Image and object

THE goat is back in town. Robert Rauschenberg’s “Monogram” (1955-1959) is a notorious work of art assembled from an old automobile tire encircling the midsection of a stuffed Angora goat. The handsome yet ridiculous beast, snout smeared with paint, stands atop a collaged painting placed horizontally on the floor, which transforms it into a sculptural pedestal. It’s as if the goat is idly grazing in the trash, gobbling up lunch.

Goats are like that. Rauschenberg is too.

“Monogram” is a kind of self-portrait of an artist who voraciously changed the terms by which art was understood in the 1950s. It virtually shouts his vivifying sense of ambition.

Rauschenberg was a relative unknown when he began work on it, a 30-year-old kid from coastal Texas who had mostly kicked around art schools and bummed around Europe and North Africa. A monogram is an identifying mark. This one explodes collage into human scale while simultaneously acknowledging and undermining the established genius of the medium’s 1912 inventor, Pablo Picasso. “Monogram” riffs on Picasso’s “She-Goat” (1950-1952), which the Spaniard assembled from a palm leaf, ceramic flowerpots, a wicker basket and other stuff, but then classically cast in Old Master-style bronze. And it happily chews up Abstract Expressionist painting.

“Monogram” periodically leaves Stockholm, where it has been a centerpiece at the city’s Modern Museum for 40 years. Now it’s holding court on the second floor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the smashing exhibition “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines.” The show opened Tuesday, and it is revelatory and immensely satisfying.

That’s no surprise, given the artist’s stature. But seeing this work in the hallowed halls of the Met does offer something unexpected. Inside America’s greatest museum, Rauschenberg is enthroned in art’s pantheon. Meanwhile, his rambunctious Combines offered simultaneous homage and assault to the new gods of American painting in the expansive aftermath of World War II.

Take “Minutiae” (1954), the extraordinary work that greets you at the show’s entrance. It looks like a tattered stage set for a domestic drama -- theatrical flats for a performance in which one unexpected actor turns out to be the audience.

A large painting stands away from the wall, propped up on three legs. The middle one is an actual table leg, which gives the painting the objective presence of furniture. A fourth “leg” is a panel from the painting that Rauschenberg has projected forward several feet (it’s attached to the main painting by wooden struts at the top). Imagine that this panel has stepped out of the painting to expound a ruminative soliloquy.

At eye level a scrim of blue gauze lets you look right through the painting, the same way you’d look through a window. Suspended below the gauze is a round shaving mirror, so your face gets reflected in the painting. The dual traditions guiding Western art for a couple of thousand years -- that painting is either a window on the world or a mirror of it -- is shoved into the foreground.

Simultaneously, though, Rauschenberg demolishes both metaphors. This art window and this art mirror are not fictive, as they have been since ancient Greece. These are palpable and real. Furthermore, the image and the object have been fused into one.

Rauschenberg dubbed this fusion-format a Combine because imaginary elements from painting were combined with the object quality of sculpture. Neither takes precedence over the other. Image and object are equivalent. “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines” brings together nearly 70 choice examples of this revolutionary genre (and the fat, engrossing catalog chronicles about 100 more), made between 1954 and 1964.

The obsolescence of the worn-out artistic traditions of window and mirror are embodied in Rauschenberg’s materials, scavenged from dumpsters and urban alleys. The artist had a cold-water studio on Lower Manhattan’s Fulton Street (for the princely sum of $10 a month), which he rented in 1952 after returning from the grand, classical environs of Rome. The youthful novelty of America’s emergent postwar empire stood as a rather sharp counterpoint to the ancient Eternal City, heroic and historic.

Below the blue gauze window and the battered shaving mirror of “Minutiae,” Rauschenberg pasted a patch of blue cotton tablecloth. The fabric’s pattern couldn’t be more ordinary, one you’ve seen a thousand times before. But the cloth, printed with a tree-branch laden with ripe red apples, was anything but chosen at random. Its pseudo still life is instead a witty nod to Cezanne, whose famous apples are the ur-objects of Modern art. Rauschenberg’s remnant from the five-and-dime transforms the art of the museums, august and intrepid, into domestic kitchen-table fare.

With “Minutiae,” it’s the little things that count. In 1954, when Rauschenberg made it, Abstract Expressionist painting was the art that was heroic and historic, august and intrepid. The Combines took direct aim at its newly established tropes and cliches.

At the lower right of “Minutiae’s” rear panel he pasted a crumpled, paint-slathered clipping from the Sunday funnies. Otto Soglow’s “The Little King” was a pantomime comic, first launched in the New Yorker magazine and then syndicated by Hearst. Pantomime hinges on expressive bodily movement -- and, not coincidentally, so did New York School painting. Rauschenberg chose a strip in which the Little King visits a show of Modern sculpture and confronts a Henry Moore-like bronze with a hole in its belly -- a hole not unlike the one directly above it in the belly of his Combine.

That Rauschenberg chose a comic about a portly, bearded monarch says two things. First, the once cataclysmic European confrontation with modernity has been rendered quaint, given the democratic mass-media juggernaut of the newly dominant American Empire. And second, there are new kings on the block: painters like Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning -- the first Americans to gain international stature. “Believe it or not!” declares the Ripley’s newspaper feature that Rauschenberg pasted opposite the Little King.

