Encounters with Rauschenberg

Leo Steinberg is the rare art historian who has known the political pressures implicit in reviewing the work of living artists. In his engrossing lecture, filled with exciting insights and personal memories, he surveys the career of Robert Rauschenberg, one of the great American postwar artists. Beginning with his own experience as a moonlighting critic in the turbulent art world of New York in the 1950s and 1960s, he reveals much about himself and more about the insolent originality of the young Rauschenberg. With the sharpness and confidence of one who championed Rauschenberg's work in its beginnings and has pondered it ever since, Steinberg offers in-depth discussions of such major challenges as the "Erased de Kooning Drawing", "Bed" and "Monogram". Where his interpretations differ from those of other critics, he shows how, and why. And he reflects candidly on his own change of mind over the years. Rauschenberg's crucial role in exploding earlier limits of art - "letting the world in again" -is demonstrated with fresh argument and precision. Where some of Rauschenberg's more recent work leaves him unmoved, or resistant, Steinberg is ready to say so. Steinberg warns against the modish enthusiasm that now loads Rauschenberg's work with murderous symbolism or same-sex iconography. He argues that meaning in this artist's work is almost unspeakable, and the novel relationship established between the work and viewer more subtly intentioned.