GHOSTSof

the

NEWYORK

GHOSTSof

the

NEWYORK

featuringROY LICHTENSTEINTOM WESSELMAN

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIETROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

featuringROY LICHTENSTEINTOM WESSELMAN

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIETROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

“I think we’re much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there’s

another purpose to it”.

R OY LICHTENSTEIN WAS BORN IN NEW YORK City ON October 27, 1923, the son of Milton and Beatrice Werner Lichtenstein. His father owned a real estate firm. Lichtenstein studied with artist Reginald Marsh (1898–1954) at the Art Students League in 1939. After graduating from Benjamin Franklin High School in New York City, he entered Ohio State University. However, in 1943 his educa-tion was interrupted by three years of army service, during which he drew up maps for planned troop movements across Germany during World War II (1939–45; a war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States fought against Germany, Japan, and Italy). Lichtenstein received his bachelor of fine arts degree from Ohio State Univer-sity in 1946 and a master of fine arts degree in 1949. He taught at Ohio State until 1951, then went to Cleveland, Ohio, to work. In 1957 he started teach-ing at Oswego State College in New York; in 1960 he moved to Rutgers University in New Jersey. Three years later he gave up teaching to paint full-time.

IN THE CAR1963

Ghosts of New York / Roy Lichtenstein

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F rom 1951 to about 1957 Lichten-stein’s paintings dealt with themes of the American West—cowboys, Native Americans, and the like—in a style similar to that of modern European painters. Next he began hiding im-ages of comic strip figures (such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Bugs Bunny) in his paintings. By 1961 he had created the images for which he became known. These included advertisement illustrations—com-mon objects such as string, golf balls, kitchen curtains, slices of pie, or a hot dogs. He also used other artists’ works to create new pieces, such as Woman with Flowered Hat (1963), based on a reproduction of a work by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). He also created versions of paintings by Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), Gilbert Stu-art’s (1755–1828) portrait of George Washington (1732–1799), and Claude Monet’s (1840–1926) haystacks.

Lichtenstein was best known for his paintings based on comic strips, with their themes of passion, ro-mance, science fiction, violence, and war. In these paintings, Lichtenstein uses the commercial art methods: projectors magnify spray-gun stencils, creating dots to make the pictures look like newspaper cartoons seen through a magnifying glass. In the late 1960s he turned to design ele-ments and the commercial art of the 1930s, as if to explore the history of pop art (a twentieth-century art movement that uses everyday items). In 1966 his work was included in the Venice (Italy) Biennale art show. In 1969 New York’s Guggenheim Museum gave a large exhibition of his work. The 1970s saw Lichtenstein continuing to experiment with new styles. His “mirror” paintings consist of sphere-shaped canvases with areas of color and dots. One of these, Self-

Portrait (1978), is similar to the work of artist René Magritte (1898–1967) in its playful placement of a mir-ror where a human head should be. Lichtenstein also created a series of still lifes (paintings that show inanimate objects) in differ-ent styles during the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lichten-stein began to mix and match styles. Often his works relied on optical (relating to vision) tricks, drawing his viewers into a debate over the nature of “reality.” The works were always marked by Lichtenstein’s trademark sense of humor and the absurd.

“ LICHTENSTEIN WAS BEST KNOWN FOR HIS PAINTINGS BASED ON

COMIC STRIPS, WITH THEIR THEMES OF PASSION, RO-MANCE, SCIENCE FICTION,

VIOLENCE, AND WAR . ”

LICHTENSTEIN’S LONG CAREER AND large body of work brought him appreciation as one of America’s greatest living artists. In 1994 he designed a painting for the hull of the United States entry in the America’s Cup yacht race. A series of sea-themed works followed. In 1995 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art launched a traveling exhibition, “The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein,” which covered more than twenty years of his work in this medium. In a 1996 exhibition at New York City’s Leo Castelli gallery, Lichtenstein unveiled a series of paintings, “Landscapes in the Chinese Style,” which consisted of delicate “impres-sions” of traditional Chinese landscape paint-ings. The series was praised for its restraint (control), as common Lichtenstein elements, such as the use of dots to represent mass, were used to support the compositions rather than to declare an individual style. Lichtenstein died on September 29, 1997, in New York City, at the age of seventy-three. Lichtenstein began to find fame not just in America but worldwide. He moved back to New York to be at the center of the art scene and resigned from Rutgers University in 1964 to concentrate on his painting. Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in his best known works, such as Drowning Girl (1963), which was appropriated from the lead story in DC Comics’ Secret Hearts #83. (Drowning Girl now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.) Also featuring thick outlines, bold colors and Ben-Day dots to represent certain colors, as if created by photographic reproduc-tion. Lichtenstein would say of his own work: Abstract Expressionists “put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to the color positions and sizes. My style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don’t come out looking calligraphic, like Pollock’s or Kline’s.” Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackled the way mass media portrays them. Lichtenstein would never take himself too seriously however: “I think my work is different from comic strips- but I wouldn’t call it transformation; I don’t think that whatever is meant by it is important to art”. When his work was first released, many art critics of the time challenged its original-ity. More often than not they were making no

