The one who painted with socks Hannes Hintermeier reviews the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition in Krems
Why a trip to the banks of the Danube is well worth it.
The 100th birthday of American painter Robert Rauschenberg—who was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1925 and died on Captiva Island, Florida, in 2008—was marked by a global commemorative tour. Following the opening in Munich, exhibitions were held in Cologne, New York, Houston, Madrid, and Hong Kong. Each show had its own thematic focus. The small ‘art hub’ of Krems on the Danube is now the final European stop. The local Kunsthalle is presenting the 20th-century master as the first-ever Rauschenberg retrospective in Austria.
It took three years of persuasion to bring the show to Krems, says the director of the Kunsthalle, Florian Steininger. He also curated the exhibition, which features around 60 paintings, prints, sculptures, and videos. The works on display were gathered primarily from private collections in Germany, France, and Denmark. The Ropac gallery was involved in bringing the exhibition to fruition, as was the Rauschenberg Foundation, based in Manhattan.
In the gray-white halls of the former tobacco factory, paintings from the 1950s mark the beginning of the exhibition. Rauschenberg was new to the game – his first gallery exhibition took place in New York in 1951. In 1953, he made a splash with “Erased de Kooning Drawing,” an erased drawing that Willem de Kooning had given him and that his partner Jasper Johns framed in gold. With this, he signalled both his departure from Abstract Expressionism and his role as a bridge – rooted in Dadaism and inspired by Schwitters – to the artists of Pop Art. With his “transfer drawings,” he developed a method that created images through abrasion, similar to a scratch-off tattoo: newspaper clippings are transferred onto various surfaces using water or chemicals and then worked on with either a ballpoint pen or a brush. The works known as “combines” integrate cardboard and metal into the picture plane, extending the image into space. True to Rauschenberg’s motto: “A pair of socks is just as suitable for a painting as wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric.”
