Lighting the fusion

ART museum exhibitions change when they travel. It isn’t just that some works are withdrawn and others added -- especially if a tour is lengthy -- although that’s common. What changes most dramatically is the show’s tone or feeling. It all depends on the gallery space and the sensitivity of the installation.

“Robert Rauschenberg: Combines” was a terrific show when it had its debut last December at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. How could it not be? The artist’s 1954 invention of a bracing hybrid form, which splits the difference between painting and sculpture, was a pivotal development for art.

Now the show has arrived at the Museum of Contemporary Art, organizer of this rich survey of the genre’s evolution -- and here it’s even better. Over the course of the next year it will be moving on to museums in Paris and Stockholm, but if you can see the show at MOCA you are likely to see it in its optimal incarnation.

Why? Simple: MOCA’s permanent collection includes the largest number of Rauschenberg Combines -- 11, most of them dating to the profoundly fertile half-dozen years before 1960 -- to be found anywhere in the world. The museum has lived with them, learned from them and come to understand much about their absorbing nuances over the course of the last two decades.

Among them are major individual examples of Rauschenberg’s achievement, starting with an untitled, heavily autobiographical Combine that ranks as the artist’s first flat-out masterpiece in the genre. (It’s the one with the stuffed rooster at the bottom, strutting next to a photograph of a handsome dandy reflected Narcissus-like in a mirror.) More important, though, the show is a textbook example of the incomparable benefits inherent in collecting an artist’s work in depth.

In the imposing Beaux Arts galleries of the Met, where an encyclopedia of world art unfolded all around it, Rauschenberg’s career was infused with monumentality and grandeur. The art was certainly up to the challenge. Some Combines are as meaningful and moving as anything else tucked away in the copious rooms of that august institution.

But at MOCA the pomp and circumstance are gone, replaced by a gritty beauty that is truer to the revolutionary spirit of the work. To borrow a line from “Women in Revolt,” the satirical 1971 movie produced by Rauschenberg disciple Andy Warhol, the Combines here “get down off their trapeze and into the sawdust. That’s circus talk” -- but in the hurdy-gurdy spirit of life’s raucous, poignant carnival, it suits this art just fine.

In fact, it’s intrinsic to the Combine as a hybrid form that draws on properties of painting and sculpture -- of two-dimensional image and three-dimensional object. Consider “Interview” (1955), a shallow wooden box as tall as a standing man that hangs on the wall. It’s divided to the left of center by a hinged and battered white door, which turns the box into something that approximates a closet. Things are stored inside, including memories and aspirations. They are represented by photographs, bits of fabric and lace, a baseball, reproductions of paintings and lots of smeared paint.

The drippy, multicolored pigment mimics the brushwork of an Abstract Expressionist painting. But Rauschenberg merges it into the colorful, machine-printed patterns on shirt fabrics, tablecloths and window curtains. The ordinary household cloth also echoes canvas, usually hidden away beneath a painting’s surface. Image and object, painting and sculpture combine. Each is both and neither.

The title “Interview” suggests the give-and-take of answers offered to personal questions. Partly the piece recalls Rauschenberg’s modest childhood home on the Texas Gulf Coast. The Combine is largely made from detritus scavenged off the streets of Lower Manhattan, but the architectonic structure looks as much like a shanty as a cold-water flat. Its spirit is at once urban and rural.

Among my favorite passages is a section at the upper left that includes a small but earnest thrift-store painting of a tropical shoreline. A large brick suspended from twine hangs -- like a painting -- in front of the sun-dappled scene. It blocks the coastal view, interrupting the down-home Gulf Coast recollection with a blunt fact of current material reality.

This juxtaposition of brick and painting also underscores a simple but typically ignored truth: In art, pictures are also objects. Images have “thingyness.” That’s where the New York installation faltered a bit, but MOCA’s shines.

At the Met, with its grand, tall galleries framed by old-fashioned articulated moldings, the Combines that hang on a wall (some stand on the floor) were often installed up high. They felt less like hybrids than collaged paintings.

Chunky platforms below helped to keep visitors at a certain distance, given the necessity for managing crowds in Manhattan’s busiest tourist destination. But one result was to routinely privilege the pictorial half of Rauschenberg’s radical hybrid of painting and sculpture. Its equally important quality as an object was diminished.