attempt to be positive. Lichtenstein responded to such claims by offering responses such as the following: “The closer my work is to the original, the more threatening and critical the content. However, my work is entirely trans-formed in that my purpose and perception are entirely different. I think my paintings are critically trans-formed, but it would be difficult to prove it by any rational line of argument”. He discussed experiencing this heavy criticism in interview with April Bernard and Mimi Thompson in 1986. Suggesting that it was at times difficult to be criticized, Lichtenstein said, “I don’t doubt when I’m actually painting, it’s the criticism that makes you wonder, it does.” His most famous image is arguably Whaam! (1963, Tate Modern, London), one of the earliest known examples of pop art, adapted a comic-book panel from a 1962 issue of DC Comics’ All-American Men of War. The painting depicts a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane, with a red-and-yellow explosion. The cartoon style is height-ened by the use of the onomatopoeic lettering “Whaam!” and the boxed caption “I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky...” This diptych is large in scale, measuring 1.7 x 4.0 m (5 ft 7 in x 13 ft 4 in). Most of his best-known artworks are relatively close, but not exact, copies of comic book pan-els, a subject he largely abandoned in 1965. (He would occasionally incorporate comics into his work in different ways in later decades.) These panels were originally drawn by such comics artists as Jack Kirby and DC Comics artists Russ Heath, Tony Abruzzo, Irv Novick, and Jer-ry Grandenetti, who rarely received any credit. Jack Cowart, executive director of the Lichten-stein Foundation, contests the notion that Lich-tenstein was a copyist, saying: “Roy’s work was a wonderment of the graphic formulae and the codification of sentiment that had been worked out by others. The panels were changed in scale, color, treatment, and in their implications.

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“ I DON’T DOUBT WHEN I’M ACTUALLY PAINTING, IT’S THE CRITICISM THAT MAKES YOU WONDER, IT

DOES. ”

DR. WALDMANN1979

BRUSHSTROKE1965

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Ghosts of New York / Roy Lichtenstein

In 1967, his first museum retrospective exhibition was held at the Pasadena Art Museum in California. Also in this year, his first solo exhibition in Europe was held at museums in Amsterdam, London, Bern and Hannover. He married his second wife, Dorothy Herzka in 1968. In the 1970s and 1980s, his style began to loosen and he expanded on what he had done before. He pro-duced a series of “Artists Studios” which incorporated elements of his previous work. A notable example being Artist’s Studio, Look Mickey (1973, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis) which incorporates five other previous works, fitted into the scene. In the late 1970s, this style was replaced with more surreal works such as Pow Wow (1979, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen). In 1977, he was commissioned by BMW to paint a Group 5 Racing Version of the BMW 320i for the third installment in the BMW Art Car Project. In addition to paintings, he also made sculptures in metal and plastic including some notable public sculp-tures such as Lamp in St. Mary’s, Georgia in 1978, and over 300 prints, mostly in screenprinting. In 1996 the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. became the largest single repository of the artist’s work when he donated 154 prints and 2 books. In total there are some 4,500 works thought to be in circulation.He died of pneumonia in 1997 at New York University Medical Center. He was survived by his second wife, Dorothy, and by his sons, David and Mitchell, from his first marriage. The DreamWorks Records logo was his last completed project. “I’m not in the business of doing anything like that (a corporate logo) and don’t intend to do it again,” allows Lichtenstein. “But I know Mo Ostin and David Geffen and it seemed interesting.” Pop art continues to influence the 21st century. Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol were used in U2’s 1997, 1998 PopMart Tour and in an exhibition in 2007 at the British National Portrait Gallery. Among many other works of art destroyed in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, a painting from Lichtenstein’s The Entablature Series was destroyed in the subsequent fire. His work Crying Girl was one of the artworks brought to life in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.

