Robert Rauschenberg's Combines

Last Sunday I went to see the Robert Rauschenberg exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was bitterly cold out so the crowds were small. But that didn’t stop the people who did show up to be so annoying. A guy was leaning on the wall and drumming his fingers. So distracting. People were shuffling their feet from painting to painting, blocking my view and slowing me down at every turn. So I wasn't in the best mood to see art. Plus I‘m not into collage work and this show didn’t change my mind. It was difficult for me to get into his combines. It looked messy. Maybe it was the captions too. They kept describing the source materials he was using. A striped tie, a newspaper with a large red letter "A", an old quilt. But this was beside the point. Bob was using the objects not for their contents but for their shapes and colors. I do realize that he was exploring Abstract Expressionism the hard way. Not by starting with abstract paint strokes but by working with recognizable objects and legible text and images and stripping them of the contents. He was forcing the viewer not to see the objects literally.

Towards the end of the exhibit I saw the Rauschenberg that I love. This room housed The Summer Rentals series, Pilgrim and Reservoir. Maybe because it spoke to my personal aesthetics. A white background with a centralized collage of printed letters and bold colored oil paint.

Some things I learned about Bob:

• His real name is Milton.
• He studied under Joseph Albers who taught him to use objects abstractly. Stripped of all content except for their shapes and colors.
• He didn’t know there was such a job as an artist until he saw Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy in the museum. Previously he just knew the image from the back of a deck of playing cards.

We published his bio Off the Wall to coincide with this exhibit. Rebus, the painting we used of the cover is not part of this show but is at the MoMA. Erin designed the cover and her book was displayed all over the gift shop as if it was on exhibit. She even got to meet him. Afterwards, I met her to just say hi. Of course that turned into 6 hours, two dinners and many drinks later.