Published in Arts, January 1985.
Also presented as a lecture at the Whitney Symposium, Whitney Museum of American Art, April 1984.
This article presents one of the first in-depth considerations of the early Rauschenberg paintings exhibited in the artist’s initial solo show. These paintings disclose, among other things, the artist’s attraction to symbolic content and seemingly contradictory literalmindedness, his interest in incorporating objects and materials from the real world, his conception of the canvas as a “flatbed” of information, and his penchant for irony and humor.