“ I’M NOT IN THE BUSINESS OF DOING ANYTHING LIKE THAT (A CORPORATE LOGO) AND DON’T

INTEND TO DO IT AGAIN,” ALLOWS LICHTENSTEIN. “BUT I KNOW MO OSTIN AND DAVID GEFFEN AND IT

SEEMED INTERESTING. ”

TOM WESSELMANN

“I’d never painted anything before. I was quite content to take other people’s work since I didn’t care anyway

about the subject matter. I approached subject matter as a scoundrel. I had nothing to say about it whatsoever. I only

wanted to make these exciting paintings”.

F ROM 1949 TO 1951 HE ATTENDED COLLEGE IN Ohio; first at Hiram College, and then trans-ferred to major in Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. He was drafted into the US Army in 1952, but spent his service years stateside. During

that time he made his first cartoons, and became interested in pursuing a career in cartooning. After his discharge he com-pleted his psychology degree in 1954, whereupon he began to study drawing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He achieved some initial success when he sold his first cartoon strips to the magazines 1000 Jokes and True. Cooper Union accepted him in 1956, and he continued his studies in New York. During a visit to the MoMA he was in-spired by the Robert Motherwell painting Elegy to the Spanish Republic: “The first aesthetic experience… He felt a sensation of high visceral excitement in his stomach, and it seemed as though his eyes and stomach were directly connected”. Wesselmann also admired the work of Willem de Koon-ing, but he soon rejected action painting: “He realized he had to find his own passion he felt he had to deny to himself all that he loved in de Kooning, and go in as opposite a direction as possible.”

Ghosts of New York / Tom Wesselman

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After graduation Wesselmann became one of the founding members of the Judson Gallery, along with Marc Ratliff and Jim Dine, also from Cincinnati, who had just arrived in New York. He and Ratliff showed a number of small collages in a two-man exhibition at Judson Gallery. He began to teach art at a public school in Brooklyn, and later at the High School of Art and Design. Wesselmann’s series Great American Nude (begun 1961) first brought him to the attention of the art world. After a dream concerning the phrase “red, white, and blue”, he decided to paint a Great American Nude in a palette limited to those colors and any colors associated with patriotic motifs such as gold and khaki. The series incorporated representational images with an accordingly patriotic theme, such as American landscape photos and portraits of founding fathers. Often these images were col-laged from magazines and discarded post-ers, which called for a larger format than Wesselmann had used previously. As works began to approach a giant scale he ap-proached advertisers directly to acquire billboards. Through Henry Geldzahler Wes-selmann met Alex Katz, who offered him a show at the Tanager Gallery. Wesselmann’s first solo show was held there later that year, representing both the large and small Great American Nude collages. In 1962 Richard Bellamy offered him a one-man exhibition at the Green Gallery. About the same time, Ivan Karp of the Leo Castelli Gallery put Wesselmann in touch with several collec-tors and talked to him about Roy Lichten-stein and James Rosenquist’s works. These Wesselmann viewed without noting any

STILL LIFE #201962

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The Sidney Janis Gallery held the New Realists exhibition in November 1962, which included works by the American artists Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, George Se-gal, and Andy Warhol; and Europeans such as Arman, Enrico Baj, Christo, Yves Klein, Tano Festa, Mimmo Rotella, Jean Tinguely, and Mario Schifano. It followed the Nouveau Réalisme exhibition at the Galerie Rive Droite in Paris, and marked the international debut of the artists who soon gave rise to what came to be called Pop Art in Britain and The United States and Nouveau Réalisme on the European continent. Wesselmann took part in the New Realist show with some reservations, exhibiting two 1962 works: Still life #17 and Still life #22. Wesselmann never liked his inclusion in American Pop Art, pointing out how he made an aesthetic use of everyday objects and not a criticism of them as consumer objects: “I dislike labels in general and ‘Pop’ in particular, espe-cially because it overemphasizes the material used. There does seem to be a tendency to use similar materials and images, but the different ways they are used denies any kind of group intention”. That year, Wesselmann had begun working on a new series of still lifes. experimenting with assemblage as well as collage. In Still Life #28 he included a television set that was turned on, “interested in the competitive demands that a TV, with moving images and giving off light and sound, can make on painted portions”. He

