Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism: Art, ‘Sensibility’ and War 9781501358296, 9781501358265, 9781501358272

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Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

Transnational Surrealism Series Editor Gavin Parkinson (The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, UK) Exploring all aspects of the Surrealist movement since its establishment in Europe in the 1920s, Transnational Surrealism places particular emphasis on the international scope of the movement and on the long history of Surrealism, extending up to the present day. The series is a venue for scholars from multiple fields to engage with Surrealist history, with a particular focus on themes and concepts from the 1940s onwards, or on the activities of Surrealist groups in areas of the world that lie beyond the usual reach of studies of Surrealism such as Africa, China, Japan, Latin America, Romania and the USA. Monographic studies of individual groups, artists and writers are welcome, especially those that promise to uncover new or relatively overlooked areas of Surrealist activity. Proposals that promote gender and racial diversity in Surrealism studies are particularly encouraged given the fundamental aims of the series. Advisory Board Ambra d’Antone, Warburg Institute and The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Norwich University of the Arts, UK Kristoffer Noheden, Stockholm University, Sweden Michael Richardson, joint editor of The Surrealism Reader (2015), and Visiting Fellow (honorary) at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK Abigail Susik, Willamette University, USA Titles in the Series: Surrealist Sorcery: Objects, Theories, and Practices of Magic in the Surrealist Movement by Will Atkin (forthcoming)

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism Art, ‘Sensibility’ and War Gavin Parkinson

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2023 Copyright © Gavin Parkinson, 2023 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover designer: Elena Durey Cover image: Robert Rauschenberg, Bed (1955). Combine: oil and graphite on pillow, quilt, and sheet, mounted on wood support 75.25 in × 31.5 in × 8 in (191.1 cm × 80 cm × 20.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Leo Castelli in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5829-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5827-2 eBook: 978-1-5013-5828-9 Series: Transnational Surrealism Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

­­Contents List of illustrations ­Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction

1

1­ ­2 3­ ­4 ­5 ­6 ­7 ­8

Poet: Allegory and metaphor in US art history and criticism Intruders in the Surrealist domain: Bed, Target with Plaster Casts, The Consumer Opposer: The poetics and politics of Canyon in Paris and New York, 1961 Surrealist of the re-found object: Beholding Jean-Jacques Lebel and Monogram in Front unique Resistance artist: Bed at Anti-Procès The Constantin Guys of the atomic era: Reading Alain Jouffroy, Talisman and Barge Choisiste: ‘Things’ in French and US art criticism in the 1960s Surrealist in irony: Reading José Pierre and Trophy III (for Jean Tinguely)

Concluding remarks: Reconsidering art history, Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism, 1952–80 Notes ­Bibliography Index

vi

13 31 51 68 91 107 131 150 170 179 274 295

List of illustrations Plates Robert Rauschenberg, Persimmon (1964). Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas, 66 × 50 in (167.6 cm × 127 cm) 2 Anonymous, photograph of ‘Cannibal Feast’ showing Jasper Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts (1955) at Exposition InteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS), Paris (1959–60) 3 Robert Rauschenberg, Bed (1955). Combine: oil and graphite on pillow, quilt and sheet, mounted on wood support, 75.25 × 31.5 × 8 in (191.1 × 80 × 20.3 cm) 4 Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts (1955). Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects, 129.4 × 111.8 cm 5 Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled (de Gaulle) (1961). Solvent transfer with gouache, watercolour and graphite on paper, 57.1 × 74.9 cm 6 Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon (1959). Oil, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, cardboard box, printed paper, printed reproductions, photograph, wood, paint tube and mirror on canvas with oil on bald eagle, string and pillow, 207.6 × 177.8 × 61 cm 7 Printed leaflet reproducing the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War or Declaration of the 121 (1960), inserted into Front unique, no. 2, winter 1960 8 Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram (1955–9). Oil, paper, fabric, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber shoe-heel, and tennis ball on two conjoined canvases with oil on taxidermied Angora goat with brass plaque and rubber tire on wood platform, 106.5 × 160.6 × 163.5 cm 9 René Magritte, Hegel’s Holiday (1958). Oil on canvas, 61 × 50 cm 10 Robert Rauschenberg, study for Monogram (1959). Watercolour and graphite on paper, 48.3 × 28.6 cm 11 Jean-Jacques Lebel, Enrico Baj, Roberto Crippa, Gianni Dova, Antonio Recalcati and Érro, Le Grand tableau anti-fasciste collectif (1960). Oil and paper collage on canvas, 400 cm × 500 cm 12 Jean-Jacques Lebel, Portrait de Rauschenberg (1961). Collage, printed matter, oil paint and Ripolin on plywood, 127 × 113 cm 1

List of illustrations

vii

13 Robert Rauschenberg, Talisman (1958). Oil, paper, printed paper, printed reproductions, wood, glass jar on metal chain and fabric on canvas, 107 × 71.1 × 11.4 cm 14 Robert Rauschenberg, Barge (1962–3). Oil and silkscreened ink on canvas, 203.9 × 980.4 cm 15 Robert Rauschenberg, Trophy III (for Jean Tinguely) (1961). Oil and printed paper on carved wood structure with metal bed springs, metal ladder, cloth, fuse box with fuses, metal dish, eyehook and nails, 243.8 × 167 × 26.7 cm

Figures 1.1 Robert Rauschenberg, Crocus (1962). Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas, 61.375 × 37.5 × 2.25 in (155.8 × 95.1 × 5.7 cm) 1.2 Cover of Location, no. 1, spring 1963 1.3 From Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Random Order,’ Location, no. 1, spring 1963, 28 1.4 Cover of André Breton, Nadja (1928) 1.5 From Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Random Order,’ Location, no. 1, spring 1963, 29 1.6 Jacques-André Boiffard, André Breton, ‘The words BOIS • CHARBONS’, Nadja (1928) 2.1 Photograph of Leo Castelli at Jasper Johns exhibition, 1958 2.2 Anonymous, photograph of corridor showing Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) and Alberto Giacometti's Invisible Object (cast c. 1954–5), at Exposition InteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS), Paris (1959–60) 2.3 Henri Glaeser, photograph of corridor showing Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) at Exposition InteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS), Paris (1959–60) 2.4 Anonymous, photograph showing Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed and Jasper Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts at Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain, New York (1960–1) 2.5 Alfred Jarry, Veritable Portrait of Monsieur Ubu (woodcut, 1896) 2.6 René Magritte, The Eternally Obvious (1930). Oil on five separately stretched and framed canvases mounted on acrylic sheet, 167.6 × 38.1 × 55.9 cm 2.7 Marcel Duchamp, shop window display for Arcane 17 (1944) at Gotham Book Mart. Installation view of Lazy Hardware, Gotham Book Mart with Marcel Duchamp and André Breton’s reflection in the window