Revolutions topple kings, and Rauschenberg’s revolutionary Combines certainly embody his own outsized artistic ambitions. In elaborating collage he pointedly jousted with Picasso, king of the Modern art-hill. In “Small Rebus” and “Honeysuckle” (both 1956) and in “Odalisk” (1955-1958), he includes newspaper photos of matadors and bullfights. Since at least the 1930s, Picasso had been identifying himself in countless works of art with the animal power of the bull. So Rauschenberg wields his Combines as a cape and sword, going in for the artful -- and deeply respectful -- kill.

Like Picasso, in “Monogram” he also represented himself in animal guise. Identity was the issue at the core of Abstract Expressionist art, whose autobiographical brushstrokes were believed to embody an interior world of mythic self-hood. As a goat, satyric emblem of Bacchus, Rauschenberg cast himself as a lecherous Dionysian.

In “Hymnal” (1955), whose large field of elegant swirls of paisley fabric forms a funny travesty of Ab Ex brushstrokes, he sings in the New York School choir -- albeit with a view of identity that is social, not individualistic. Embedded like a statue of a saint within a niche is the Manhattan telephone book. In the corner he pasted a post office FBI flier, complete with a set of unique fingerprints of the wanted criminal. In the lower center is a chunk of crudely scratched bathroom graffiti, chronicling the tempestuous love-hate relationship between one Peg and Ray.

If artistic identity is made a joke -- and nowhere more than in the paint-slathered face and ears of “Monogram’s” horny goat -- the audience is welcomed into the space of art as a full participant in the manufacture of its meanings. As much as he admired the legacy of Cezanne and Picasso, Rauschenberg also took Marcel Duchamp to heart. The platform on which the “Monogram” goat stands is collaged with numerous photographs, and almost all are aerial views. That means that when you look down on the horizontal, paint-smeared platform, the pictures conform to your perspective.

One shows a vast crowd. Another is a view into an office interior, reminiscent of a bank. A third is a fighter pilot standing with hands on hips and looking heavenward; as he does he looks straight at you -- which transforms you into a celestial god.

The funniest (and most pointed) photo is an aerial view of a tightrope walker, shown midway across a wire stretched over a deep and forbidding canyon. Art is a risk! As you look down on this precarious scene, you face into the abyss -- into the existential void that haunted Abstract Expressionist art.

Again and again, Rauschenberg starts with the inside-baseball arguments common among artists. Then, scavenging found objects, he renders them as artifacts of an ordinary humanity, rather than bolts of lightning cast down from Olympian heights by the mysterious gods. He’s a profoundly democratic artist -- an all-American. Witness “Black Market” (1961), an audience-participation work that invites you to add your own drawings, skillful or crude, to a row of attached clipboards, while featuring a single collage image: the dome of the U.S. Capitol.

Among my favorite democratizing examples is his use of shirt-sleeves, which turn up repeatedly as collage elements. This is more than a case of Rauschenberg wearing his art on his sleeve (although it is that too). The twin titans of Ab Ex were Pollock and De Kooning -- the latter championed for the fluid, facile mastery of the painter’s wrist, the former hailed for the dazzling command of his arm in slinging spectral skeins of paint. Rauschenberg’s cut-up and painted shirt-sleeves picture and materialize both -- the arm signified by the sleeve and the wrist by its prominent cuff. And his shirt-sleeve is not much different from the one a viewer is likely to be wearing as he looks at Rauschenberg’s aestheticized example. The scale of art is human.

One problem with the Met show is that the wall-bound Combines are hung too high. (These hallowed halls are also tall.) Some of the bodily correspondence between art and viewer is lost. Instead, the elevation on the wall emphasizes their pictorial qualities, at the expense of equally important objective ones. While the authentic power of the Combines resides in Rauschenberg’s artful balance, here the scales are tipped.

Two important early examples are also missing. “Rebus” (1955), which is related to the marvelous “Small Rebus,” was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art; but in its increasingly imperious manner, the museum would not let it travel up Fifth Avenue to the Met. (MoMA also won’t let its iconic 1955 “Bed,” which is at the Met, travel with the show.)

The very early “Charlene” (1954), perhaps the first major Combine, will catch up with the exhibition later, when it travels to Paris and Stockholm next fall and winter.

Still, this first examination of what surely ranks as Rauschenberg’s most important body of work is sensational. The landmark exhibition was deftly organized by Paul Schimmel, chief curator at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, home of the largest public collection of Rauschenberg Combines. (Nine of MOCA’s 11 examples are in New York.) Shows typically change on the road, and when it comes to L.A. -- May 21 through Sept. 11 -- expect this one to be slightly larger than the version at the Met.

Hopefully that means more Combines made before 1960. Beginning with the so-called time paintings, in which Rauschenberg began to embed actual clocks as an element, an easy elegance begins to overtake the work. The Combines start to lose some grit.

Rauschenberg’s work was in transition. He was starting to explore silk-screens as a painting tool, and printmaking became a more prominent independent medium.

In his personal life, a romantic relationship with Jasper Johns, an artist who approached similar themes in very different ways and a union that coincided with the emergence of the Combines, was coming to an end.

The show’s single example from 1964, the pseudo Japanese folding screen called “Gold Standard,” made during a public performance in Tokyo, is showy yet bland. It’s the opposite of its title. The empty virtuosity that had overtaken Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s -- inspiring Rauschenberg -- now engulfs the Combines. That year Rauschenberg won the top prize for painting at the Venice Biennale with his silk-screen canvases, and a remarkable era for art came to a triumphant close. This extraordinary show is its chronicle.