Artist Quotation

"Though never less than perfectly composed, Mr. Rauschenberg's montages seem to defy any sense of deeper meaning or higher order. With occasional exceptions, like the alligators in ''Homestead,'' most of what you see is what you might notice or, as often as not, overlook while passing through any American city or town: cars, trucks and trailers; commercial signs, street signs and handmade signs; street intersections and traffic barriers; flea markets and boarded up stores; construction and demolition sites; rubble and trash; bicycles, fire hydrants, drain spouts and manhole covers.

The random dissonance of all this can be irritating. Art, you may feel, ought to organize, harmonize, transform and otherwise redeem the chaotic reality on which it draws for subject matter. But Mr. Rauschenberg has always resisted such traditional imperatives. He banishes the usual consolations: fantasy, illusionism, personal expression, idealism and metaphysics. He has wanted his art to be not a transcendentalist escape from the empirical mess of reality but co-extensive with it.

This can feel like a deprivation. But people who travel to the show may find upon returning home that they have the uncanny experience of seeing Rauschenbergs everywhere they look. effect: at its best Mr. Rauschenberg's art returns us to the mundane world from which we are always inclined to drift away."

Published in ART REVIEW, March 19, 2004, 'Under Rauschenberg's Spell, Mundane Turns Uncanny' By KEN JOHNSON © New York Times

Robert Rauschenberg, with the assistance of Terry Van Brunt, working on drawings in the artist's studio in Captiva Island, Florida, circa 1980.

© Terry van Brunt. Reproduction of image allowed by kind permission of Gary L.Haller, Master Jonathan Edwards College, Yale University, New Haven Connecticut.