17 19 21 21 22 22 33

38

39

42 43 45

46

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List of illustrations

2.8 Marcel Lannoy, photograph showing the collective object The Consumer (1965, destroyed) at L‘Écart absolu, Paris (1965). Mixed media, dimensions unknown 2.9 Marcel Lannoy, photograph showing detail of the collective object The Consumer (1965, destroyed) at L‘Écart absolu, Paris (1965). Mixed media, dimensions unknown 3.1 Robert Rauschenberg, Pilgrim (1960). Oil, graphite, paper, printed paper and fabric on canvas with painted wood chair, 201.3 × 136.8 × 47.3 cm 4.1 Cover of Front unique, no. 1, spring/summer 1959 4.2 Cover of Front unique, no. 2, winter 1960 4.3 Photograph of Monogram in Front unique, no. 2, winter 1960, 30 4.4 Meret Oppenheim, Object (Breakfast in Fur) (1936). Fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon cup 10.9 cm in diameter; saucer 23.7 cm in diameter; spoon 20.2 cm long, overall height 7.3 cm 4.5 Robert Rauschenberg, detail of Monogram (1955–9) 4.6 Robert Rauschenberg, detail of Monogram (1955–9) 4.7 Pablo Picasso, She Goat (1950). Plaster (wicker basket, ceramic ware, palm leaf, metal, wood, cardboard and plaster), 120.5 × 72 × 144 cm 4.8 René Magritte, The Cut Glass Bath (1946). Gouache on paper, 48.5 × 34 cm 4.9 René Magritte, The Vocation (1964). Coloured pencil on paper, 22.6 × 29.5 cm 4.10 Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram: Preliminary Study 1 (1955). Graphite on paper, 11.875 in × 8.75 in (30.2 cm × 22.2 cm) 4.11 Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram: First State (c. 1955). Oil, paper, fabric and wood on canvas plus stuffed Angora goat and three electric light fixtures, approx. 190.5 × 118.1 × 30.5 cm 4.12 Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram: Second State (c. 1956). Oil, paper, fabric and wood plus stuffed Angora goat and rubber tyre on wood, approx. 292.1 × 81.3 × 111.8 cm 4.13 Robert Rauschenberg, detail of platform of Monogram (1955–9) 4.14 Robert Rauschenberg, detail of platform of Monogram (1955–9) 4.15 Wolfgang Paalen, Articulated Cloud (1937). Umbrella with natural sponge attached by adhesive, height 50 cm 4.16 Robert Rauschenberg, The Ancient Incident (Kabal American Zephyr series) (1981). Wood and metal stands with wood chairs, 219.7 × 233.7 × 50.8 cm 4.17 Robert Rauschenberg, Racketeer (Kabal American Zephyr series) (1983). Construction, 120.7 × 43.2 × 47 cm

48

49 60 70 71 73

75 76 77 78 80 80 82

82

83 84 84 85

86 86

List of illustrations 4.18 Jean-Jacques Lebel, Pretty Storm (1990). Construction: dimensions and location unknown 5.1 Matta, La Question (1958). Oil on canvas, 200 × 295 cm 5.2 Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Serapion (1628). Oil on canvas, 120 × 103 cm 5.3 Mario Dondero, photograph of organizers, exhibiting artists including Robert Rauschenberg and lenders at Anti-procès 3, Milan (1961) 5.4 Jean-Jacques Lebel, Gauguin’s Spirit (1960). Mixed media on wood, 128 × 101 × 50 cm 5.5 André Breton, Poem-Object (1941). Carved wood bust of man, oil lantern, framed photograph, toy boxing gloves and paper mounted on drawing board, 45.8 × 53.2 × 10.9 cm 5.6 Jean-Jacques, Drapeau (1989). Assemblage, 167 × 81.5 × 50 cm 6.1 Alain Jouffroy, photograph of André Breton in Brittany including Jouffroy’s reflection (1966) 6.2 Robert Rauschenberg, Odalisk (1955/8). Oil, watercolor, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, photographs, printed reproductions, miniature blueprint, newspaper, metal, glass, dried grass and steel wool with pillow, wood post, electric lights and rooster on wood structure mounted on four casters, 210.8 × 64.1 × 63.8 cm 6.3 Joan Miró, Object (1936). Stuffed parrot on wood perch, stuffed silk stocking with velvet garter and doll’s paper shoe suspended in hollow wood frame, derby hat, hanging cork ball, celluloid fish and engraved map, 81 × 30.1 × 26 cm 6.4 André Breton, ‘statuette . . . in raw rubber,’ Mad Love (1937). 6.5 Robert Rauschenberg, Empire II (1961). Ventilation duct, roller skate, paper, wire and electric light on wood mounted on three metal wheels, 153.7 × 147 × 73 cm 6.6 André Breton, ‘The luminous Mazda sign on the boulevards,’ Nadja (1928) 7.1 Denise Bellon, photograph showing Oscar Domínguez’s Never (1937) at International Exhibition of Surrealism, Paris (1938) 7.2 Robert Rauschenberg, Hymnal (1955). Oil, paper, fabric, printed paper, printed reproductions and wood on fabric with telephone directory, metal bolt and string, 162.6 × 125.7 × 18.4 cm 7.3 Photograph of Bed with Ed Kienholz, Ida Franger (1960) and Niki de Saint Phalle Ghea (1964) at Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1968

ix

87 96 98 100 102

103 104 109

119

119 120

121 127 133

143

147

x

List of illustrations

7.4 James Mathews, photograph of Target with Plaster Casts with Jean Tinguely, Méta-Matic No. 12 (1959), Arman, Fortune Smiles on the Daring Ones (1962) and Claes Oldenburg, Fagends, Medium Scale (1967) 8.1 Robert Rauschenberg, Aen Floga (1961). Oil on canvas with wood, metal and wire, 185.4 × 127 × 34.9 cm 8.2 Robert Rauschenberg, Coexistence (1961). Oil, fabric, metal, wood and other found materials on canvas, 169.55 × 126.68 × 36.2 cm 8.3 Robert Rauschenberg, Solstice (1968). Silkscreen ink on motorized Plexiglas doors in metal frame mounted on platform with concealed electric lights and electronic components, 304.8 × 436.9 × 436.9 cm 8.4 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even or Large Glass (1915–23). Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire and dust on two glass panels, 277.5 × 177.8 × 8.6 cm 8.5 Robert Rauschenberg, Revolvers (1967). Silkscreen ink on five rotating Plexiglas discs in metal base with electric motors and control box, 137.2 × 134 × 61.6 cm 8.6 Christian Bernard and Jean-Claude Wallior, ‘Ce qui est surréaliste (???),’ Phases, Second Series, no. 1, May 1969, 84

