Rauschenberg's Mystery Goat Stars in Paris Show of `Combines' Bloomberg

In 1964, after Robert Rauschenberg won the Venice Biennale Grand Prize, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano deplored the event as ``the total and general defeat of culture.''

Since then Rauschenberg, 81, has become one of the Grand Old Men of contemporary art, with auction prices to match. ``Combines,'' an exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, is on the third leg of an international tour that started in New York and Los Angeles and will end in Stockholm.

``Combine paintings'' is the name Rauschenberg gave to the three-dimensional works he produced between 1954 and 1961. At the time, they were viewed as a declaration of war against Abstract Expressionism, the movement that had dominated U.S. art since the 1940s.

Rauschenberg had started with monochromatic paintings. In 1954, he began to attach Coca-Cola bottles, light bulbs, shoes, stuffed animals and other ``found objects'' to his canvases.

The idea was not new. Dadaists and Surrealists had already experimented with ``assemblages,'' made of various materials, often junk. The funniest example was Kurt Schwitters's ``Merzbau'' (Merz Building) in Hanover aka ``the Cathedral of Erotic Misery.'' It was destroyed by the Royal Air Force in World War II.

Relating Materials

Rauschenberg's teacher at Black Mountain Collage in North Carolina was Josef Albers, an émigré from Germany. Although a Bauhaus man, not a Surrealist, Albers insisted on the exact knowledge of different materials and the relationship between them. ``Combination'' was an important term in his lexicon.

No wonder the young painter's strange excursions into the third dimension were first dismissed as ``Neo-Dada,'' the poor imitation of an old hat. In 1958, when Leo Castelli gave him a one-man show in his gallery on New York's Upper East Side, only one item was bought -- by Castelli himself.

The MoMA indignantly refused when Castelli tried to sell the museum ``Monogram,'' arguably Rauschenberg's most famous work and one of the Paris show's highlights. Today, it occupies a place of honor at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

``Monogram,'' a stuffed angora goat with a rubber tire around its body standing on a canvas with collages, has inspired extravagant interpretations. Some describe it as Rauschenberg's ``Rosebud,'' a memory of a pet goat killed by his father.

`Area of Feeling'

Although the combine paintings are replete with personal references and reminiscences, Rauschenberg has refused to admit that they are autobiographical statements. Instead, he has called them ``unbiased documentations of what I observed, letting the area of feeling take care of itself.''

Nor does he like to be pigeonholed as a pop artist. ``I have never belonged to them,'' he insists. He may have borrowed from pin-ups and cartoon strips, yet, he says, ``my intention was never to elevate commercials to an art form.''

In other words, the visitor has to solve the mystery of the 50 works the Pompidou Center has brought together or leave it unsolved, like the mystery of Mona Lisa's smile.

The show runs through Jan. 15, 2007. It will be on display at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm from Feb. 17 through May 6, 2007. Bloomberg