How Robert Rauschenberg Made the Real Realer
When Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) enrolled at Black Mountain College, in 1948, ravenous to learn everything he could about art in general and about the art that he wanted to make, the photographer and curator Beaumont Newhall and his wife, Nancy, a photography critic, had recently been in residence there. Curators pop up in famous artists’ biographies all the time, usually as handmaidens to the creator’s genius, opening a door to a gallery here or supporting a grant application there. But the Newhalls were, by then, stars in their own right; in 1940, Beaumont had helped found the Museum of Modern Art’s department of photography and had become its first curator, and, while he served in the military during the Second World War, Nancy had taken his place.
Looking at the photographs in the current show “Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World” (curated by Sean Corcoran, at the Museum of the City of New York, through April 19th) made me want to know more about Rauschenberg’s education. Although there’s no evidence that he met the Newhalls during his time at Black Mountain, I trust Rauschenberg’s eye: he wasn’t the kind of person to miss anything. He would have been well aware of Newhall’s recent tenure and of his eminent place in the art world, a world he wanted to belong to, and I believe that he would have been interested enough by Newhall’s images to tuck them away in his mind for future reference or inspiration. What I suspect he would have liked in Newhall’s photographs—“Cape Cod” (1941), for instance, a shot of a sand dune with spiky growths piercing its surface, or “Souvenir of Chatham” (1941), an image of a depot and a truck near train tracks a few hours from New York City—is their stillness. Rauschenberg, throughout his career, regarded stillness as a form of energy; for someone as kinetic as he was, stillness was a non-native force, attractive though not always easy to achieve. Or attractive because it wasn’t easy.
A photograph that Rauschenberg took while at Black Mountain, “Untitled (Interior of an Old Carriage)” (1949), has a similar stillness and silence. It shows the seat of an open carriage, shot from the front, in black-and-white. The image is tightly cropped, the carriage wheels slightly cut off. The cab’s dark interior seems to lure Rauschenberg in, but perhaps he was also drawn to the small round window, like a porthole, above the seat, which looks out at the distance behind the carriage. The photograph feels funereal but rich, somehow—evocative of the days when Edith Wharton’s troubled characters tried to hide from others’ eyes, while the carriage horses clopped along, each step as heavy as destiny.
Rauschenberg and his partner, Susan Weil, whom he’d followed to Black Mountain, made their way to New York in 1949, marrying the following year and divorcing two years later. Although Rauschenberg took relatively “straight” photographs of places and people, including Weil and his first significant male lover, Cy Twombly, he also began bending the medium to suit his creations. While he and Weil were together, they collaborated on a series of cyanotype photograms. These transitional works don’t appear in Corcoran’s show, but I remember them the way you remember ghosts. Cyanotypes are life-size, created by exposing chemically treated light-sensitive paper to studio lamps. Whatever is placed on the paper as it is exposed—a body, a flower—is silhouetted. The vibrancy of the image is also the vibrancy of life, which answered Rauschenberg’s aesthetic question: How do you make the real realer? Which is to say, how do you make an artistic vision of the world resonate more than the world itself does?
Rauschenberg’s experiments with Weil opened him up, like an aperture. (Edward Steichen included one of the cyanotypes in his 1951 show “Abstraction in Photography” at MOMA.) In 1952, Rauschenberg started employing photographic imagery in drawings, something he achieved, Corcoran notes, “through a transfer process in which a printed image is shifted to a new ground with a rubbing technique”—a kind of primitive version of the silk-screening that soon became very important in his work.
Rauschenberg returned to Black Mountain for the summer of 1951. By then, the photographers Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan were teaching at the school, along with Hazel Larsen Archer, who had overlapped with Rauschenberg in 1949 and captured his love of movement and of grace in a photograph of her own. (Her picture shows Rauschenberg stripped to the waist, “doing” modern dance by striking a Martha Graham-like pose. It’s a wonderful picture of a moment, full of youth and freedom and the unself-conscious self-importance one has to have in order to make anything at all at that age.) Rauschenberg was presumably familiar with Siskind’s views on the inherently abstract nature of photography. Even if an image is shot straight on, Siskind argued, the camera often renders it “unrecognizable; for it has been removed from its usual context, disassociated from its customary neighbors and forced into new relationships.” Part of Rauschenberg’s genius was not to force the juxtapositions but to try out unexpected combinations—these trash bags with that diner sign, or the different angles from which New York can come at you, as in “New York City” (1981), which shows us the Twin Towers from the perspective of the Lower East Side. Before we focus in on the looming buildings, we see tenement fire escapes, a courthouse, a street lamp, traffic: all the things we live among but don’t necessarily look at.
His photographs of New York redirect our attention by taking the noise out of the city. The silence of the medium is the dominant aesthetic pleasure of “Robert Rauschenberg’s New York.” How moving it is to see, in “Staten Island Beach (I)” (ca. 1951), the torso of a man lying on a striped towel, his hands placed a little awkwardly on his swimming trunks. His head isn’t visible; the focus of the image is the swirl of hair on the man’s chest and at his waist, pointing toward what is concealed in his trunks. A mystery in the sunlight that’s reminiscent of Newhall’s quiet picture of a dune, and the queer vegetation growing out of that body of sand.