148 161 161

165

165

166 168

A ­ cknowledgements I wish to thank all the people who helped with their support, encouragement and advice while I was thinking about Robert Rauschenberg’s work and Surrealism, writing this book on and very much off from 2012 to 2022. Nicole Benson, James Boaden, Lewis Kachur, Elliott King, Kristoffer Noheden, Gražina Subelytė, Abigail Susik and Michael White all aided the process with suggestions and responses to queries. The students in my MA group ‘Modernism After Postmodernism’ at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London taught me all about Bed when we visited the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg at Tate Modern in February 2017. Generous funding for image permissions was forthcoming from the Research Commitee at The Courtauld and the Centre for American Art, the latter following a solicitous intervention by my colleague David Peters Corbett to whom I am indebted, as I am to our Picture Researcher Karin Kyburz. Library personnel at The Courtauld were very helpful, as always, ordering in relevant books when requested and arranging inter-library loans. I am also especially grateful to Steven Harris who kindly showed me his unpublished writing on Rauschenberg and Surrealism as early as 2012; My Bungaard at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm for information regarding the institutional history of Monogram; Jean-Jacques Lebel for details of his activities and activism in the 1960s; and Ed Krčma who was very insightful in the general counsel he offered, also generously sending me several hardto-find articles from his own archive. I extend my gratitude also to my two anonymous peer reviewers who I hope will notice improvements to the final text that are owed to their remarks and advice; and as always to my ace friend Margaret Michniewicz who also happened to be Visual Arts Acquisitions Editor at Bloomsbury while I was writing away. I send deepest love and respect to my family who are Alessandra Montioni, Gabriel and Greta, and as ever to Lesley Bell, the Brooks family, Zavier Ellis, Christopher Green, Jane and Faruque Hussain, Mick Keber, die Kiso Familie, la famiglia Mazzoli, Dominic Shepherd, Michael Taylor and Rita Zuccari. In memory of Gill Keber, my sister, 1963–2019.

xii

Introduction

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) is not usually thought to have had anything like a trajectory through Surrealism. He was never close to the Parisian Surrealist group of the post-war period, even though he visited the French capital for an unrewarding period of study at the birthplace of the Nabis, the Académie Julian, between March and October 1948; nor did he have any contact with the Surrealist group that began in Chicago in the mid-1960s.1 His innate artistic sympathy towards the art of Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp, and attraction to the Dada ‘aesthetic’ more generally, made him view André Breton and Surrealism, not unreasonably, as the cause of Dada’s obscurity from the 1920s to the 1950s, avowing in a 1980s interview with the art critic Barbara Rose: ‘I don’t like Surrealism. I think Dada was totally misrepresented by people like Breton. The Surrealists tried to tuck people under their wing and use them because they needed visually interesting motifs.’2 This was already a long-standing aversion. At the height of his powers in the mid-1960s, Rauschenberg had flatly told Brian O’Doherty: ‘I hate Surrealism,’ a remark passed on by the critic without elaboration.3 Around that time, Rauschenberg spoke of his suspicion and avoidance of unconscious fantasy and symbolism in his art, as well as the modernist and Surrealist language of ‘expression’,4 also averring as follows in a related and well-known statement in interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler in 1965: I don’t mess around with my subconscious. I mean I try to keep wide awake. And if I see in the superficial subconscious relationships that I’m familiar with, clichés of association, I change the picture . . . if you do work with known quantities making puns or dealing symbolically with your materials, I think you’re shortening the life of the work even before it’s had a chance to be exposed.5

Although its casual terminology and claim to dismiss recognizable ‘subconscious’ associations warn us against taking this as an explicit rejection of either Surrealism or the unconscious (in its latter part, in fact, the statement sounds more like a refutation of the kind of wordplay revelled in by Duchamp), it is clear that Rauschenberg’s emphasis on deliberation and correction here is far from the rhetoric of Surrealism. But what did Rauschenberg mean by ‘Surrealism’ between 1965 and 1987? How were the movement, its theory and its art understood in the United States and France from the point of Rauschenberg’s emergence as an artist up to that period? What place

2

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

did writers on art and culture afford it in relation with the art of the time? And what of Surrealism’s long-established ‘mode of lyric comportment and analogical vision’ by the 1960s, when Rauschenberg’s work was being weighed up by a later generation of art historians, critics, curators and friends with new priorities?6 These are the framing questions of this introduction.

Surrealism’s decline and a ‘sensibility’ of the 1960s In September 1983, the year before his death, Michel Foucault gave an interview on the subject of Raymond Roussel in which he recollected his youthful impatience with, and departure from the overpowering presence of Marxist, phenomenological and existentialist thought in Paris in the period after the Second World War. Presenting the ‘non-Saussurean’ examination of language by Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett and the Nouveaux Romanciers that preceded the essential cultural review Tel Quel (1960–82) as at least as important to him as the notion of ‘structure’, if not more so, he seemed to trace his ‘liberation’ quite specifically back to 1953, also a key year in the history of the art of the United States: for me the break was first Beckett’s Waiting for Godot [1953], a breathtaking performance; then reading the works of [Maurice] Blanchot, Bataille, and [Alain] Robbe-Grillet, especially his novels Les Gommes [The Erasers, 1953], La Jalousie [Jealousy, 1957], and Le Voyeur [The Voyeur, 1955]; Michel Butor, [Roland] Barthes’ Mythologies [1957], and [Claude] Lévi-Strauss. There’s an enormous difference between Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Blanchot, and Robbe-Grillet, and I don’t want to make them seem similar. For my generation they represented the break with a perspective dominated by Marxism, phenomenology, and existentialism.7

Emerging or re-emerging in the post-war period, several of these individuals would directly inflect the course taken by Tel Quel for which Foucault would be an important contributor and advocate. Notice the absence of poetry and, more pointedly, the Surrealism-shaped hole in his account. Notwithstanding the names of two of the movement’s advocates, Maurice Blanchot and Bataille, it is a glaring one given the significance of the movement up to the end of the 1930s, yet it should not surprise us because Surrealism had been battered from all sides immediately after the war. It was terminated implicitly as an active force in art, culture and politics by the very project of Maurice Nadeau’s History of Surrealism (1945) and explicitly so in Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life (1947), finding itself up against a French Communist Party ascendant politically and culturally, assisted partly through its Stalinist review Les Lettres françaises for the cultural part, under the direction of Surrealist-turned-antagonist Louis Aragon. For many too young to know of its pre-war deeds at first hand, the focus of Le Surréalisme en 1947, the International Exhibition of Surrealism devoted to myth, superstition, magic and the occult held from 7 July to 30 September at the galerie Maeght, came as a

