Happy 100th Mirthday, Robert Rauschenberg The artist's centennial is being celebrated with more than 30 exhibitions around the globe

By Deborah Solomon

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The artist, who died in 2008 at age 82, would have turned 100 this month, and his centennial is being celebrated with fitting exuberance and visual overload. More than 30 exhibitions of his work can be seen around the globe. None of the shows constitutes a definitive retrospective, although the scrappy, piecemeal approach makes sense for an artist who bestowed a new majesty on everyday fragments. His paintings combined images, objects and things-that-didn’t-look-like-art decades before clever remixing became the main mission of contemporary culture.

In Manhattan alone, four exhibitions are zeroing in on different aspects of his fiendishly faceted career. On upper Fifth Avenue, the Museum of the City of New York is showcasing an underknown body of the artist’s black-and-white photographs, while the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, starting Friday, is rehanging his “Barge,” a justly historic silk-screen painting. Downtown, Rauschenberg’s passionate environmentalism — he designed the official poster for the first Earth Day, in 1970 — is the subject of a show at the Grey Art Museum at New York University. In the Chelsea galleries, the artist’s inordinately inventive work in prints and multiples, which once led him to create an edition of tall cardboard doors that come with hinges and are actually functional, can be seen at Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl.