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Fig. 7. Robert Rauschenberg, Composition I, c. 1951. Private Collection, Vancouver.

yet to acquire its characteristic multiplicity, physicality, and sensuality. The seeds of his later art, however, were already there; they needed only to develop and grow until they found their ultimate expression in his mature work - the Combines.

1. Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1980, p. 62.

2. It was formerly believed that with the exception of 22 The Lily White, all of the other works from this show had perished in a fire at Susan Weil's parents' home on Outer Island, Connecticut. Crucifixion and Reflection, however, was in the collection of the artist Sari Dienes since shortly after the Betty Parsons exhibition. The artist Knox Martin was in possession of several of the paintings (among them the "Burst"-like painting and Composition I), as Rauschenberg had apparently stored them in Martin's studio during the summer of 1951 and then forgot about them. These works were recovered a few years ago when Martin sold them back to Rauschenberg and Leo Castelli. (The Hirshhorn Museum's Basketball Court had also been in Martin's possession.) Trinity, Garden of Eden, Stone, Stone, Stone, and Should Love Come First? are all known from photographs that were taken for the Betty Parsons Gallery by Aaron Siskind at the time of the exhibition. A photograph of still another work, a painting which appears to consist mainly of an arrow and a dot (like the show's announcement), is in the artist's possession.

3. "Robert Rauschenberg: An Audience of One", Art News LXXVI, February 1977, p. 46.

4. In a statement prepared for "The Ideographic Picture" exhibition which was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1947 and which included the work of Still, Rothko, Stamos, Hofmann, and others. Newman, the show's coordinator, explained that these artists introduced arrows, signs, and abstract forms into their work in order to make contact with "mystery - of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy."

5. This material came to be so closely associated with Rauschenberg that both Allan Kaprow and Elaine Sturtevant incorporated mattress ticking into works executed in homage to the artist (Kaprow in Grandma's Boy and Sturtevant in an untitled work in the collection of B.H. Friedman).

6. Robert Pincus-Witten suggested this in his "Johns/Rauschenberg" seminar taught at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York during spring 1980, as did Robert Rosenblum during an interview with the present writer on November 17, 1982.

7. The song, which was probably a hymn, was "Green Grow the Rushes O." It may be noted that Rauschenberg was not the only one to equate pictographs with gameboard structures. Thomas Hess in Abstract Art (New York: Viking Press, 1951), p. 125, spoke of the manner in which Adolph Gottlieb divided his compositions into "elaborate tic-tac-toe compartments - derived from Indian pictographs."

8. Tomkins, op. cit., p. 53.

9. Rauschenberg's use of an expanded range of collage materials in his Red Paintings was probably due to his having seen a large number of Schwitters' works in the exhibition "Dada 1916-1923," held at the Sidney Janis Gallery, April 15-May 9, 1953.

10. The writer is indebted to Professor Kirk Varnedoe of the Institute of Fine Arts for having called this to her attention.

11. Leo Steinberg, "Reflections on the State of Art Criticism," Artforum, X (March, 1972), pp. 37-49; reprinted under the title "Other Criteria" in Steinberg's book Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 55-91. Steinberg derived the concept of the "flatbed" from the flatbed printing press - a horizontal bed which supports a flat printed surface. It may be noted that the shift in orientation indicated by Steinberg was also seen in Rauschenberg's use of mattress ticking, something associated with horizontality and lying down, as the support for Garden of Eden.

12. Steinberg, Other Criteria, p. 84.

13. Ibid., p. 91.

14. Rosalind Krauss, in "Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image," Artforum, XIII (December 1974), pp. 36-43, explained that the part-by-part, image-by-image structure of the Combines simulated language and caused the viewer to engage in "discourse" with the work. Unlike the present writer, however, Krauss felt that although there was a high degree of plausibility in the manner in which objects and images were juxtaposed, "...this plausibility is not to be explained by any kind of formal logic that might pertain to them as elements in a design, or any kind of narrative connection between them."

15. Mary Cole, "Fifty-Seventh Street Review," Art Digest, June 1, 1951, p. 18.

16. Dorothy Seckler, "Exhibition at Betty Parsons' Gallery," Art News, May 1951, p. 59.

17. Stuart Preston, "Robert Rauschenberg," The New York Times, May 18, 1951. Trinity, a "semi-geometrically planned oil," may have numbered among the works preferred by Preston.

18. Rauschenberg withdrew 22 The Lily White from Betty Parsons show to exhibit it on Ninth Street.

19. Helen Frankenthaler and Alfred Leslie were also included in the Ninth Street Show. Frankenthaler was invited to join The Club at the same time as Rauschenberg; Leslie, Larry Rivers, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Paul Brach joined a year later. It may be noted that Rauschenberg was among the first artists of his generation to have a solo show. Frankenthaler, Leslie, and Goodnough, all of whom showed at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, had their first one-person shows during the fall or winter of 1951-52.

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