Introduction

3

revelation and successfully heralded the movement’s return to non-clandestine activity in Paris.8 However, the event was met by the usual bad press and, more damagingly, by Jean-Paul Sartre’s broadside in ‘Situation of the Writer in 1947’ in which Surrealism was well and truly consigned to irrelevance if not the past.9 Breton’s sixteen, hour-long radio interviews with André Parinaud on the history of Surrealism, broadcast by French national radio in February to June 1952 and published that year as Entretiens 1913–1952, were meant to contend also the continuing significance of the movement. There and elsewhere in that decade, Breton demonstrated an extraordinary tenacity in reminding his listeners of Surrealism’s first principles. He stated in the third interview that these lay in ‘the lyrical phenomenon in poetry’, which he continued to believe had achieved its ‘highest examples’ in the concise oeuvre of Isidore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautréamont (1846–70),10 whose lasting eminence among Surrealists in their twenties was confirmed the following year in the review of his Oeuvres complètes (1953) by young Surrealists Georges Goldfayn and Gérard Legrand in the new Surrealist periodical Médium: Communication surréaliste (four issues, 1953–5).11 Foucault would have tuned into Breton’s interviews and there is even a chance he opened a copy of Médium, but his testimony thirty years later records clearly enough that the fidelity to ‘poetic intuition’ and ‘every freedom’ afforded metaphor by Breton in a major statement that decade was irrelevant to him and his generation who had looked elsewhere for inspiration in the mid-1950s.12 A Surrealist group continued in France in the 1950s, then, and even had a small audience; in the United States, on the other hand, the understanding and acceptance of Surrealism had always been incomplete and the fall of its reputation had been absolute after the war. In 1936, the vast, travelling Museum of Modern Art exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism had given wide visibility to Surrealist art, ideas and even poetry in the United States. The artistic, curatorial and publishing activities of the Parisian Surrealists mainly in New York during the war are now well documented and although their roles in the development of abstract art in that city from the 1940s have always been acknowledged, the strength of the influence has been contested. The lull in attention given the movement in France after Le Surréalisme en 1947 was more like a deafening silence in the United States when abstract expressionism started to take on an international standing and, as late as 1968, William Rubin was recalling that event as the ‘death knell of the Surrealist movement’.13 Disinterest in Surrealism in the United States lasted throughout the 1950s as Rauschenberg’s ascent began and Foucault in France looked elsewhere for the materials that would foster his own thought. Sandra Zalman could find ‘no scholarly studies of the movement published in English’ from 1951 to 1960 during her research on its US reception.14 Although Rubin stated of the New York School that ‘the visionary spirit of their wholly abstract art retained much of Surrealism’s concern with poetry,’ he also observed that in the 1950s its artists had been ‘reluctant to exhibit their earlier surrealizing [sic] works.’15 As far as art history in that period was concerned – by which Rubin meant modernist-formalist art history and criticism – ‘it appeared by 1955 as if the entire Dada-Surrealist adventure was a kind of anti-modernist reaction situated parenthetically between the great abstract movements prior to World War I and after

4

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

World War II.’16 That conviction, Rubin admitted, had been weakened by some of the artists who had emerged since 1955, such as Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns; his year was well chosen since it was that of Bed and Flag, the first ordinarily the site of dreams, the second reportedly the outcome of one.17 Rauschenberg had barely any interest in or even knowledge of Surrealism in 1955. Meanwhile, he took a critical attitude towards abstract expressionism due in large part to an alleged rhetoric engaged in by that generation of artists that we can also associate with Surrealism. As evidence, the scholarship on Rauschenberg often calls upon his own probably caricatural testimony of life at The Club and the Cedar Street Tavern in the early 1950s where poetically minded artists pondered objects as metaphorical windows onto the self and conceived of colours as vehicles capable of expressing its depths: ‘It was a time when they were all discussing “a sad cup of coffee” . . . “How can a cup of coffee be sad?” I wondered. “Or how can red be passion? Red is red.” Jasper and I used to start each day by having to move out from abstract expressionism.’18 The putatively unreferential Red Paintings ensued across 1953–4. Rauschenberg had long settled on this attitude by the time of the interview with Seckler in 1965, emboldened by his friendship since 1951 with the composer John Cage and the mutual admiration and sympathy the two shared. The radical cultural currency that the conscious elimination of symbolism, depth and expression had brought Rauschenberg and Cage, along with the evidence it provided of the irrelevance of Surrealism, had been measured two years before the Seckler interview in Leonard B. Meyer’s much-discussed theory of avant-garde activity since the early 1950s titled ‘The End of the Renaissance?’ (1963), which assumed an ‘uncompromising positivism’ or ‘radical empiricism’ (Meyer’s preferred term) across a range of US and French cultures.19 Writing in the years before the formulation of the chronological, artistic, cultural and epistemological boundary between modernism and postmodernism, Meyer admitted Rauschenberg into his canon of radical empiricists. This took place in a passage comprising Meyer’s fullest attempt to delineate the new avant-garde pose: Nature has, in fact, no purpose or goal. It simply is. And like nature, art should simply present. Thus Rauschenberg contends that ‘painting is always strongest when . . . it appears as a fact or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement.’ Alain Robbe-Grillet makes a similar point when he says of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot that ‘the theatrical character is on stage, this is his primary quality – he is there.’ Or, put negatively, the scenes in Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jealousy [1957], are, [Bruce] Morrissette tells us, presented ‘without a word of analysis or commentary, in the pure domain of phenomenological semantics.’ Similarly Cage . . . emphasizes that sounds should simply ‘be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human sentiments.’ Our relationship to art, like our relationship to nature, ought to be one of acceptance.20

Under the mentorship of Cage’s writings, Meyer regarded the relationship between the anti-teleological aesthetic and Zen Buddhism as ‘direct and obvious.’21 But he also

Introduction

5

thought it ‘characteristically American’ due to its ‘emphasis upon the value of naïve, direct experience and upon the natural goodness of man,’22 comparing a quotation from Cage’s recent book Silence (1961) with Henry David Thoreau’s writings to that end: Art should, in Cage’s words, be: an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.23

