Rauschenberg

A personal appreciation on the occasion of Robert Rauschenberg's death

I was born in 1951, a clean slate, the same year Robert Rauschenberg accomplished his famous series of white interactive paintings. It seems to me he has been inter-filling my mind in ever since; though we never met.

I was trying to remember how I first became aware of his work: but of course it was through the mechanically reproduced. As a freshman at
Hinsdale High School I purchased a copy of Calvin Tomkins’s book "Ahead of the Game" (I still own it! – the cover incorporates "L.H.O.O.Q." by Marcel
Duchamp), in which Rauschenberg was introduced to me via Duchamp, John Cage and Jean Tinguely. I think I had been prepared to become devoted to his combination-permutation sensibility because I had been highly excited, as a 10 year old boy, by the Dada collages I had discovered in the Max Ernst exhibition I saw the summer of 1961 at the Art Institute of Chicago.