concentrated on the juxtapositions of different elements and depictions, which were at the time truly exciting for him: “Not just the differences between what they were, but the aura each had with it... A painted pack of cigarettes next to a painted apple wasn’t enough for me. They are both the same kind of thing. But if one is from a cigarette ad and the other a painted apple, they are two different reali-ties and they trade on each other... This kind of relationship helps establish a momentum throughout the pic-ture... At first glance, my pictures seem well behaved, as if – that is a still life, O.K. But these things have such crazy give-and-take that I feel they get really very wild”. He married Claire Selley in November 1963. In 1964 Ben Birillo, an artist and business partner of gallery owner Paul Bianchi-ni, contacted Wesselmann and other Pop artists with the goal of organizing The American Supermarket at the Bianchini Gallery in New York. This was an installation of a large super-market where Pop works (Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup, Watts’s colored wax eggs etc.)were shown among real food and neon signs. In the same

year Wesselmann began working on landscapes, including one that includes the noise of a Volkswagen starting up. The first shaped canvas nudes also appeared this year. His works in these years: Great American Nude #53, Great American Nude #57, show an accentuated, more explicit, sensuality, as though celebrating the rediscovered sexual fulfilment of

his new relation-ship. He carried on working on his landscapes, but also made the Great American Nude #82, rework-ing the nude in a third dimension not defined by drawn lines but by medium: molded plexiglass modeled on the female fig-ure, then painted. His compositional focus also became more daring,

narrowing down to isolate a single detail: the Mouth series began in 1965, his Seascapes be-gan the following year. Two other new subjects also appeared: Bedroom Painting , and Smoker Study, the latter of which developed from ob-servation of his model for the Mouth series. The Smoker Study series of works would become one of the most recurrent themes in the 1970s.

OLYMPISCHE SPIELE1972

Ghosts of New York / Tom Wesselman

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“ I DISLIKE LABELS IN GENERAL AND ‘POP’ IN

PARTICULAR, ESPECIALLY BECAUSE IT OVEREM-

PHASIZES THE MATERIAL USED. ”

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Ghosts of New York / Tom Wesselman

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In 1980 Wesselmann published the monograph Tom Wesselmann, an autobiography written under the pseudonym Slim Stealingworth. His second daughter, Kate, was born; pre-vious children were Jenny and Lane.In 1983 Wesselmann was seized by the idea of doing a drawing in steel, as if the lines on paper could be lifted off and placed on a wall. Once in place the drawings appeared to be drawn directly on the wall. This idea preceded the available technology for lasers to mechanically cut metal with the ac-curacy Wesselmann needed. He had to invest in the development of a system that could accomplish this, but it took another year for that to be ready. The incorporation of negative space that had begun in the Drop-Out series was continued into a new medium and format. They started out as works in black and white, enabling him to redevelop the theme of the nude and its composition.[15] Wesselmann took his idea further and decided to make them in color as well. As well as colored metal nudes, in 1984 he started working on rapid landscape sketches that were then enlarged and fabricated in aluminum. Obliged by the use of metals to experiment with various techniques, Wesselmann cut works in aluminum by hand; for steel he researched and developed the first artistic use of laser-cut metal. Computerized imaging had not yet been developed. His metal works continued to go through a constant metamorpho-sis: My Black Belt, 1990, a seventies subject, acquired a new vivacity that forcefully defined space in the new me-dium. The Drawing Society produced a video directed by Paul Cummings in which Wesselmann makes a portrait of a model and a work in aluminum.“Since 1993 I’ve basically been an ab-stract painter. This is what happened: in 1984 I started making steel and aluminum cut-out figures... One day I got muddled up with the remnants and I was struck by the infinite variety of abstract possibilities. That was when I understood I was going back to what I had desperately been aiming for in 1959, and I started making abstract three-dimensional images in cut metal. I was happy and free to go back to what I wanted: but this time not on De Kooning’s terms but on mine”.

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

“I don’t listen to what art critics say. I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is. ”.

BORN IN NEW YORK, THE FIRST OF THREE CHILDREN to Matilde Andrades (July 28, 1934–November 17,2008) and Gerard Basquiat (born 1930). He had two younger sisters: Lisane, born in 1964, and Jeanine, born in 1967. His father, Gerard Basquiat, was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and his mother, Matilde Basquiat, was of Puerto Rican descent, born in Brooklyn, New York. Basquiat was a preco-cious child who learned how to read and write by a was a gifted artist. His teachers noticed his artistic abilities, and his mother encouraged her son’s artistic talent. By the age of eleven, Bas-quiat could fluently speak, read, and write French, Spanish and English. In September 1968, Basquiat was hit by a car while play-ing in the street. His arm was broken and he suffered several internal injuries, and eventually underwent a splenectomy. His parents separated that same year and he and his sisters were raised by their father. The family resided in Boerum Hill, Brook-lyn, for five years, then moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1974. After two years, they returned to New York City.