Similar ‘culturalist interpretations’ would dominate writing on Rauschenberg over the years, casting him as an affectless ‘Emersonian,’ ‘Whitmanesque’ American Adam.24 They impart the very same ‘transformation of an aesthetic practice of transcendental negation into one of tautological affirmation,’ later credited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh to Andy Warhol in the 1960s, in fact (at the expense of what Buchloh thought became the ‘painterly’ and ‘expressive’ efforts of Johns and Rauschenberg, respectively, in that decade), ‘perhaps best articulated by John Cage’s famous dictum of 1961 in Silence: “Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it) . . . ”’25 Meyer’s article was one of the first attempts to define the ‘sensibility of the sixties.’ It was pre-empted by Susan Sontag’s essay on Happenings in 1962, which defined their ‘alogic of dreams’ by way of what she termed a ‘Surrealist sensibility,’26 and was followed by the Artforum article of September 1963 titled ‘Anti-Sensibility Painting’ by Ivan C. Karp, associate director of the Leo Castelli Gallery, who was aiming to promote Pop art (under the name of ‘Common Image Painting’ in this early attempt to glimpse its predominant trait) as a ‘vicious,’ ‘hostile,’ ‘thrillingly insensitive’ trend that depicted ‘fantastically ugly’ US urban subject matter where, unlike in Surrealist painting, ‘[t]he poetry is invisible’ and it is ‘the fact of the picture itself which is the poetry.’27 Karp believed that ‘purging of poetic sensations in painting’ was best achieved by Rauschenberg’s work, which was the ‘ideal symptom of these high spirits.’28 It was not far from what Sontag aimed to determine throughout the 1960s, with the significant difference that Surrealism remained a component. This is true of her ‘Notes on “Camp”’ (1964),29 ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility’ (1965) with its odd list of ‘basic texts for this new cultural alignment’ where Cage, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Marshall McLuhan and Ludwig Wittgenstein were placed alongside Antonin Artaud, Breton, Norman O. Brown and Friedrich Nietzsche,30 and ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ (1967) in which she used a single term to identify cognate ones that plot the new epistemology of ‘absence,’ ‘termination,’ ‘nihilism,’ ‘emptiness,’ ‘reduction,’ ‘the “zero degree,”’ ‘blandness,’ ‘deindividuation,’ ‘alogicality,’ ‘literalness,’ ‘reticence’ and the ‘power to negate.’31 Cage, Duchamp, Johns and Rauschenberg were central to Sontag’s sensibility, as were Beckett and Robbe-Grillet. The same cohort was present when Rose attempted to define a sensibility for the visual arts at mid-decade, firstly in her review of the pioneering minimal show Black, White, and Gray held from 9 January to 9 February

6

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

1964 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut; secondly in the landmark article ‘ABC Art’ (1965), written on the request of Art in America editor Jean Lipman to capture the apparent new tendency in US art that had ‘no wish to transcend the physical for either the metaphysical or the metaphoric,’ as Rose put it;32 and thirdly in the questionnaire of 1967 carried out with fellow critic Irving Sandler that published artists’ responses to their enquiry as to the existence and nature of a ‘sensibility of the sixties.’33 Unlike Sontag, a repudiatory judgement as to the relevance of Surrealist art was given implicitly by Rose, as it had been by Meyer, in a combination of  a theory that excluded it, by writers with apparently barely any knowledge of it in texts that do not mention it.34 By then, the sensibility had taken on a specific identity as ‘cool,’ ‘antisubjective or anti-Expressionist’ and ‘thing-oriented or object-like,’ and it had a set of artistic styles, key texts (Cage, Robbe-Grillet and Wittgenstein were indispensable, but so was McLuhan) and had been quite meticulously periodized in the decade, though frequently seen as originating somewhere in the 1950s.35 Artists ‘did look at things for what they actually were and not as metaphors of human feelings,’ recalled Sandler later, and their sensibility as seen in their work and statements showed a shift that sounds almost fastidiously divergent from Surrealism’s, in his terms: ‘from psychology to physicality, from subjectivity to objectivity, from interpretation to presentation, from symbol to sign . . . from anthropocentrism to anti-anthropocentrism.’36 Looking back on Rauschenberg’s career at the end of the 1960s, the Surrealist José Pierre argued that the steering philosophy of US art over the preceding fifteen years had been an English-language ‘logical positivism’ or ‘scientific empiricism,’ implicating Rauschenberg’s apologist Cage as a key protagonist to that effect with a few choice quotations from the composer: ‘“The object is a “fact,” not a symbol,”’ ‘“Ideas are one thing and what happens is another thing.”’37 Such art and its supporting commentary marked the fashionable estimation in the 1960s that the end had come for ‘metaphor, of messages and other dusty old nonsense,’ as Pierre satirized it.38 He probably took the term ‘positivism’ from Meyer himself for the verdict he gave on the art of the period, employing ‘mock positivism’ (‘positivisme narquois’) for Cage’s statements and influence specifically.39 Rose had used the same fact-not-symbol quotation by Cage in her American Art Since 1900 (1967), one of Pierre’s sources for his evaluation of Rauschenberg through Surrealism’s theoretical means in his article, which was as much a defence of Surrealism.40 But where did Surrealism stand on phenomena, language and art by contrast with the ‘factism’ of Cage and the choisisme of Robbe-Grillet, and how did this determine its reception of Rauschenberg’s work?

Rauschenberg and ‘poetry’ As can be gleaned from Pierre’s text on the artist, Rauschenberg had a very favourable, multi-levelled reception among Surrealists in the 1960s and, as I will show in this book, the artist’s attitude towards his own work and its potential audiences frequently goes some way towards making the Surrealist reading of his art perfectly justifiable. In order

Introduction

7

to broach that history and to extrapolate from it a theory, it will be necessary to look a bit more broadly than usual at art and theory in France at the beginning of that decade; or, to put it another way, to adjust both intellectual history and art history a little – to augment their current narrative of the past, I mean – by taking Surrealism seriously as a noteworthy participant in the midst of the emerging ‘factist’ theories, philosophies and avant-gardes of the decade in both France and the United States.41 Broadly speaking, then, I identify the Surrealists’ readings of Rauschenberg’s work as poetic and political. By ‘poetic,’ I mean that they viewed it as inescapably prone to metaphor and analogy; by ‘political,’ I mean that they frequently (but not always) understood the pictorial language arrived at intuitively by the artist to be latent material that was predictive of the bearing being taken by social events. So this is to say that both the theoretical approach and historico-political context that are reconstructed and developed in this book are proposed by Surrealism itself. As I elaborate these in my chapters, I will show that they overlap, parallel and sometimes anticipate or possibly even influence most of the bespoke interpretations of Rauschenberg’s art that have circulated since the 1950s, including those of the ‘American Adam,’ the idea of the ‘vernacular glance,’ the iconographic studies, the competing postmodern versions of the work, the closely related ‘rival notions of allegory’ in Thomas Crow’s phrase and even the queer readings of the oeuvre.42 Most of all, though, they give a historical and theoretical rationale for the routine designation of the artist’s work as ‘poetry.’ Observations about the poetic, allusive, permutative nature of the discarded materials recycled in Rauschenberg’s Combines are familiar. However, this is what complicates the procedure of contrasting a ‘Surrealist’ Rauschenberg with the more accustomed ‘elementary’ idea of the artist: that is, the sheer constancy of the word ‘poetry’ across every grouping of scholarship on the oeuvre. It is particularly intriguing and puzzling that it has been used since the 1950s by spokespersons for the ‘literalist’ critical tendency, by Rauschenberg himself and by those closest to him such as Cage, who were most persuasive about and sympathetic towards what the artist called his ‘sense of literal realism,’ as well as more logically by the ‘associative’ interpreters and his many advocates in art history, curating and collecting.43 Some justification for the use of that word can be found, perhaps, in the early admiration for Rauschenberg’s art shown by the US poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. In his Art News review of Rauschenberg’s fourth solo exhibition held in 1954–5 at the Egan Gallery in New York, illustrated by the recent Charlene (1954), O’Hara generously announced its range from the earlier ‘ecstatic’ works to the ‘poignant collages’ and those with a ‘gentle and just passion for moving people,’ concluding that ‘the quieter pictures evidence a serious lyrical talent.’44 Three years later in March 1958, also in Art News, Ashbery reviewed in similar terms the breadth of Rauschenberg’s major solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, also in New York, from the ‘early fireworks’ to the ‘difficult serenity’ of the current Combines, but apart from the baffling compliment that the artist was a ‘sort of avant-garde Cocteau,’ he did not comment on a poetic element in the Combines.45 Nevertheless, the ‘poetry’ of Rauschenberg’s work soon became a staple of its commentary.

