Robert Rauschenberg could reinvent any tradition. For instance, he believed you should observe your birthday by giving gifts to your friends rather than passively waiting to receive them. You never knew, when Oct. 22 rolled around, on whom he would bestow new birthday drawings.
He once made what was essentially a grandly scaled birthday card to himself. “Mirthday Man,” as it is punnily titled, is a 15-foot-wide painting that he started and finished on his 72nd birthday. It reproduces a jumble of photographs of things he loved (the beach, a bicycle wheel, Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”) on either side of a full-size X-ray of his own bony skeleton.
The artist, who died in 2008 at age 82, would have turned 100 this month, and his centennial is being celebrated with fitting exuberance and visual overload. More than 30 exhibitions of his work can be seen around the globe. None of the shows constitutes a definitive retrospective, although the scrappy, piecemeal approach makes sense for an artist who bestowed a new majesty on everyday fragments. His paintings combined images, objects and things-that-didn’t-look-like-art decades before clever remixing became the main mission of contemporary culture.
In Manhattan alone, four exhibitions are zeroing in on different aspects of his fiendishly faceted career. On upper Fifth Avenue, the Museum of the City of New York is showcasing an underknown body of the artist’s black-and-white photographs, while the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, starting Friday, is rehanging his “Barge,” a justly historic silk-screen painting. Downtown, Rauschenberg’s passionate environmentalism — he designed the official poster for the first Earth Day, in 1970 — is the subject of a show at the Grey Art Museum at New York University. In the Chelsea galleries, the artist’s inordinately inventive work in prints and multiples, which once led him to create an edition of tall cardboard doors that come with hinges and are actually functional, can be seen at Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl.
But the buoyant birthday festivities come mixed with sobering news. In a surprising turn of events, the artist’s foundation is selling off his former 22-acre compound in Captiva, Fla., the tranquil barrier island where he settled in 1970 after leaving New York. He stayed on for the duration of his life, savoring the views of the Gulf of Mexico, the same body of salt water in which he first learned to swim and fish during his boyhood in the sleepy coastal town of Port Arthur, Texas.
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The post Happy 100th Mirthday, Robert Rauschenberg appeared first on New York Times.
