Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, who died Monday at his Florida home, had a long association with Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Starting in 1961, his work was included in 14 Walker shows spanning 40 years. The museum owns an important early painting by him, "Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp) 1960, as well as more than 130 prints, books and other works on paper.
For the opening of the Walker's 1971 building, Rauschenberg was among several artists commissioned to create "New Works for New Spaces," as the show was called. He contributed a cubistic sculpture made of cardboard. Early in his career he also designed sets for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which frequently performed at the Walker.
"He just seemed eternally young," said former Walker director Martin Friedman, who commissioned the 1971 work. "He was a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, taking the brush work of expressionism and then doing subversive things, incorporating photographs, turning a mattress into a canvas and gluing things on. It all had to do with breaking down the relationship between art and the real world."
In the late 1950s Rauschenberg electrified the art world with his "combines," exuberant constructions that merge painting and sculpture. The most famous, called "Monogram," features a paint-spattered stuffed goat with a tire around its belly. In 1964 he became an international sensation as the first American to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale. Later he was the first living artist featured on the cover of Time magazine, and in 1999 was named one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century by ARTnews magazine.
"It's kind of awful," Friedman said, musing on the death of Rauschenberg and other art stars of the era, especially sculptors Sol LeWitt and George Segal and painters Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann. "You think of Pop artists never getting old because their work has such youthful vitality. But unfortunately they're subject to the same vicissitudes that the rest of us have to endure."
Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431
