Robert Rauschenberg’s 'Combine' Drawing Illustrations of Inferno (1958-60)
Originally shared: Monday 8 February 2021
Robert Rauschenberg, 1958
Canto I: The Dark Wood of Error
(images MoMA, New York - c/o Robert Rauschenberg Foundation)
Jumping away from the usual representational works associated with the Divine Comedy, I wanted to bring to light a much more complex, impressionistic vision of Dante's poem. Robert Rauschenberg's 'combine' drawings are visual tone poems. If you are aware of the cantos for Inferno you will see direct relationships, but if you aren't there are strange tensions. Elements and graphics are loosely familiar but the joins, stains, cancellations, erasures, rough marks, scrapes and colour washes all suggest meanings and connections in ways not typical to conventions of realism and representational space. Figures and symbols exist in a state of both appearance and erasure. They float, in an expressionistic mist, haunting the page's surfaces, being suggestive whilst in a process of disappearing. Arrows point to directions of movement and flow. Odd letters point to coded hierarchies within the spaces. Features that initially appear to be smears on closer inspection reveal to be complex forms and silhouettes. Strange fragmented framings highlight separations of space, time and meaning. There is a feel of Dada's automatic drawings and collages, but the placings are deliberate and not as random in nature as they at first may appear.
You can see the full set of illustrations via the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation website at this following link [Robert Rauschenberg’s Dante Drawings (1958–60) - link]
Robert Rauschenberg, 1958-60
Canto XX: Circle Eight, Bolgia 4, The Fortune Tellers and Diviners
(images MoMA, New York - c/o Robert Rauschenberg Foundation)
Robert Rauschenburg is known for being a hugely talented multidisciplinarian, being a keen collaborator, graphic artist, "painter, printmaker, photographer, sculptor, theatre designer, performance artist, and technologist" [link]. His 'combine' works [link] are known for bridging the shift from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art.
Robert Rauschenberg (left) image from Bell telephone Magazine 1967
(Contributing Library: Prelinger Library, Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive, via Flickr Commons)
Like many art students in the 1980's and 90's fascinated by minimalism, I first knew of him through his proto-minimalist erasure of a Willem De Kooning drawing [link] and the presentation of what was left behind as an artwork in 1953. Where an artwork could be formed not from an act of creation but one of erasure and/or destruction/deconstruction. A 2013 essay by the curator Sarah Roberts, 'Erased de Kooning Drawing', deeply explores the work and the ideas that have been provoked by this piece at this following link on the SF MoMA website [link].
Holding my hand up now, Rauschenberg's life is so incredibly dense that I'm going to crib directly from Wikipedia [link]
Rauschenberg was born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, the son of Dora Carolina (née Matson) and Ernest R. Rauschenberg. His father worked for Gulf States Utilities, a light and power company. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians. He had a younger sister named Janet Begneaud.
At 18, Rauschenberg was admitted to the University of Texas at Austin where he began studying pharmacology, but he dropped out shortly after due to the difficulty of the coursework—not realizing at this point that he was dyslexic—and because of his unwillingness to dissect a frog in biology class. He was drafted into the United States Navy in 1944. Based in California, he served as a neuropsychiatric technician in a Navy hospital until his discharge in 1945 or 1946.
Rauschenberg subsequently studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris, France, where he met fellow art student Susan Weil. In 1948 Rauschenberg joined Weil in enrolling at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
At Black Mountain, Rauschenberg sought out Josef Albers, a founder of the Bauhaus in Germany, whom he had read about in an August 1948 issue of Time magazine. He hoped that Albers' rigorous teaching methods might curb his habitual sloppiness. Albers' preliminary design courses relied on strict discipline that did not allow for any "uninfluenced experimentation."
Rauschenberg became, in his own words, "Albers' dunce, the outstanding example of what he was not talking about". Although Rauschenberg considered Albers his most important teacher, he found a more compatible sensibility in John Cage, an established composer of avant-garde music. Like Rauschenberg, Cage had moved away from the disciplinarian teachings of his instructor, Arnold Schönberg, in favor of a more experimentalist approach to music. Cage provided Rauschenberg with much-needed support and encouragement during the early years of his career, and the two remained friends and artistic collaborators for decades to follow.
From 1949 to 1952 Rauschenberg studied with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor at the Art Students League of New York, where he met fellow artists Knox Martin and Cy Twombly.
