Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Curator Megan Fontanella discusses this work.

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This painting is Gabriele Münter “Still Life with Queen” an oil on canvas from 1912. Gabriele Münter often combined unrelated objects from her private world in her paintings, as in the “Still Life with a Floating Puppet”, her Queen, and framed behind a vase of flowers. Gifted to her by the Russian dancer Alexander Sakharov, the puppet takes on a life like presence. Without that context, however, viewers may not immediately recognize the figure as a puppet. Instead reading it as disproportionately small beside the bouquet of flowers. Such deliberate dissonances, slippages between artifact and human were characteristic of Gabriele Münter’s practice. The artist Vasily Kandinsky observed that her uneven translation of objects in one in the same painting helped her to achieve a “strong, complicated inner resonance.”

“Still Life with Queen” entered the Art Institute of Chicago's holdings in 1931 through the Distinguished modern Art collection of Arthur Jerome Eddy. It was therefore among the first of Münter’s works to appear in a US private collection by 1914, and later in a museum collection

Senior Paintings Conservator Julie Barten gives an inside look at how "Barge" was created and how it traveled from Bilboa to New York.

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To create "Barge", Rauschenberg used a combination of silk screening and direct painting on his

massive canvas. For the silk screen sections, he had photographic images commercially transferred

to screens, and he used those to print directly on the primed white canvas. While he incorporated

some of his own photographs, he also made prints using found imagery that depicts things like

sports, transportation, space exploration, and even a reproduction of a well-known painting by

Velázquez called the Roqueby Venus.

He also painted directly on the canvas, limiting his palette to black and white and gray admixtures. His vigorous brushwork conveys the remarkable speed with which he was working. Some of the paints were applied quite thickly, but others were so diluted that they caused drips of paint to run down the surface of the canvas.

There's film footage of him rubbing solvent-soaked rags across the paint surface, which resulted in dissolving the underlying paint and partially obscuring or blurring some of the imagery. The wiping with solvent-drenched rags also caused additional drips to run down the surface.

Bringing a painting of this scale into the galleries is a complex undertaking. A 32-foot-long canvas cannot

be walked up the spiral of the Guggenheim, nor does it fit in a truck or an airplane. So each time the painting is exhibited in a new space, the canvas has to be removed from its stretcher. Before the work travels, conservators detach the canvas and roll it very carefully face out around a sturdy, large-diameter tube. It takes a team of at least 16 or 18 people to do this work. The stretcher comes apart and travels along with the rolled painting, and once the work arrives at its next destination, we unroll the canvas and restretch it on the reassembled stretcher.

Traditionally, paintings are attached to their stretchers using staples around the edges. But when

the Guggenheim acquired this work, conservators devised a new system for attaching velcro to the tacking margins to avoid the need to repeatedly add staple holes.

Senior Curator Joan Young introduces "Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can't Be Stopped"

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My name is Joan Young. I'm the Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Guggenheim, New York,

and curator of "Robert Rauschenberg's Life Can't Be Stopped", part of our "Collection in Focus "series.

The exhibition is part of the centenary celebration of Rauschenberg's birth. Museums and galleries across the world have organized exhibitions of his work to examine the impact of his practice on art. Our exhibition features more than a dozen works from the Guggenheim's collection, along with major loans from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. The works on view demonstrate his engagement with the world around him through his use of photographs, both drawn from mass media sources, such as newspapers and magazines, as well as his own photography.

Rauschenberg often blurred the line between art and everyday life. This work reflected the proliferation of visual images within culture, which is even more inescapable today. Illustrated in the works on view are the many experimental techniques Rauschenberg has explored, from transferring images directly from newsprint and magazines by rubbing them with a burnishing tool, to silk screens made from his own or found photographs, to adopting vegetable dye-based inks for transferring imagery in order to avoid using chemical solvents. When he felt too comfortable with one process, Rauschenberg would try a new approach, evidence of his endless curiosity and willingness to take risks.

Senior Curator Joan Young discusses the significance of "Untitled (Red Painting)"

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"Untitled", from Rauschenberg's Red Painting series, displays the innovative and experimental approach that he took to materials. He used layers of paper, newsprint, and fabric to create a variegated ground for a range of reds applied at some points thickly and in other places thinly as washes, splatters, and drips. Framed at the top and bottom with blocks of wood, melding the two-dimensional aspects of painting with a three-dimensionality of sculpture. This is something he would pursue further in his Combines.

His pioneering series began in 1954 that often integrated found objects, such as a tire, an umbrella, pillow, or stuffed goat, into his paintings. For source material, for both his drawings and paintings, Rauschenberg often turned to sources from the mass media, such magazines as National Geographic, Life, Newsweek,

common publications that people encountered in their daily life. These images might be both easily recognizable to viewers, but also really capture the moment in which these works were created.

