Robert Rauschenberg

Early in the career of American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), critics derided his work as “Dada shenanigans,” but this muscular exhibition catalogue, occasioned by a major retrospective (organized by London’s Tate Modern and New York’s Museum of Modern Art), demonstrates that his art had breadth, depth, and lasting cultural resonance. Edited by Dickerman, a curator at MoMA, and Borchardt-Hume, the director of operations at the Tate, this book’s 18 brief, chronologically arranged essays trace the trajectory of Rauschenberg’s career from his formative years at Black Mountain College in North Carolina to his final years of experimentation with digital media. The authors reveal that his works, far from random, were often deeply suffused with social commentary. His Glut series from 1986 to 1995 responded to both the Texas oil crisis of the 1980s and information overload. And his ambitious series of 34 illustrations for Dante’s Inferno used the process of solvent transfer to brazenly people the cantos of Dante’s Hell with relevant contemporary social and political figures appropriated from the newspaper (Nixon, for example, appears in the circle of violence against neighbors). In an effort to initiate cross-cultural dialogue across diverse ideological borders, Rauschenberg launched the Overseas Culture Interchange, a traveling series of exhibitions in which Communist, totalitarian, and developing nations shared their art with one another. Lavishly illustrated, this is a sumptuously and beautifully produced catalogue of an artist who managed to speak to real-world issues by appropriating the overlooked detritus of everyday life. 436 color illus. [em](May) [/em]