Enfant Terrible at 50

By ROBERT HUGHES

In the arts, as elsewhere, there are some enfants terribles whose public image gets trapped in infancy. Whether or not such an artist really is Peter Pan, he is apt to be treated as though he were; a precocious reputation stiffens round him like a coffin, immuring him in the period of his youth. He is not expected to mature, but simply to become an older virtuoso, so that all his later work risks being dismissed as an appendage to the earlier. If he accepts this role, it grips him, and he turns into a vulgar monster--something like Salvador Dali. If he fights it and reflects the blame for it on the audience (where it belongs), he may, with luck, come to resemble Robert Rauschenberg, whose latest prints--after a run at the Castelli Gallery in New York City--are on view at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles.

Iniquitous Goat. Rauschenberg turns 50 this year. It is almost a quarter-century since he popped into American art with an eccentric, prankish and--in retrospect --prophetic show of pictures, some painted all white, others all black, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in Manhattan. This ironic burst of premature minimalism was only the first in a series of gestures that, throughout the '50s, persistently harassed and delighted art's public in New York. They were all conducted under Rauschenberg's slogan, derived from futurism and Dada, about "working in the gap between art and life." Out of street rubbish, dead birds and old newspapers and gaudy lathers of pigment, he put together the "combine paintings" that, so much later, remain his best-known works. How outrageous, how iniquitous that tire-girdled Angora goat looked in 1959! What perversity seemed to lurk behind Rauschenberg's gesture of erasing a drawing by Willem de Kooning and exhibiting the sheet! How dandyist an affront to spontaneous sincerity, the idea of painting two abstract expressionist canvases, Factum I and Factum II, almost identical down to the last drip!

Rauschenberg's role as provocateur could only work within a relatively innocent art world, which New York had in the '50s--innocent not only about modern art, but to some degree about its history. It took more than a decade before the relationship of his big combines to Kurt Schwitters' tiny Merz pictures and to the formality of cubist collage could be talked about without heat and seen, not as proof of derivativeness, but as simply part of his work's ecology. Besides, the '50s were the last time a public could be provoked by art. (Since then, an overload of images has rendered art's audience blase.) This seems to have confronted Rauschenberg with a crisis after his silk-screen paintings won the Venice Biennale in 1964--a dead zucchino now, but the Big Apple then.

For a time, he cut down on his production of gallery art and began to turn himself into a rootin'-tootin' mixture of Zen monk and Texas daddy, full of Jack Daniel's and koans, moving from one collective project to the next and plunging into a sequence of causes. These have run from EAT (Experiments in Art and

Technology, an ambitious but not very successful attempt to get industry to underwrite art experiments) to such projects as royalty legislation for artists on resale of their work (TIME ESSAY, March 11) and Change, Inc., a foundation through which established artists can give emergency money to unrecognized ones by donating works of art to a pool. In the desiccated, clique-ridden and ungenerous atmosphere of the New York art world in the '70s, Rauschenberg has turned out to be one of the few senior artists with real respect and concern for his juniors.

All during this time -- ten years --there was a slow gathering of opinion that Rauschenberg's art was on the decline. Like Willem de Kooning, he be came one of those major figures whose last show is always fated to be thought his worst. The reason was that no later performance could ever measure up to the exaggerations of praise cast on their early work. Meantime, Rauschenberg, mainly through his collaborations with the Los Angeles printmaking firm of Gemini G.E.L., had developed into one of the few major graphic artists in Amer ica. The print suited his liking for swift assemblies of images, and his rest less improvisation tested the limits of defining a print. The latest result includes some of the most remark able graphic images made by a liv ing artist: Rausehenberg's Hoar frost suite, including Mule (see color page).

Taffeta Phantom. They are out of the familiar Rauschenberg image bank again, part random and part (one suspects) autobiographical: newspaper fragments, comic cutouts, a Cessna, a balloon, an octopus, buckets, a hand gripping a squeegee, an ostrich egg and so on.

But they are printed on floating veils of silk, chiffon, muslin and taffeta, one positioned over another.

One peers into this soft, gauzy space as though looking through ice crystals diffused on a windowpane: hence the collective title Hoarfrost.

No reproduction can convey the subtleties of light and opacity Rauschenberg's method gives. The mix of forms is pale, apparitional and exquisite. This seems a long way from the declamatory harshness of his old combine paintings, but in fact, it pertains to a continuous theme of Rauschenberg's: ghost images, traces. The white paintings were made white to accept passing shadows. The De Kooning drawing was not erased to blank: a phantom of it stays on the paper. Rauschenberg's illustrations to Dante's Infer no (1960) were pale transfers from newsprint. But the Hoarfrost prints extend Rauschenberg's delight in faintness to a ravishing lyricism: because their constituent images are so familiar, clear-cut and even brassy, and yet presented with such rippling and indistinct sweetness, they become a visual equivalent of free-associative dreaming -- creative inattention at play. Perhaps only a temperament as rich and unclogged by dogma as Rauschenberg's could have brought off this theatrical play between the "reality" of collage and the vague beauties of atmosphere -- or having done that, turned it into such a wry disquisition on the difficulty of seeing anything Clearly at all.

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