Senior Curator Joan Young on the centerpiece of the exhibition.

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A centerpiece of the exhibition is "Barge", the largest in his silkscreen painting series, approximately 80 paintings made between 1962 and 1964. "Barge" was executed predominantly in a 24-hour period and suggests a barge in shape and size and in the volume of images it carries, ranging from sports to transportation to space exploration and iconic historical works of art.

The cacophony of images enlivened by areas of expressive paint reflects the random and unending

visual stimulation we encounter in daily life. Guggenheim, New York jointly acquired the work with

the Guggenheim Bilbao at the time that we organized Rauschenberg's extensive retrospective in 1997. "Barge" has not been exhibited in New York in nearly 25 years, and we're excited to have it on view where it will be seen by a new generation of artists and museum visitors.

Noam Segal, the LG Electronics Associate Curator, discusses Rauschenberg's ethos and today's AI Ecology.

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Rauschenberg famously said, “I want paintings to be reflections of life, and life can’t be stopped.” And elsewhere he said: “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in the gap between the two.

This ethos aligns deeply with generativity—but it also highlights a crucial difference between Rauschenberg’s technological ecology and our own.

Artists working with E.A.T. were committed to opening the black box: understanding how machines work, exposing their mechanisms, and sharing technological knowledge. Today, we operate in a radically different environment. Contemporary AI systems are largely opaque, proprietary, and inaccessible. Where earlier technologies invited tinkering and transparency, today’s systems resist inspection.

As a result, while AI is generative, it produces a different kind of agency, a different relationship between artist, machine, and viewer. The liminal technological spaces that Rauschenberg explored—spaces of shared experimentation and legibility—are far harder to access now.

Senior Conservator for Works on Paper, Jeffrey Warda, discovers how Rauschenberg used newspaper rubbings, solvent transfers, and inkjet prints to pull everyday imagery into layered works grounded in an age-old printmaking tradition.

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One of the most accessible ways of making a print, maybe for him, was what we call transfer drawings. And if anyone remembers holding a newspaper, up until the 70s, the more you read that newspaper, you'd realize you had black smudges all over your fingers. Manufacturers did not like this. Rauschenberg says, this is a great thing. And he finds something really interesting out of it. And you hear the story of him being in Cuba in the early 50s cutting out a piece of something from the newspaper, laying it face down onto paper, and then rubbing that from the back, pulling it off, and some of the ink transfers.

The manufacturers, they're all about putting an end to this. So by the late 70s into the 80s and 90s, they figure out, okay, our inks are stable now. And that's largely done by adding resin to the inks. And the resin essentially fuses to the paper. So now it doesn't just flake or powder off. Not to be deterred, though, Rauschenberg says, oh, okay, I can handle that. And he finds another way to do these transfer drawings by using pretty much any organic solvent. It's often said that he used lighter fluid to do solvent transfers. You could really use anything. And if you had done any printmaking or as a painter, you'd have easy access to turpentine or mineral spirits, acetone, lacquer thinner. These are common solvents in any studio.

What's fun about solvent transfers is that they're very accessible. Anyone can do this. When you look at a work called "Religious Fluke" from 1962, you can see in some of the open areas of the paper where, okay, I can tell something was printed and transferred, but you can see how it's sort of washy and didn't completely transfer, and it definitely bled. That's very classic, just too much solvent probably. So you know he's using solvent to do this, and you can see how it just migrates into the paper as it gets wet. As printing technology changes over time, this process of solvent transfers, this is something he does throughout his career. But when you look at a work much later from 1997 called "Bilbao Scraps", those are inkjet transfers. So now he's moved to a modern printing technique that we use today and transferring those prints.

Now he could take a photograph that he made, enlarge it, and make a larger inkjet print out of it. He wouldn't be limited to the size of a newspaper publication or a magazine publication. He could make this any size and then do a similar solvent transfer with that inkjet print onto an artwork. And that's what you see in "Bilbao Scraps". Now this process of transferring, this goes back thousands of years. This is not unique to Rauschenberg. This goes back to Chinese rubbings, where stone tablets with texts or images or

bronze vessels with designs, these large stone monoliths with text were available to only those who could make it to that site. And with the advent of paper, you get the ability to distribute this. And printmaking is the vehicle to distribute widely. Popular texts back in the day, thousands of years ago, could be distributed through printing on paper, and rubbings did this.

So Rauschenberg, thousands of years later, is doing it with our current popular culture from the 70s and 80s and 90s. And often that was National Geographic or Popular Mechanics. These are the most common magazines that you would find. And he's distributing that popular culture through this technique that goes back thousands of years.

