Transferring Dante

In December 1960 the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York displayed a series of thirty-four illustrations of the Inferno by the avant-garde artist Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg had developed this project over the previous two years, working on it almost exclusively, first in New York City, and then in an isolated storage room in Treasure Island, Florida, where he retreated to concentrate on the last half of the cycle. When Rauschenberg decided to illustrate the Inferno in early 1959, his reputation in the New York art world was growing, although he did not achieve full recognition as the leading artist of his era until 1964, when he won the Venice Biennale International Grand Prize. But by the mid-1950s his works were shown in major galleries, and he had begun to be regarded as a major, if controversial, figure of the generation following Abstract Expressionism. As is well known, his Combines juxtapose found objects as diverse as stuffed animals, chairs, photographs, plastic, quilts, and pillows with paint, watercolour, and graphic signs. This refuse collected from the streets of New York was Rauschenberg’s ‘visual archive’, his ‘public act of collective memory’, to borrow Rosalind Krauss’s description in her discussion of the artist’s shift to photography in the early 1960s. Just think of two celebrated pieces, Bed and Monogram, as examples of the artist’s three-dimensional work of the 1950s: his own quilt and pillow (in the first case) and a stuffed goat with a tire around its middle (in the second) stand out as transfigured objects, visual allegories of his age. For, writes Krauss, ‘it is exactly the notion of memory, or of any other private experience which paintings might have formerly expressed, that is redefined by these pictures. The field of memory itself is changed from something that is internal to something that is external.’ Leo Steinberg first suggested a connection between the surface of Rauschenberg’s works and the mind itself ‘as a running transformer of the external world’. His picture planes are, wrote Steinberg, ‘for the consciousness immersed in the brain of the city’. As memos to the viewers, they document collective history, entrusting common images with the task of representing an age and its culture through exemplary objects. ‘The strongest thing about my work’, said Rauschenberg to Barbara Rose in 1966, ‘is the fact that I chose to ennoble the ordinary.’