The trashcan laureate

[Dave Monroe]

The trashcan laureate

Robert Rauschenberg's generous, epic vision captured the chaos of
modern America. Jonathan Jones pays tribute to the man who first made
him want to write about art

Thursday May 15, 2008
The Guardian

[...]

For me, Rauschenberg's art is about love, history, politics. From my
very first visits to the Tate Gallery (as it was called in those
days), one of my favourite works there has been Rauschenberg's 1962
painting Almanac, a fractured montage of silkscreened news photographs
that drift spectrally through mists of white paint. Rauschenberg's
silkscreen paintings convey the dissonance and conflict of 1960s
America - the space race, poverty, his native South - but in an
allusive and unresolved way. Its simultaneous engagement with the rich
epic of America, and its inability to find sense in it, is reminiscent
of Thomas Pynchon's 1960s novels, The Crying of Lot 49 and V.
Rauschenberg's 60s paintings mourn JFK; a great series of prints
transpose Dante's Inferno to the political struggles of the decade.
When I look at Rauschenberg, I see the terrible broken epic of modern
America. No question, he will be remembered as one of his country's
great artists. I'm headed for Tate Modern to toast Almanac.