The variety and freshness of Rauschenberg\u2019s works at the Nasher provide a veritable garden of delights \u2014 admittedly quirky ones at times. <\/p>\n
News Roundups<\/p>\n
By signing up, you agree to our\u00a0Terms of Service<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Privacy Policy.<\/a><\/p>\n “Rauschenberg Sculpture,” gallery view at Nasher Sculpture Center.<\/p>\n Scott Cantrell<\/p>\n I keep coming back to Three Traps for Medea, a concatenation of cage-like wire structures, with strips and twists of fabric, atop a rugged, industrial-looking box. What does it \u201cmean\u201d? What does the title mean, except suggesting traps for small animals? For all their inclusion of recognizable objects, Rauschenberg\u2019s creations are often titled as inscrutably as works by surrealists and abstract expressionists.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t matter. What matters is the strange beauty of the thing \u2014 the overall geometries, the balances of shapes, the lines and twists of the wires, the cryptic dialogue with fabrics. <\/p>\n Four tilted, stone-like boxes, Untitled (Early Egyptian), suggest architectural buttresses or plinths, perhaps with some long-lost religious association. But the boxes are actually of cardboard, covered in sand and acrylic.<\/p>\n Petrified Relic from the Gyro Clinic (Kabal American Zephyr) sets a metal wheel above an old typing table, with a crumpled, corroded metal duct penetrating beneath. <\/p>\n Installation view of Robert Rauschenberg, “Untitled (Late Kabal American Zephyr)” (detail), 1985. Rubber cycle wheels on metal structure with hand crank. 73 1\/2 x 23 5\/8 x 16 1\/4 inches (186.8 x 60 x 41.3 cm). \u00a9 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.<\/p>\n Kevin Todora<\/p>\n Rauschenberg\u2019s approach was not without precursors. The elevation of ordinary objects to the status of \u201cart\u201d can be traced back to Marcel Duchamp\u2019s 1917 urinal titled Fountain and signed R. Mutt. Kurt Schwitters was a pioneer in collage, which was also a factor in cubism. Disorienting juxtapositions were a signature of surrealism.<\/p>\n As a boy growing up in Port Arthur, Texas, an oil refinery town of sulfurous air, Rauschenberg often wore clothes his mother had patched together from assorted fabric scraps. Seeing art for the first time during a military posting in San Diego, he resolved to become an artist himself.<\/p>\n He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Acad\u00e9mie Julian in Paris and Black Mountain College in North Carolina. One of his teachers at Black Mountain was the stern modernist Josef Albers, but it was also there that Rauschenberg met the avant-garde composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham.<\/p>\n Both exploring the integration of daily life into art, Cage and Cunningham were to become long-standing friends \u2014 and collaborators on numerous projects. Rauschenberg even tried his own hand at choreography. (The Verdigris Ensemble choral group performed Cage\u2019s Hymns and Variations in connection with the Rauschenberg show\u2019s opening.)<\/p>\n Abstract expressionism \u2014 art of nonrepresentational color, gesture and texture \u2014 had become the hot new thing in the 1940s and \u201950s. In the later years of its primacy, though, the world was ripe for a new art about things, and recognizable images. Rauschenberg was a man for the hour, along with Jasper Johns, in a progression culminating in Andy Warhol\u2019s Campbell\u2019s Soup cans and Brillo boxes.<\/p>\n Rauschenberg coined the term \u201ccombines\u201d for his works mixing found objects and paint. The most famous are Monogram, with a taxidermied, tire-encircled Angora goat atop a painted panel, and Bed, a quilt roughly slathered with paint.<\/p>\n Installation view of Robert Rauschenberg, “Revolver V” (detail), 1967. Silkscreen ink on five rotating plexiglass discs in metal base with electric motors and control box. 54 x 52 3\/4 x 24 1\/4 inches (137.2 x 134 x 61.6 cm). \u00a9 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.<\/p>\n Kevin Todora<\/p>\n Works at the Nasher are more purely sculptural, although several incorporate collages of transferred imagery. Revolver V comprises five plexiglass discs with silk-screened images and an adjacent control box activating motors to spin the discs. An interest in technology is further demonstrated in Dry Cell, which incorporates a piece of metal that can revolve in response to sound.<\/p>\n Robert Rauschenberg, “Balcone Glut (Neopolitan),” 1987 (detail) at Nasher Sculpture Center. \u00a9 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.<\/p>\n Scott Cantrell<\/p>\n The very textures of works at the Nasher give pleasure. The crumpled metal panel at the bottom of Balcone Glut is as beautiful in its way as a Greek statue. So is an untitled stack of rugged bricks with a chunk of concrete suspended from a metal curlicue. <\/p>\n Just as Rauschenberg had precursors, he had fellow travelers and kindred spirits. The Nasher includes one of John Chamberlain\u2019s sculptures assembled from twisted metal parts, and a motorized Jean Tinguely contraption of miscellaneous rusty metal bits.<\/p>\n Smaller works of Mark di Suvero shown in a 2023 Nasher exhibition<\/a> would fit right in, too. It\u2019s a pity that companions don\u2019t include one of the late Texas artist James Magee<\/a>\u2019s powerful assemblages of corroded steel and shattered glass.<\/p>\n Details<\/p>\n![\""Rauschenberg](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Z64PBUQZ4FGYDMLDSC6KOSAGRE.jpg\")
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