8

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

More vexing still than the larger literalist school of interpretation that uses the word ‘poetry’ casually is the branch of it that actually gets drawn into speaking of allusion. This is a critical tradition that extends from the 1960s and includes Rose and Rauschenberg himself, as in this exchange in the 1987 interview: Rose: Another interesting part of your career is that it begins in ‘junk,’ but it’s not ‘junk’ now. Rauschenberg: No, it begins in ‘things.’ I like the experience that says that a shirt changes when it gets in the sun a little, or when you go swimming in it, or when the dog sleeps on it. I like the history of objects. I like humanitarian reportage.46

Rauschenberg’s abrupt correction of Rose’s term – even in its cautious usage within quotation marks – might have come partly from the artist’s reluctance to be lumped in the category of ‘junk art.’ But it is more likely that he wanted to divert consideration from the routine ‘transmutation-of-the-discarded’ to a more specific capacity of the ‘used’ to allude to a set of either historically real, potential or imagined associations. What makes this peculiar is that Rauschenberg’s tendency throughout his career was to state the exact opposite. ‘I don’t want my work to be associative’ and ‘nothing in my work represents something other than it is’ are slightly later, typically blunt renderings of what comes across as nothing less than a stringent agenda to negate allusion in his art.47 Rose could not resist pressing Rauschenberg in spite of her earlier brief as advocate and explainer of numb, unresponsive Minimalist art – neither metaphysical nor metaphoric – to a perplexed public: ‘[l]ooking at your paintings,’ she volunteered, ‘the images aren’t literal; they are allusive, like poetry,’ but she was blocked unequivocally by the artist: ‘[t]hey’re facts. They’re all facts.’48 The tendency to take Rauschenberg’s word for it yet engage, nevertheless, in speculation as to what his materials might indicate beyond their immediate thereness is a standard trope in the scholarship on the artist. One of its regular accomplices was Pontus Hultén who had studied History of Art and Ethnography at Stockholm University in 1945–50, so had established his understanding of art well before the onset of Cage’s rhetoric of ‘factism’ or literalism, during the period of Surrealism’s early historicization.49 Hultén’s esteem for Rauschenberg would be rounded not so much by theoretical disposition or ideology (to my knowledge, he rarely explained his use of terms) as by taste. Formed in the later 1950s when he first came into contact with the artist’s work, it just about precedes and comprehensively exceeds the period frame of this book so, for better or worse, it journeyed alongside the artist for almost the entirety of his career.50 The terms of Hultén’s commentary are of interest here initially, then, because their simultaneous, seemingly contradictory insistence on a poetry of innocent, outward form, on the one hand, and a poetry of things with ‘depth,’ on the other – of ‘their transformation from material to poetry . . . ’ as Hultén put it in the scene-setting conversation with Julia Brown Turrell, opening the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition Rauschenberg Sculpture that began at Fort Worth in

Introduction

9

1995 – originated at a time when both seemed possible but when the former was soon to take a critical and ultimately historical precedence over the latter.51 ‘Poetry’ is the imperative word tendered by Hultén throughout the Fort Worth conversation: You said you felt the sculpture radiates poetic feeling, and I feel that’s very striking too. Maybe this poetic feeling that the sculpture expresses is that Rauschenberg decided not to add any colour in some of the works in order to reinforce this simple poetry, to not complicate it but to let it be very pure in its formal sense. And in the associative sense, because obviously these different objects are elements coming from the world of constraint, the world called reality, which have now been transferred to the world of art. As ropes, or pieces of metal, they carry associations, and these associations are an important part of the poetic send-off that his sculptures give you. But my guess is that he avoids additional colour to keep this poetry pure.52

Once again, here are two different ways – one to do with form, the other content – in which Rauschenberg’s work registers ‘poetically,’ but neither is clarified by recourse to an actual theory of poetry, even though Hultén had edited a collection of the writings of several Surrealists a few years earlier so knew enough to propose one.53 His response to the work was strongly felt and he repeated some of this word for word in his brief Afterword for the catalogue of the 2005–7 touring exhibition of Combines, writing casually of Rauschenberg’s ‘use of the poorest, most thrown away, and rejected things,’ at the same time asserting that ‘the Combines radiate poetry.’54 That is to say that as ‘ropes, fabric, photographs, or pieces of metal, they carry associations, and these associations are an important part of the poetic send off that his sculptures offer,’ or, put another way by Hultén that meets Rose’s terminology: ‘[a] piece of junk all of a sudden, by unconventional operations, became indescribable, became poetry.’55

Rauschenberg and Surrealism, 1959–69 The opening, historiographical chapter of this book will seek to complicate the ‘depthless,’ ‘factualist’ propensity dominant in theory, art and art criticism in the 1960s by contrasting it with Surrealism’s allusive, metaphorical reading of Rauschenberg’s work.56 This is encountered throughout the Surrealists’ writings on the artist in that decade and arose more or less simultaneously with the first allegorical ones prompted largely by the Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (1958–60), which in turn occasioned Cage’s deliberations on the ‘poetry’ of the oeuvre. So they predate the multi-registered allegorical ones that remain among the principal ways in which Rauschenberg has been assigned status as a pioneering postmodernist, even though the latter show no awareness of the Surrealists’ interest in the artist. The rest of the book takes its cue from there to assemble an art historical account of the Surrealist reception of Rauschenberg within the adjusted framework, assessing alternative,

