Date: 14-01-2001
Owning Institution: The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, America.
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 20th Century        

The coming week sees the fortieth anniversary of the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy. So today’s picture is Robert Rauschenberg’s silkscreen painting Retroactive I, dominated as it is by an image based on a photograph of Kennedy in full flow at one of his televised press conferences.

When Rauschenberg started Retroactive I the president was still alive and well. Then, on November 22 1963, news came through of his assassination. Having almost decided to abandon his painting altogether the artist eventually reworked it into a meditation on Kennedy’s death and on the central place he had assumed, through his martyrdom, in modern American mythology.

Rauschenberg’s original idea had not been to create a memorial, but something very different. He was one of the first post-war American artists to take inspiration from popular culture. He wanted to bring the life of the street into the studio and to dismantle the perceived barriers separating the world of fine art from that of mass media such as advertising, news photography and television. His ideal was an art that would reflect the discontinuous, image-saturated reality of urban existence in 1960s America. Explaining the genesis of his collage-derived silkscreen paintings, he said: “I was bombarded with TV sets and magazines, by the refuse, by the excess of the world… I thought that if I could paint or make an honest work, it should contain all of these elements, which were and are a reality. Collage is a way of getting an additional piece of information that is impersonal. I’ve always tried to work impersonally.”

Such ideas left their trace on Retroactive I. Appropriating imagery from mass media sources – such as the picture of Kennedy himself or the astronaut with parachute – was one of Rauschenberg’s ways of striving for the impersonality he claimed to yearn for. The grainy, flickering quality of his painting pursues the same documentary goal in terms of pictorial texture. Rauschenberg wanted to capture on canvas something akin to the experience of channel-hopping while watching television.

He was fascinated not just by the cornucopian visual anarchy of the modern world, but by the way in which it seemed to modify the role of the artist. There was no more room, he felt, for the grand defining gestures of the painters of the past: “The logical or illogical relationship between one thing or another is no longer a gratifying subject to the artist as the awareness grows that even in his most devastating or heroic moment he is part of the density of an uncensored continuum that neither begins nor ends with any decision of his.”

The strongest influence on Rauschenberg was neither a painter nor a sculptor but a musician, John Cage. During the 1950s Cage had pioneered the idea of “aleatory music”, as he called it, deriving his term from the Latin alea, meaning “dice”. Seeking to reconcile the sounds of the ordinary world with the western musical tradition, Cage created deliberately random compositions, the experience of which might be determined by whatever noises happened to be going on at the time of their performance. The best known example is 4’ 33’’, a piece in which conductor and musicians remain utterly silent onstage for exactly the amount of time prescribed by Cage’s title. The composer did not, as some have mistakenly assumed, want to bore his audience with a pure absence of sound. Instead he wanted them to attend with a heightened sense of perception to the random, circumambient noise of the world: to listen to their neighbours’ coughs and fidgetings, their own heartbeat, the noise of a police siren outside the auditorium (or whatever). Rauschenberg modelled his own deliberately artless and all-inclusive art, to a great extent, on such experiments. Instead of “aleatory music”, he proposed “aleatory painting” – pictures into which all sorts of unsorted images might seem to have drifted at random.

But Kennedy’s death jolted the artist out of his devotion to the operations of chance. The painting is a carefully constructed elegy to a dead hero. “Kennedy and his presidency,” Rauschenberg later said, “had merged to become fact. He reestablished what a president is supposed to be – somebody special, not somebody you’re comfortable with. One of the things that was so shocking about his death was that it was so believable; it wasn’t out of scale with the strength and abruptness of all the things he’d done in office.” Setting out to memorialise such a man, Rauschenberg found himself harking back to the very traditions of high art against which he had (theoretically) rebelled. The imagery he chose to convey his message was anything but randomly selected. The red area at the bottom right-hand corner of the painting is a silkscreen enlargement of a photograph by Gjon Mili originally published in Life magazine. Showing successive frames of a single figure in movement, Mili’s work was a parody of Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated post-Cubist painting Nude Descending a Staircase; but in Rauschenberg’s hands it has been given a striking resemblance to the figures of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden in Masaccio’s celebrated fifteenth-century Florentine frescoes. Rauschenberg, incidentally, had spent some months in Florence during the early 1950s, exhibiting there and even (on the advice of a local art critic) going so far as to throw all of his then extant work into the river Arno.

The allusion to Masaccio has the effect of turning Kennedy himself into a vengeful deity, a secular version of God the Father and Jesus Christ rolled into one – a figure whose death or sacrifice announces modern America’s fall from grace. The insinuation is strengthened by the other elements of Rauschenberg’s collage: the image of abundant oranges (rather resembling Edenic apples); the smudged halo of paint hovering over Kennedy’s head; the astronaut hovering like an angel attending at the Lord’s Ascension. Isolated on a green ground to the right, a glass of water (if that is what it is) may recall the symbolism of the Eucharist, hinting at sacrificial blood and transubstantiation. Most obscure of all is the image of a construction worker, perpetuated in murky black-and-white, in the top right-hand corner of the painting. But even this apparently mundane scrap of photographic appropriation conceals a related meaning. Rauschenberg told the writer Calvin Tomkins that the gesturing man in the hard hat reminded him of Michelangelo’s languidly pointing figure of Adam, animated by God, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

When he first decided to become an artist Rauschenberg changed his Christian name, dropping his given name of “Milton” for “Robert” on the grounds that the latter sounded more bohemian. Painting Retroactive I, he seems to have reconnected for a moment with his own past. Rauschenberg was a more conservative artist than his statements might suggest and this picture proves it. From one of the greatest traumas of post-war American history a painter formerly known as Milton created his own, updated version of Paradise Lost.