This is more than a semantic issue. Witness it yourself in the encounter with Rauschenberg’s “Canyon,” the astounding 1959 interpretation of the homoerotic Greco-Roman myth of Ganymede, the mortal boy abducted by a god disguised as an eagle. Enshrined and elevated at the Met, the impressive work made you think of classic Old Master pictures by the likes of Rembrandt and Correggio. Neither one came to mind when I saw it at MOCA, except in retrospect.

The work is composed from city rubbish, and the title “Canyon” refers to the modern urban cliffs formed by skyscrapers. The collage elements include a photograph of the artist’s son, an obvious allusion to young Ganymede. The laughing boy’s upraised arm forms a mirror image of an adjacent picture of the Statue of Liberty -- a feminine icon of freedom, holding aloft her torch.

Affixed to the front of the large canvas is a stuffed, paint-covered eagle -- a masculine icon of American freedom, further mirroring Lady Liberty. The eagle, of course, also represents Jupiter or Zeus, the god who swooped down from the heavens to capture the handsome mortal and bring him back to his love nest on Mt. Olympus. Rauschenberg put an empty cardboard box in the eagle’s talons, perhaps as a talisman for his relationship with artist Jasper Johns, and he suspended a sexually suggestive pillow below. It hangs like a heavy pair of testicles.

At MOCA “Canyon” grabs you in the gut. Properly installed, as it was not at the Met, the testicular pillow is suspended just above the floor. The story of abduction has gravity. Meanwhile the eagle, with its imposing 5-foot wingspan, bears down squarely on a viewer’s midsection. Yikes!

Scale is critical in art, and that includes the physical relation between the pictorial elements of “Canyon” and a viewer’s body. The effect is thrilling. The work’s theatrical power is juiced every time you move in close to examine a small element of background collage -- and the menacing eagle presses back. In the modern city evoked by “Canyon,” sexual freedom is not just an abstract idea.

MOCA curator Paul Schimmel, whose show this is, has done a masterful job of installing these 71 Rauschenberg Combines. As “Canyon” demonstrates, the works speak directly to you, rather than from on high.

They also speak with -- and illuminate -- one another. The second room is a stunner. In the center is a pair of totemic Combines, each sporting a taxidermic chicken. The untitled 1954 work sometimes referred to as “Man With White Shoes” is the first masterpiece in Rauschenberg’s new genre. Slightly later is “Odalisk,” its equally compelling companion. Schimmel persuasively describes them in the show’s indispensable catalog as “veritable portraits of the artist.” One features collage elements emphasizing masculinity, the other femininity -- most wittily by featuring a rooster and a hen.

Behind the pair and flanking them on the wall are four more Combines. These include “Factum I” and “Factum II,” the famous pair of almost-but-not-quite identical canvases. If the totems manifest the masculine and feminine sides of a single person, think of this pair as a same-sex couple.

Rauschenberg was drafted into the Navy at the end of World War II; by 1954, he was a divorced man coming to terms with his homosexuality and in love with Johns. Society was split into rigidly defined gender zones. The social context made these Combines radical, even though they embody the simple truth of Rauschenberg’s own hybrid nature.

And so it goes throughout the large and effusive exhibition, which includes works gathered from public and private collections throughout Europe and North America. Disappointingly, the Museum of Modern Art refused to lend 1955’s “Bed” and “Rebus.” (The latter is especially missed, given that MOCA owns the companion “Small Rebus.”) But there are compensatory satisfactions, such as 1962’s “Navigator,” added to the show. Its cruciform assembly of crumpled light fixtures and metal cans accented by a ghostly question mark makes it perhaps the most lyrically beautiful of the last Combines.

The survey brings together more Combines than have been seen in a single exhibition since 1963, just before the series ended. When you realize in that stunning second room that three of the six Rauschenbergs that have just knocked your socks off are in MOCA’s permanent collection, it’s easy to understand why the show is exceptionally well done. The next four months are going to be a lot of fun.

*

Robert Rauschenberg: Combines

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Closed Tuesday and Wednesday

Ends: Sept. 4

Price: $5 to $8

Contact: (213) 626-6222