10

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

‘poetic’ and political versions of the artist by Surrealists, resuscitating in revisionist mode the alternative critical terms deployed for that alleged and sometimes selfavowed literalist. Specifically Surrealist interpretation of the oeuvre, which underpins much of the talk of ‘poetry’ in the scholarship on the artist, continues to be excluded from consideration of the period as outdated and at variance with the ‘sensibility of the sixties,’ by historians and by artists such as Rauschenberg himself, who are usually said to have been attuned to it and even to have helped create it. The aim in this opening chapter, then, will be to show how the mutual exclusivity of the ‘literalist’ and ‘allusive’ Rauschenberg as that is implied or actually played out in the writings of Cage and certain Minimalist artists, along with those on the sixties sensibility by Meyer, Rose, Sandler and others, becoming deeply woven into the critical economy sustaining Rauschenberg’s work, was under question from its beginnings in the writings of Sontag and Rosalind Krauss. The idea for this book came about from what seemed to me and continues to be experienced by others as the idiosyncratic staging of the work of Rauschenberg and Johns in two exhibitions of Surrealism: the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) of 1959–60 in Paris and Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain of 1960–1 in New York. Accordingly, my second chapter looks at these and the ways in which Surrealism as much as Dada was associated with the work of both at first, and particularly Rauschenberg’s by critics in France and the United States. This is my attempt to tilt the historical record back towards comparison of art in the 1960s with Surrealism, which is still too rarely considered due to the overwhelming importance that has been given to the return of interest in Dada in the 1950s by art historians from then till today. The four chapters that follow constitute the core of the book, detailing the linkage of poetry and politics in the reception of Rauschenberg’s work by Surrealists and recently ejected ex-Surrealists. I begin with a substantial contextualizing section in Chapter 3 meant to show how the most turbulent event of the era shaping French foreign policy, namely the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), was closely tied to the Surrealist reception of Rauschenberg’s work. But I want to show also, more broadly, how the ethical position taken on Rauschenberg by Surrealists who had helped draft and had signed the notorious Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War or Declaration of the 121 (1960) was coupled to a lyrical understanding in a reading that was therefore both political and poetical. Driven by the intensification of political activity in Surrealism due largely to the scandalous situation in Algeria, Robert Benayoun and José Pierre took Rauschenberg’s Combines to manifest a specific if veiled protest against US expansionism, the excesses of modern industry and the failures of capitalism. Jean-Jacques Lebel admired and helped promote Rauschenberg in France and Italy in the early 1960s through the initially Surrealist journal Front unique and the events that came under the heading of ‘Anti-procès.’ In my fourth chapter, on Front unique, I offer a rationale for how Monogram (1955–9), one of Rauschenberg’s most important Combines, could be reproduced in that publication alongside the Declaration of the 121 and in a Surrealist context, by drawing upon the artistic relationship that Rauschenberg

Introduction

11

is known to have had with René Magritte; in the closely associated chapter that follows it, I discuss the politicization of Rauschenberg’s Bed at Anti-procès by way of Lebel’s idiom that privileged ‘poetry’ under the form of poésie directe, achieved against a highly charged political and social background when the war in Algeria had reached an unbearable pitch with significant repercussions for France at home. The off-andon Surrealist Alain Jouffroy was Rauschenberg’s main sponsor in France at the time: in Chapter 6 I compare the different attitude he took towards the artist’s work to that of Benayoun and Pierre, viewing it as a form of protest and as evidence of a postSurrealist révolution du regard, before focusing on Jouffroy’s simultaneous tributes in prose and poetry to Rauschenberg’s large silkscreen painting Barge (1962–3). Jouffroy’s assessment of Rauschenberg in 1964 was advantageous for the artist when the vote was taken in June that year for the award of the Grand Prix to Best Foreign Artist at the thirty-second Venice Biennale. Surprisingly, this did not put the Surrealists off Rauschenberg and I demonstrate this with an inquiry into Breton’s praise for the artist that preceded and followed on from the prize. After that section of four chapters devoted mainly to politics, I return in my final two chapters to the discussion of a sixties sensibility begun in the early part of the book. My seventh chapter looks at how Rauschenberg’s work was theorized in France in terms of the ‘thing,’ usually by contrast with or overlapping comparison to Surrealism. The French cultural review Tel Quel becomes a key site for this reading, which ranges far and wide necessarily, even straying strategically from Rauschenberg at moments of its journey into the intellectual, cultural and art historical contexts of the 1960s begun in my first chapter and signalled in the title of my book (I ask my reader to bear in mind that although this is a kind of monograph on an artist, it is one that is shaped within a lesser-known period of Surrealism that I must reconstruct and it is argued against the ways that the art of the period has been narrated by art history). I move from there towards the interpretation of Rauschenberg’s work carried out by Nicolas Calas in New York against a modish backdrop of ‘literalism’ in art and art history, choisisme in literature and positivism in philosophy, complicated by the reawakening of Calas’s loyalty to Surrealism and therefore at odds with the other ‘poetic’ Surrealist readings I introduce here. My eighth and final chapter returns to Pierre whose essay of 1969, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ is the lengthiest single consideration of the artist given within Surrealism. Summarizing some of the Surrealist interpretations of the preceding decade, it has a disappointed air and message, looking back on the fate of the art of Rauschenberg from the time his reputation had been confirmed following the success of the silkscreen paintings and his subsequent immersion in technology, at the moment the particular ‘literalist’ meaning had so firmly attached to his art through what Pierre understood to be a form of Cagean ‘positivism.’ The final, concluding part of this book is cued by the histories explored in Chapters 1 and 7 to summarize a question that is touched on throughout as to what a Surrealist reading of Rauschenberg’s art means for art history. In the first section it attempts to rethink perhaps the key moment in the art of the twentieth century, which is the purported break from modernism in the 1950s that gave us postmodernism. It undertakes this by proposing a greater significance for the dispute commenced by

12

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

Surrealists and others with a tradition largely composed of formalism that, I argue, actually extends across the ‘literalist’ work of Rauschenberg and Minimalist and Pop artists in spite of the supposed rejection of modernism by those artists and the repudiation of those styles by modernist formalists such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. After that, I close by addressing the ways in which Rauschenberg’s work continued to be regarded in relation with Surrealism in the 1970s in Tel Quel and elsewhere following the advent of structuralism and post-structuralism. If Tel Quel had gradually moved to distance itself from historical Surrealism, then attempted to bury the contemporary manifestations of the movement at the end of the 1960s, the theory it exemplified in that decade tended to ignore the epochal importance of Surrealism; or, as that theory was used in art history, at the very least it endeavoured to remove its magnitude out of the hands of the Surrealists themselves. Given the significance of Tel Quel and the theory it embodied for the Anglophone interpretations of Surrealism, art history and studies of Rauschenberg since the 1970s up to today, a clarification of this seems an appropriate way to end.

­1

Poet: Allegory and metaphor in US art history and criticism

The commonplace yet contradictory language used to describe Robert Rauschenberg’s work from the early 1960s up to the period when it had long triumphed, often used by the artist himself – of ‘poetry,’ ‘things’ and even ‘junk’ (or ‘déchets’ as it is often given in the French) – suggests an initial means of comprehending its early reception in France. But it also introduces a particular theoretical context for the art of the period that probably had its origins in the immediate post-war period in both France and the United States, as I showed in my introduction. The theory and the history, as well as the ‘sensibility’ in art and culture that they are said to articulate, are known to art historians of the 1960s to a greater or lesser extent. My intention is to expand both the theory and the history here in such a way that reintroduces Surrealism into the art history of that time through its own poetic, metaphorical, analogical ‘sensibility.’ It is not unusual for the term ‘poetry’ to be attached to an artist’s work, and sometimes it is the artist who does the attaching, but it has a contested meaning in the writing on Rauschenberg that is of interest for my book. In this chapter, I am going to argue that its use was spurred early on by the enormous success of the Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (1958–60) and its commentary, called ‘visually beautiful and poetically eloquent’ by the art critic John Canaday.1 To set up that argument, I want to demonstrate in more detail what I have already begun to suggest: that the metaphorical aspects of the oeuvre were never exactly separate from the literalist ones. That is to say that Surrealism was implicit in the sixties sensibility and that gives some backing for its concurrent and subsequent stake in the interpretation of Rauschenberg’s work, especially in the ways that the later allegorical readings of it have an unacknowledged history that partakes of both.