Noam Segal, the LG Electronics Associate Curator, connects contemporary AI to Rauschenberg’s Revolver, tracing a shared logic of generative systems, interaction, and distributed authorship across art and technology.

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Contemporary AI marks a fundamental shift. Unlike closed software systems, AI operates as an open, data-hungry, self-modifying apparatus. It is pixel-based rather than vector-based, probabilistic rather than deterministic, and capable of altering its own parameters through training.

In this sense, AI resembles a transmission-based generative technologies more than early computer art—but at an entirely different scale and opacity. The system evolves continuously, often without transparency or access to its internal logic.

This brings us back to Rauschenberg—and specifically to Revolver.

Revolver is a great example for Rauschenberg’s generative and interactive thinking. The work consists of 5 silkscreened Plexiglas discs, mounted one behind the other and driven by electric motors. A control box—originally intended for audience use—allows viewers to activate any number of discs, chose if to place the recto or verso, and to set them rotating in either direction.

As a result, Revolver never resolves into a final image. The composition is continuously produced through motion, layering, and viewer choice. In this sense, the work is generative: it is focused on variation rather than fixed representation and at the same time, it is interactive. Rauschenberg deliberately transfers agency from the artist to the viewer. The viewer does not merely interpret the work but they actively participate in its formation, shifting between a minimum of 3,840 visual combinations.

In Revolver II from 1967, this principle over ability becomes even clearer. The rotating discs combine photographs of motorcycles, diagrams, text, historical imagery, and abstract forms, including a grid overlayed on the artist body photograph, suggesting notions of quantified selfhood, industrialization and automation, producing a kaleidoscopic field in which authorship is distributed between artist, machine, and participant.

Seen from this perspective, Revolver is not only a landmark of generative and interactive art, but also a reminder of an earlier technological imagination—one grounded in openness, participation, and shared responsibility. Thinking about Rauschenberg today invites us to ask not only what AI can generate, but also who understands the system, and who gets to act within it.

Senior Conservator of Paper, Jeffrey Warda, discusses how Rauschenberg’s newspaper and magazine transfers blur drawing and print, revealing hidden dates and sources that can be traced through tiny fragments of text embedded in the work.

Transcript:

One of the early pieces you see walking into the gallery is a work called "Yellow Body". It has a yellow rectangle in the center. Looking at that at first, you'd say, okay, it's all this graphite pencil. You can just see these really fast pencil marks going back and forth. But you have a printed image from a magazine, and it sort of doesn't make sense. I think he loved that dichotomy. I think he loved this play on materials and process, where it looks like it's done directly on paper like a drawing, but it's actually printed. And when you look really closely at those lines, you realize they're not graphite, they're halftone, because they're printing from newspapers and magazines.

What can be kind of fun for us today is to go back and find the sources for all these publications. In some cases, you find enough text from the newspaper that you can find the actual New York Times from 1974. In the case of "Yellow Body", Rauschenberg signs the work just below the yellow rectangle. You can see written in his hand, Robert Rauschenberg, 1968. But the Rauschenberg Foundation subsequently has gone back and found these publications and noted the Apollo mission, which happened in 1969, and other images in "Yellow Body" that indicate this had to have been made in 1969. So likely he dated this a little later.

If you go all the way to the back corner of the gallery, there's a work from 1974 that's basically these strips of gauze that are hanging down from a piece of paper that's just nailed into the wall. And there's sort of these vague marks, and most of that is transfer drawings from newspapers. When you transfer something, you reverse it, you get a mirror image. So it can be hard to read it. You have to take a photograph of it and then flip it. Then you can read what the text is more easily and then do a search. And we found a number of elements that were transferred on that work to be from the New York Times. Same with "Talisman Freeze".

This is sort of an orange and red work on paper from 1979. This also has like a very thin fabric glued down onto the surface and you can see the stock market is printed on the surround, again from the New York Times. And we can go through all of these works with newspaper. Newspaper is often the easiest because

there's text that can be searched.

Senior Curator Joan Young talks about Rauschenberg's extensive history with the museum.

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As a hub for experimentation, the Guggenheim continues to inspire and uplift artists whose work extends beyond traditional confines. That by challenging the artistic status quo of his time, Rauschenberg embodied the very spirit of innovation that Hilary Bay, the founding director of the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, sought to promote through her commitment to abstract and non-objective art.

The Guggenheim first exhibited Rauschenberg's work in the early 1960s, notably including him in the seminal exhibition Six Paintings and the Object, organized by curator Lawrence Alloway, which was the first show of pop art in a New York museum. The other artists in the exhibition were Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. In 1997, the Guggenheim organized an extensive retrospective of Rauschenberg's work curated by Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, which traveled to several venues, including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. This was the first exhibition on which I worked, researching and writing a chronology of the artist's life and work. And so for me, this show is a homecoming or return to my roots.