Trivial pursuits | 1 December 2016

Robert Rauschenberg, like Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, was a ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’. Unlike Shakespeare’s character, however, he made them into art. Rauschenberg’s most celebrated piece, ‘Monogram’, on view in the grand retrospective of his work at Tate Modern, comprises, among other bits and pieces, a rubber shoe heel, a tennis ball, and a car tyre-plus-oil paint on stuffed angora goat. Next to it is another amalgam from the mid-Fifties, incorporating ‘paint, paper, fabric, printed paper reproductions, sock and army-issue flare parachute on canvas’. Modern-art sceptics — a dwindling group but not yet extinct — might conclude that this stuff deserves that time-honoured epithet ‘a load of old rubbish’.

It’s quite true in a way. But then, most art always has been created from low-value substances such as dried-up colours, coarse cloth and bits of rock. It’s what you do with it that counts. Walter Sickert put it well: ‘The artist is he who can take a piece of flint and wring out of it drops of attar of roses.’

Rauschenberg could do marvellous things with garbage. But only, it seems to me — and perhaps I reveal my own prejudices here — when he stayed close to the tradition of painting. This was, roughly, until the summer of 1964. That was when he won the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale with his silk-screen paintings, a selection of which are beautifully displayed halfway through the Tate exhibition.

These consist of images from newspapers and magazines, reproduced on the canvas — just as they were in Andy Warhol’s exactly contemporary arrays of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup tins — by using the silk-screen technique. Unlike Warhol, however, Rauschenberg used this process to create a mosaic of imagery as diverse as the objects in his earlier work. Among these favourite photographic fragments, recurring in picture after picture, are a shot of John Kennedy from a presidential debate with Nixon, a nude Venus by Rubens, an eagle, and a Manhattan street sign.