B

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At 15, Basquiat ran away from home. He slept on park benches in Washington Square Park, and was arrested and returned to the care of his father within a week. Basquiat dropped out of City As School in the tenth grade. His father banished him from the household and Basquiat stayed with friends in Brooklyn. He supported himself by selling T-shirts and homemade post cards. He also worked at the Unique Clothing Warehouse in West Broadway, Manhattan. In 1976, Basquiat and friends Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson began spray-painting graffiti on buildings in Lower Manhattan, working under the pseudonym SAMO. The designs featured inscribed messages such as “Plush safe he think.. SAMO” and “SAMO as an escape clause.” On December 11, 1978, the Village Voice published an article about the graffiti. The SAMO project ended with the epitaph “SAMO IS DEAD,” inscribed on the walls of SoHo buildings in 1979. In 1979, Basquiat appeared on the live Public-access television cable TV show TV Party hosted by Glenn O’Brien, and the two started a friendship. Basquiat made regular appearances on the show over the

next few years. That same year, Basquiat formed the noise rock band Gray with Shannon Dawson, Michael Holman, Nick Taylor, Wayne Clifford and Vincent Gallo. Gray performed at nightclubs such as Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, Hurrah, and the Mudd Club. In 1980, Basquiat starred in the O’Brien’s independent film Downtown 81, originally titled New York Beat. That same year, O’Brien introduced Basquiat to Andy Warhol, with whom he later collaborated. The film featured some of Gray’s record-ings on its soundtrack. He also appeared in the Blondie music video “Rapture” as a nightclub disc jockey. In June 1980, Basquiat participated in The Times Square Show, a multi-artist exhibition sponsored by Collaborative Projects Incorporated (Colab) and Fashion Moda. In 1981, Rene Ricard published “The Radiant Child” in Artforum magazine, which brought Basquiat to the attention of the art world. In late 1981, he joined the Annina Nosei gallery in SoHo, Manhattan. By 1982, Basquiat was showing regularly alongside Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi, involved with the Neo-expressionist movement.

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H e briefly dated then-aspiring performer Madonna in late 1982. That same year, Basquiat

also worked briefly with musician and artist David Bowie. Basquiat painted in Armani suits, and often appeared in public in the same paint-splattered $1,000 suits. By 1986, Basquiat had left the Annina Nosei gallery, and was showing in the famous Mary Boone gallery in SoHo. On February 10, 1986, he appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a feature entitled “New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist”. He was a successful artist in this period, however his growing heroin addiction began to interfere with his personal rela-tionships. When Andy Warhol died on February 22, 1987, Basquiat became increasingly isolated, and his heroin addiction and depression grew more severe. Despite an attempt at sobriety during a trip to Maui, Hawaii, Basquiat died on August 12, 1988, of a heroin overdose at his art studio in Great Jones Street in New York City’s NoHo neighborhood. He was 27. Continuing his activities as a graffiti artist, Basquiat often incorporated words into his paintings. Before his career as a painter began, he produced punk-inspired postcards for sale on the street, and become known for the political–poetical graffiti under the name of SAMO. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriend’s dress with the words “Little Shit Brown”. He would often draw on random objects and surfaces. The conjunction of various media is an integral element of Basquiat’s art. His paintings are typically covered with text and codes of all kinds: words, letters, nu-merals, pictograms, logos, map symbols,

diagrams and more. A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multi-panel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, col-lage and imagery. The years 1984-85 were also the main period of the Basquiat–War-hol collaborations, even if, in general, they weren’t very well received by the critics.A major reference source used by Basquiat throughout his career was the book Gray’s Anatomy, which his mother gave to him while in the hospital at age seven. It re-mained influential in his depictions of in-ternal human anatomy, and in its mixture of image and text. Other major sources were Henry Dreyfuss Symbol Sourcebook, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks, and Brentjes African Rock Art. Basquiat doodled often and some of his later pieces exhibited this; they were often colored pencil on paper with a loose, spontaneous, and dirty style much like his paintings. According to Andrea Frohne, Bas-quiat’s 1983 painting “Untitled (History of the Black People)” “reclaims Egyptians as African and subverts the concept of ancient Egypt as the cradle of Western Civilization”. At the center of the painting, Basquiat depicts an Egyptian boat being guided down the Nile River by Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. On the right panel of the painting appear the words “Esclave, Slave, Esclave”. Two letters of the word “Nile” are crossed out and Frohne suggests that, “The letters that are wiped out and scribbled over perhaps reflect the acts of historians who have conveniently forgotten that Egyptians were black and blacks were enslaved.” On the left panel of the painting Basquiat, has illustrated two Nubian style masks.