Rauschenberg married Susan Weil in the summer of 1950 at the Weil family home in Outer Island, Connecticut. Their only child, Christopher, was born July 16, 1951. The two separated in June 1952 and divorced in 1953. Thereafter, Rauschenberg had romantic relationships with fellow artists Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, among others. His partner for the last 25 years of his life was artist Darryl Pottorf, his former assistant.
In the 1970s he moved into NoHo in Manhattan in New York City.
... Rauschenberg died on May 12, 2008, on Captiva Island, Florida.
For a thoroughly personable account of Rauschenberg and his life I encourage folk to read the 2008 Vanity Fair article by John Richardson, "Rauschenberg’s Epic Vision" [link].
Robert Rauschenberg - Pop Art Pioneer
BBC Documentary 2016
[Youtube link]
What led Rauschenberg into the creation of the Inferno drawings?
Leah Dickerman: In the middle of 1958, Rauschenberg took on a project that would occupy him across the course of the next two and a half years. He wanted to create illustrations for Dante's Inferno, a work that was written over 600 years before. And to work on these drawings, he set a series of rules for himself. He would only read one canto at a time, and then he’d make a drawing. He wouldn't read ahead and so he could respond to it with a kind of freshness.
Robert Rauschenberg: When I started the Dante illustrations, I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn't work any other way, or, or whether I was doing it out of choice. So I really welcomed, insisted, on it—on the challenge of being restricted by a particular subject, which meant that I would have to be involved in symbolism. Well, I spent two and a half years deciding that yes, I could do that..
Leah Dickerman, the Director of Editorial & Content Strategy at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City with an exerpt of Robert Rauschenberg talking [playlist - Robert Rauschenberg. Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. 1958-1960 ]
The imagery used has literally been ripped from the newspapers, books and magazines of the time and before. Sports people, National Graphic type imagery, architectural forms, racing vehicles, people in suits and at play, soldiers at war, men from men's physique magazines all blend together in a grimy mix. 3 wrestlers stand on podiums representing the 3 giants Nimrod, Ephialtes and Antaeus in the illustration for Canto XXXI. In the illustration for Canto XIV a foot appears at the top of the page, the point where Dante and Virgil enter part of the 7th circle where the sodomites roam. Raushenburg by this time was out of the closet and the toes in the illustration are his. Positioning himself on the edge about to enter the realm declaring this is the realm he would in all likelihood be condemned within Dante's mythology. Almost familiar faces dot the landscape of these works. Is that an astronaut? Neil Armstrong? Is that Freud? Nixon? George Washington? I can't quite tell, but it might be.
Materials and technique
Leah Dickerman: He developed an innovative technique for the drawings. It was a solvent transfer technique, choosing photo-based images from popular illustrated magazines, like Sports Illustrated, or Life and Time. He would soak the images with lighter fluid, flip them over, and rub on their back with an empty ballpoint pen. And that would transfer the image to a sheet of drawing paper. Then, he added touches of wash, and gouache, and crayon, and pencil. In this way, he was mixing images that were snipped from the flow of the contemporary media world with traditional fine art media. And he called them "Combine" drawings.
Leah Dickerman, the Director of Editorial & Content Strategy at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City [playlist - Robert Rauschenberg. Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. 1958-1960 ]
What I find interesting is that the transferred newsprint ink has a quality and tone of a graphite pencil, however the transferred images are not drawings though the marks appear similar. The slippage with actual drawing lain over the top blurs the line between print and mark-making entirely. Add the staining through ageing, the smudges, the smears and you have imagery that is an anti-art, anti-perfection, that mirrors the dirt and grime of what is being depicted. No part is quite what it seems.
So, what do I think? On a personal note I will be honest and say I'm confused. Initially I want to reflexively dismiss but I can't. These are not scrawls though may at first appear as such. The images are provocative and tantalising in their complexity. They sit outside of usual classical aesthetic norms and I love them for it.
Robert Rauschenberg, 1959-60
Canto XXXI: Central Pit of Malebolge, The Giants
(images MoMA, New York - c/o Robert Rauschenberg Foundation)
h/t: [OpenCulture], [The Art Newspaper] & [The Independent]
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation -
Robert Rauschenberg’s Dante Drawings (1958–60) [link]
MIT show
Robert Rauschenberg: 'XXXIV Drawings for Dante's Inferno' Dec 1, '04–Apr 1, '05
[link]
NY MoMA show
Robert Rauschenberg 'Among Friends' May 21–Sep 17, 2017 [link][audio - Robert Rauschenberg. Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. 1958-1960][Among Friends | MoMA LIVE discussion - YouTube link]
SF MoMA
Rauschenberg Research Project [link]
