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CLEAR SKIES, SUNNY AND WARM

The World According to Rauschenberg

Immersed in work on the world's largest painting, a section of which will show in Miami beginning this month, the artist pauses in his Captiva studio to pitch some words around.

By Bill Hutchinson

In the idiomatic style of the Time cover story about him in 1976, Robert Rauschenberg, "almost the Most Famous Artist in the World", is almost Finished with His Haircut. The Swedish-made scissors are very new and very sharp, so Rauschenberg sits very still as his guests arrive, somehow managing an exuberant welcome nonetheless. He calls himself a shy man, but whatever vestiges of reserve may survive from his outsider's childhood in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg has learned to conceal under an avalanche of hearty charm that makes people like him at once. We are in Captiva, in his little house on the Gulf beach of the 37 acres he owns there, Rauschenberg's home-base and the place he feels most content, so the artist is in top form. As the haircut continues, in a stool-height canvas director's chair pushed into the light near the kitchen alcove, Rauschenberg holds court like a jolly patriarch over his small audience of visitors and staff.

Present are his collaborators - Darryl, today pressed into service to cut hair, usually a silkscreener; Emil, a photographer, and his wife Bradley, who functions as a combination secretary and office manager; and Terry, the artist's chief assistant and man-of-all-work, who travels most everywhere with Rauschenberg and lives in the Captiva compound. It is Terry who brings out a tape recorder to keep track of Rauschenberg's conversation - "for legal and archival purposes," it is explained later - and it is he who nudges the painter toward his studio after a long cocktail hour of photographs, questions, digressions, Space Shuttle wine, Chardonnay, Scotch (Darryl) and Jack Daniels sour mash (Rauschenberg). "Well," says the artist, rising at his cur with practiced resignation, "it looks like I gotta go pitch some paint around."

The remark is classic Rauschenberg - who has indeed become almost the Most Famous Painter in the World all the while referring to his line of work as "the furniture business" - and in some odd way it suggests one explanation for his extraordinary success. With the other leading Pop artists who emerged around the start of the 1960s, Rauschenberg first got attention for what seemed to be clowning antics - his "White Paintings" in 1951, perfectly flat, all-white canvases, one after another, or "The Bed" in 1955, a massive collage consisting of his own linens, pillows and mattress. Rauschenberg, Oldenberg, Warhol, certainly, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist: these Pop people just wouldn't behave. Their refreshing, art-for-the-fun-or-it philosophy clashed brilliantly with the soberness of New York under the Abstract Expressionists. From the 1930s through the '50s, this high-minded, rather brooding bunch (Pollock, Gorky, Rothko, de Kooning, among others) had comprised the first body of American painters to beat the Europeans at their own Old World game of Serious Art. The Abstract Expressionists had made New York the enter of the international art world but by the start of the '60s New York was ready for a little fling. Pop Art was just that, a bright and lively leap into recognizable images, hot colors and merry pranks. 

Of all the Pop Art superstars, Rauschenberg seemed at once the most serious and the most accessible - serious because he appeared to be reaching beyond the intent of the others, accessible because he was so unfailingly down-home Regular Guy, not odd like so many of them. Journalists loved him as an expansive and always quotable subject, a painter who could talk about painting in language anybody could understand, demystifying it, even referring to himself as a journalist, "a communicator," rather than a painter. The art world intelligentsia, by and large, did not love him, not at first and not for a long time, even well after his reputation was sealed with the taking of grand prize at the 32nd International Venice Biennial Exhibition in 1964. There are those in New York who still resent the fact that Rauschenberg became the first U.S. painter ever to win the art world's most prestigious award, an honor that "belonged" to Willem de Kooning, then as now the high priest to Contemporary American Art. Terry and Rauschenberg tell this story together, toward the end of the evening, with sly relish on both parts and a quick burst of laughter from the painter, who then looks sheepish at his own enjoyment of the tale. He seems now not so much patriarchal as like some impish but loveable Prodigal Prince, deflating the stuffiness out of his elders while maintaining a courtly respect, occasionally impossible but basically kind. Five months short of 59, now one of the most honored and admired artists of his generation, Robert Rauschenberg is still the same irresistible cut-up he was in the '60s, still "pitching paint around" and stressing his origins as "Texas white trash": a uniquely American artist of his time.

Like his collages - or "combines," to use his own term for the medium that has dominated the body of his life's work - Rauschenberg's conversation is on one level an odds-and-ends jumble of whatever's handy. Ideas start and stop, images tumble about, and some tantalizing promises get work down in the confusion. As do many people with experience at talking to the press, he tends to repeat things that have proven successful in the past, which is also true in his paintings. As the combines lapse at times into slickness and self-parody, so can he. Yet Rauschenberg wins you over finally as a painter and as a man, with the sunny disposition of his, the eager charm, his obliging willingness

From the "Quarter Mile Piece" by Robert Rauschenberg