A Guide to Robert Rauschenberg's Most Controversial Works

Feature image: Ugo Mulas, Robert Rauschenberg in front of his silkscreen painting Express, 1963, at the XXII International Biennale of Art Exhibition, Venice, 1964. © Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved. Via the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Robert Rauschenberg arrived at Black Mountain College in 1948 to study under Josef Albers, a color theorist who ran his classroom with the discipline of a drill instructor and had no patience for a student who wanted to work by instinct. Rauschenberg absorbed the rigor and spent the rest of his career pushing against everything else Albers stood for, and against the dominant style of the moment along with it: Abstract Expressionism, with its big, visible, emotional gesture. His first answer to both was to remove the gesture entirely.

In 1951, stripping out the gesture meant a series of blank, uninflected canvases in one-, two-, three-, four-, and seven-panel formats, designed to register nothing but the shifting light and shadow of the room around them. Word of the "scandal" reached New York before the paintings themselves did. When they were shown at the Stable Gallery in October 1953, three of six reviewers ignored them outright; the rest dismissed them as not art at all. Composer John Cage disagreed. He read the canvases as instruments for capturing ambient change, and credited them as the direct inspiration for his own silent composition, 4'33", the following year.

Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning, then the most influential painter in New York, for a drawing he could destroy. De Kooning gave him one on the condition that it would be missed, and Rauschenberg spent over a month rubbing it out with a series of increasingly aggressive erasers. What remained, a faint ghost of graphite in a gilded frame, split critics between reading it as vandalism and reading it as a genuinely new kind of artwork built entirely from an act of erasure. Rauschenberg called it a celebration; others called it patricide. The piece is now understood as one of the earliest conceptual artworks made in America, but that reading came later. In 1953, it looked to many like an assault on a living master.

For his first combine, Rauschenberg took his own pillow, sheet, and quilt, streaked them with paint in gestures borrowed from Abstract Expressionism, and hung the whole thing vertically on the wall as though it were a canvas. At its debut, one reviewer described it as recalling "a police photo of the murder bed after a corpse has been removed." Others read it as an image of violence or assault. Rauschenberg pushed back hard against that interpretation, writing in 1959 that Bed was "one of the friendliest pictures I've ever painted," adding that he feared someone would want to climb into it. The gap between his stated intent and the public's first reaction is the whole controversy: a domestic object, spattered and vertical, could read as either intimacy or crime scene, and audiences weren't prepared to choose.

Rauschenberg spent four years building Monogram, a combine centered on a stuffed Angora goat with a tire fitted around its midsection. He never assigned the work a fixed meaning and resisted every attempt by critics to pin one down, most notably when Robert Hughes described it in 1980 as "one of the wittiest images of sexual penetration ever made by an artist," a reading Rauschenberg specifically and repeatedly disavowed. Other critics have connected the goat to his childhood in Texas, to religious scapegoat imagery, or to his own position inside the art world. The controversy wasn't really about the goat. It was about who gets to determine what a work of art means once it leaves the studio: the artist, or everyone else.

Canyon incorporates a taxidermied bald eagle, acquired before the bird was federally protected, mounted above a pillow suspended from a cord. The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act made the work permanently unsellable, which stayed a curiosity until 2007, when its owner, dealer Ileana Sonnabend, died and the piece became part of her estate. The IRS valued Canyon at $65 million and assessed roughly $29 million in estate tax, despite the fact that federal law made a sale impossible and three independent appraisers had valued it at zero. The standoff lasted five years. In 2012, the agency agreed to drop the assessment if Sonnabend's children donated the work to a museum and claimed no deduction. It went to MoMA. The controversy had migrated from the art world into tax law: what is an object worth if it can never, under any circumstance, be sold?

In 1964, Rauschenberg became the first American artist to win the Venice Biennale's grand prize for painting, a prize the French had effectively controlled for decades. The win looked orchestrated because, in large part, it was. The U.S. entry was organized by the United States Information Agency, a Cold War propaganda arm, and curator Alan Solomon exhibited several of Rauschenberg's canvases at the U.S. consulate after the official pavilion ran out of room, then secured a verbal agreement that the off-site works would still qualify for the prize. That agreement nearly collapsed at the last minute. European critics were, in the words of the press at the time, rancorous, and a French magazine ran the headline declaring that America had used the prize to proclaim "the end of the School of Paris" and launch a hostile takeover by Pop Art. A 2024 documentary, Taking Venice, revisited the win and largely confirmed what critics suspected in 1964: American cultural diplomacy, not a clean jury vote, had put its thumb on the scale.

Rauschenberg almost never explained himself. When Bed was accused of depicting a crime scene, he wrote one letter calling it the friendliest picture he'd ever made and left it at that. When Robert Hughes offered his reading of Monogram, Rauschenberg disavowed it in a single line and moved on to the next combine. He let a gallery reviewer reach for "murder," let a federal court try to price an eagle that could never legally change hands, let a French magazine declare the end of an entire school of painting, and answered almost none of it directly. The work did the provoking. He just kept making more of it.

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