Philip Morris Companies Inc. is the worldwide sponsor of this exhibition.

Hugo Boss is the sponsor of this exhibition in as part of its long-term collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum.

This project is also supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sponsorship Support in Bilbao:

The exhibition in Bilbao has been made possible thanks to the generous sponsorship of Philip Morris Companies Inc.

"Philip Morris is pleased to be the worldwide sponsor of this major retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg's work," said Murray Bring, vice chairman, external affairs and general counsel, Philip Morris Companies Inc. "Robert Rauschenberg is a highly influential figure who has helped define the art of our time. In many ways, this exhibition is a perfect example of the spirit of innovation that has guided Philip Morris's 40-year commitment to the arts."

Joachim Vogt, Chairman and CEO of Hugo Boss stated, "Hugo Boss believes that art stimulates ideas, encourages open-mindedness, and helps to develop our corporate culture.  This is why we are especially proud to sponsor this retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg, an artist who has challenged conventions and forever changed our understanding of art.  It is a historic opportunity to honor this extraordinary artist, and to share his art with the public."

Since 1958, Philip Morris Companies Inc. has supported a broad spectrum of cultural programs that reflects the corporation's commitment to innovation and creativity.  Philip Morris's support of the arts focuses on contemporary and multicultural visual and performing arts, and is among the most comprehensive corporate cultural programs in the world.  Philip Morris Companies Inc. has a tradition of sponsoring innovative contemporary art exhibitions, many of which featured works by Robert Rauschenberg, including Masterpieces from the Permanent Collection, organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1992, and Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition,1955-62, organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1993. Philip Morris has provided funding for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum since 1978.

Philip Morris Companies Inc. has five principal operating companies: Kraft Foods, Inc.; Miller Brewing Company; Philip Morris Incorporated (PhilipMorris U.S.A.); Philip Morris International Inc.; and Philip Morris Capital Corporation.

Hugo Boss entered into a long-term association with the Guggenheim Museum in 1995 to provide substantial support for a range of exhibitions,educational programming, and special projects.  The company has sponsored several major exhibitions at the Guggenheim including retrospectives of Ross Bleckner and Georg Baselitz, both in 1995, and Ellsworth Kelly, in1996-97.

Since its inception, the Hugo Boss partnership with the Guggenheim has explored new territory that goes beyond the limits of traditional arts sponsorship, including the inauguration in 1996 of the $50,000 biannual HUGO BOSS PRIZE.  Conceived as an international award recognizing significant achievement in contemporary art, the prize offers support to individual artists and brings new developments in art to the attention of a broad audience.  In 1997, The Salzburg Festival, one of the world's most celebrated performing arts festivals, was presented for the first time in New York as part of the ongoing collaboration between Hugo Boss and the Guggenheim Museum.  This inaugural presentation showcased world-class performers in both traditional and contemporary works of music,opera, and theater.

Hugo Boss's commitment to the Guggenheim reflects its belief that creativity and innovation are values shared by the art and business communities.