THE GREAT PERMITTER

By ROBERT HUGHES

The retrospective show of the work of Robert Rauschenberg, which fills the uptown and SoHo branches of New York City's Guggenheim Museum and, as if that were not enough, the Ace Gallery in SoHo as well, is too big, too profuse, too sprawling--too damned much all round--to take in with any sort of ease. Curated by Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, its bulk (some 400 works in all media) creates the fatigued impression that everything in Rauschenberg's vast and uneven output has been dumped into the hopper and left for the individual viewer to sort out. Which is fine if you've followed the artist's work over the decades, but it must be intimidating if you're new to it; and the younger part of its audience will be.

Yet it's invigorating too, in the end. "Energy," wrote William Blake, "is eternal delight," and there has never been anything in American art to match the effusive, unconstrained energy of Rauschenberg's generous imagination. Compared with the more pursed, hermetic and self-reflexive Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg is and always has been a gusher. He loves the sound, smell, grunge and look of the street. He doesn't look at his sources in American vernacular--photos, movies, and junk of all kinds--with anything resembling irony or distance. He is in it up to the neck and wants you to be too.

Hopps compares him in a catalog essay to Charles Willson Peale, the artist of the Revolutionary War period who created the first American museum, a highly personal wunderkammer of his own portraits of American heroes mixed with natural-history specimens. When you think of Rauschenberg giving new life to a stuffed angora goat in Monogram, 1955, or repeatedly silk-screening the effigy of John F. Kennedy, there's some truth to this. But his closer affinity is with an equally polymorphous ancestor, Walt Whitman, the entranced celebrant of American variety.

Rauschenberg became to American art in the 1950s and '60s what Whitman was to American poetry in the 1880s--the Great Permitter, with his declared hope to "act in the gap between art and life." This, one wants to say, is the artist of American democracy, yearningly faithful to its clamor, its contradictions, its hope and its enormous demotic freedom, all of which find shape in his work. Other American artists have had this ambition--one thinks of Robert Henri and the Ashcan painters at the turn of the century--but none fulfilled it so well.

Rauschenberg was a Texas boy, two parts Anglo, one part German, one part Cherokee. He was born in 1925 in one of the most art-free zones of America, Port Arthur, a bayou oil-refinery town on the Gulf of Mexico. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians, and as a teenager he thought of becoming a preacher. Luckily for American art, and perhaps for the ministry too, he ditched the notion on realizing that the Church of Christ forbade dancing. He did a stint in the Navy, as a male psychiatric nurse--which confirmed him as a lifelong pacifist. He dabbled in painting, then (after his discharge from the Navy) began to study it, first in Kansas City and then, having saved up some money for the trip, in Paris in 1948.

His first serious contact with modernism, however, came at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, under the abrasive tutelage of the former Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers. The friendships he formed at Black Mountain--with painters Franz Kline and Cy Twombly, composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham--continued when he settled in New York City. Rauschenberg has always had the strongest possible sense of creative community; his generosity with ideas, resources, support and money became an art-world legend, growing over the years.

He is also, without living peer, the artist of free association. Within the languages of art, Rauschenberg started more hares than he could possibly chase, including performance. His work with Cunningham and Cage, always under the influence of Marcel Duchamp, made artistic collaboration seem feasible, after the image of the artist had been monopolized by the go-it-alone individualists of the New York School. Younger artists of every kind latched on to his work, which meant that, particularly from the '50s to the '70s, there was hardly an area of "advanced" American art that didn't contain some of his DNA.

But his main achievement was undoubtedly in the realm of collage, which he picked up where Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell had taken it. Rauschenberg's Combines, as he called them, were made of large-scale junk, his "palette of objects," linked or partly effaced by slathers of paint and often provoked by a single key find. In Canyon, 1959, it was a stuffed eagle that had belonged to an old veteran of the Spanish-American War, an emblem of flight and power that Rauschenberg combined with a photo of a small child gesturing upward and another of distant galaxies. Considerately, he supplied the bird with a pillow hanging on a string, in case it crashed. Canyon was the first of a series of allusions to space exploration--the NASA program in the '60s became one of Rauschenberg's main themes.

By then, Rauschenberg had stopped making his work from actual objects and was using overlays of silk-screened photos, an idea he got from Andy Warhol. The paintings--like Estate, 1963--that won him the grand prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, with their high, bright color and rapid shuttle of images, conveyed an extraordinary impression of the electronic image glut that comes from TV. Through silk screen, Rauschenberg could now compress fragments of events as well as things into his work, giving it a heightened, broken-up documentary flavor--history painting for channel surfers.

He also had an exquisite sense of nuance. It comes out in his complex prints; his Zen-simple paper objects, Pages and Fuses, from the '70s; and in the shimmering veils of printed translucent fabric of the Hoarfrost series, image floating over image, as in Emerald (Hoarfrost), 1975, with its diver's body vanishing into the deep blue-green.

Twenty years ago, asked why he had so many assistants in his studio--by that time he had left New York for Captiva Island in Florida--Rauschenberg replied, "Because it takes away the egotistical loneliness of creation." Then he wryly added, "But the downside is that you have to wake up with an idea that will keep eight people busy for eight hours." It was true enough to be a difficulty: the basis of Rauschenberg's genius as an artist, despite his love of collaboration, has always been his autographic touch, the sense that one sensibility was at work on the world, picking up and discarding things, fine-tuning personal responses. In some of the later work the collective effort shades over into an almost corporate look--not slick, exactly, but overelaborated, as though done partly on autopilot.

The subtlety of his recent series of prints and paintings using vegetable-dye transfer on paper, however, suggests that Rauschenberg, at 72, is on his way out of that. Can this protean figure keep reinventing himself? Don't bet against it.