Ghosts of New York / Jean-Michel Basquiat

“ BASQUIAT PAINTED IN ARMANI SUITS, AND OFTEN APPEARED IN PUBLIC IN THE SAME PAINT-SPLATTERED $1,000 SUITS. ”

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Ghosts of New York / Jean-Michel Basquiat

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

ROBERT “I was much happier when I had less responsibility... when

my only responsibility was to my work and to myself ”.

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BMW 635 CSi FOR THE “ART CAR PROJECT”1986

Ghosts of New York / Robert Rauschenberg

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An American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expres-sionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, but he also worked with

photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1993. Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City as well as on Captiva Island, Florida until his death from heart failure on May 12, 2008. Rauschenberg was born as Milton Ernest Rauschen-berg in Port Arthur, Texas, the son of Dora and Ernest Rauschenberg. His father was of German and Cherokee ances-try and his mother of Anglo-Saxon descent. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians. Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris, France, where he met the painter Susan Weil. In 1948 Rauschenberg and Weil decided to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Josef Albers originally of the Bauhaus school became Rauschenberg’s painting instructor at Black Mountain. Albers’ preliminary courses relied on strict discipline that did not allow for any “uninfluenced experimentation”. Rauschenberg described Albers as influencing him to do “exactly the reverse” of what he was being taught. From 1949 to 1952 Rauschenberg studied with Vaclav Vyt-lacil and Morris Kantor at the Art Students League of New York, where he met fellow artists Knox Martin and Cy Twombly.

Rauschenberg married Susan Weil in 1950. Their only child, Christopher, was born July 16, 1951. They divorced in 1953. According to a 1987 oral history by the composer Morton Feld-man, after the end of his marriage, Rauschenberg had romantic relationships with fellow artists Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns. An article by Jonathan D. Katz states that Rauschenberg’s affair with Twombly began during his marriage to Susan Weil. Rauschenberg died on May 12, 2008, on Captiva Island, Florida.He died of heart failure after a personal decision to go off life support, Rauschenberg is survived by his partner of 25 years, artist Darryl Pottorf, his former assistant. Rauschenberg is also survived by his son, photographer Christopher Rauschen-berg, and his sister, Janet Begneaud.Rauschenberg’s will, filed in Probate Court on October 9, 2008, names his charitable foundation as a major beneficiary, along with Pottorf, Christopher Rauschenberg, Begneaud, his nephew Byron Richard Begneaud, and Susan Weil Kirschenbaum. The amounts to be given to the beneficiaries are not named, but the estate is “worth millions,” said Pottorf, who is also executor of the estate.A memorial exhibition of photographs opened October 22, 2008, (on the occasion of what would have been his 83rd birth-day) and closed November 5, 2008 at the Guggenheim Museum.

BMW 635 CSi FOR THE “ART CAR PROJECT”1986

From the beginning, Rauschenberg’s work contained nontraditional materials, was exhibited in a nontraditional setting, and refused categorization. Although he rejected the serious, self-important, personal emotionality of the abstract expressionist painters, his brushwork is expressive and emotive. His incorporation of mundane objects-such as bed linens, license plates, or tires-into his assemblages heavily influenced the growth of pop art and neo-dadaism in the 1960s, but the effect is neither banal and cynical like pop, nor deliberately chaotic and negative like dada. Unlike his contemporaries Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg’s restless inventive-ness makes his works difficult to categorize. He has always been willing to explore new possibili-ties, including combining paintings with music or performance, and using blue-prints, electron-ics, silkscreen and-most recently-ephemeral materials such as cardboard in his paintings. Rauschenberg ‘s work is contradictory. He sees the artist as a participant or reporter rather than a creator, but the stamp of his style and personality is evident in each of his paintings. Though his is an art of the concept, the idea, there is evident enjoyment in his engagement with the me-dium of expression and the material world. Whatever the judgment of later generations, Robert Rauschen-berg is regarded as a tremendously influential force in twentieth-century art.

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“ RAUSCHENBERG’S RESTLESS INVENTIVENESS MAKES HIS WORK

DIFFICULT TO CATEGORIZE. ”