Rauschenberg, literalist: Rosalind Krauss on ‘things’ and metaphors Barbara Rose’s approach to Minimalist art by way of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings in ‘ABC Art’ (1965) has been questioned by art historians,2 but her insider knowledge of the reading habits of its artists in the mid-1960s was sound: she was friends with several of them, married to Frank Stella and is characterized by James Meyer as ‘a participant

14

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

in the “movement.”’3 However, Rose goes uncredited in the 1973 Artforum essay by Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sense and Sensibility: Reflection on Post ‘60s Sculpture,’ which moderated formalism and linked the Minimalist art of the 1960s to the subsequent art of the early 1970s by viewing both as departures from Cartesianism in their rejection of illusionistic space and, therefore, the notion of a prior, private self.4 This contention was supported with reference to logical positivism, the later Wittgenstein and the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (but with no claim that Mel Bochner, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Stella or the others actually did such reading).5 In her article, Krauss further linked the emergence of this proclivity in the visual arts to the writings of Samuel Beckett and the French Nouveau Roman, which rooted her search for a recognizable, common cultural inclination in the familiar ‘zero degree’ moment of the early 1950s identified by Michel Foucault and Leonard B. Meyer: the period of Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot and novel The Unnameable, Alain RobbeGrillet’s first published novel The Erasers, and, let us add, Roland Barthes’s theoretical tract Writing Degree Zero (all 1953), along with Rauschenberg’s ‘White Paintings’ (1951) and Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953).6 Susan Sontag’s often-inapt assimilation of André Breton’s texts to the ‘new cultural alignment’ in her formative essays on the culture of the 1960s, especially ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility’ (1965) where a ‘new (potentially unitary) kind of sensibility’ was sought, had intrigued Krauss who would go on to give more credence to the role of metaphor in US art from the late 1950s to the early 1970s than Rose, Meyer or the writers they cited.7 This is revealed in the chapter on the same kind of work in her widely read book Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977). Minimalist art since 1964 was deemed ‘a single sensibility,’8 ‘obdurately external’ by contrast with the modernist sculpture of Henry Moore and Jean Arp that had not sought to present materials as materials but ‘to establish an analogy’ between materials and organic growth.9 Carl Andre and Judd were using art to critique the modernist sentiment with ‘an entirely new set of values in mind,’ which turn out to be the converse of those of abstract expressionism, ventriloquized by Krauss through the opinion of Harold Rosenberg (not through Clement Greenberg’s equally modernist, formalist stance, notice, which gave a crucial role to materials) as an ‘analogy between the psychological interior of the artist and the illusionistic interior of the picture,’ that makes it ‘possible to see the pictorial object as a metaphor for human emotions that well up from the depths of those two parallel inner spaces.’10 In this reading, Minimalist art is joined, courtesy of Wittgenstein’s writings, by Jasper Johns’s work such as Untitled (Ale Cans) (1960) and Target with Four Faces (1955), which, ‘in negating the internality of the abstract-expressionist picture, simultaneously rejects the innerness of its space and the privacy of the self for which that space was a model.’11 This was an ingrained reading of Johns that had, nevertheless, long since been challenged by Leo Steinberg who, as I discuss in my next chapter, had asked in the period of Surrealist readings of Johns in the early 1960s: ‘How improper is it to find poetic, metaphorical, or emotional content in Johns’s work?’12 The language that Krauss used in Passages in Modern Sculpture to convey the ‘extraordinary dependence upon the facts of an object’s exterior, in order to determine what it is,’ is once again redolent of Beckett and Robbe-Grillet.13 The antagonism

Poet: Allegory and Metaphor in US Art History

15

towards metaphor that was a feature of Robbe-Grillet’s writings had been well known to US critics since the translation of one of his finest essays ‘Nature, Humanism, Tragedy’ (1958) in the Evergreen Review in 1959, complete with epigram taken from Barthes’s writing on the novelist himself,14 and its sentiments could be revisited in the 1965 Grove Press translation of his theoretical volume For a New Novel: ­ etaphor . . . is never an innocent figure of speech. . . . The choice of an analogical M vocabulary, however simple, already does something more than account for purely physical data. . . . In almost the whole of our contemporary literature, these anthropomorphic analogies are repeated too insistently, too coherently not to reveal an entire metaphysical system.15 Metaphor, which is supposed to express only a comparison, without any particular motive, actually introduces a subterranean communication, a movement of sympathy (or of antipathy) which is its true raison d’être. For, as comparison, metaphor is almost always a useless comparison which contributes nothing new to the description.16

Unlike Rose in ‘ABC Art’ over a decade earlier, Krauss thought it ‘no accident that the work of Morris and Serra was being made at the time when novelists in France were declaring “I do not write. I am written,”’17 while in a later extended reading of Morris’s self-acknowledged debt to Beckett, Krauss would question directly Rose’s Wittgensteinian reading of the artist.18 The main point I want to make is that where Annette Michelson, for instance, had linked Morris’s high Minimalist work from about 1964 to John Cage’s rhetoric as ‘a resistance to prevailing critical techniques founded on notions of aesthetic metaphor, gesture, or statement,’ Krauss did not see Minimalist art as a denial of metaphor in Passages in Modern Sculpture, but a resetting of its terms.19 It might have rejected the (Rosenbergian) modernist metaphor of interiority but Serra’s One-Ton Prop (1969) struck Krauss in this phase of her interpretation as a Wittgensteinian metaphor, declaring by its unembellished surface and simple forms that ‘[w]e are the sum of our visible gestures . . . [o]ur gestures are themselves formed by the public world, by its conventions, its language, the repertory of its emotions, from which we learn our own.’20 Meanwhile, the voids and volumes of Judd’s Untitled (1970) created ‘a metaphor for the dependence of the sculpture on the conditions of external space,’ not oldfashioned ‘interiority,’21 and the viewing positions in the decentred slotted spaces of Michael Heiser’s earthwork Double Negative (1969) set up ‘a metaphor for the self as it is known through its appearance to the other.’22 Rauschenberg went unmentioned in this chapter of Passages in Modern Sculpture, while in ‘Sense and Sensibility’ three years earlier Krauss had apparently criticized his This Is a Portrait of Iris Clert If I Say So (1961) as an assertion of intention and therefore of ‘the privacy of a mental space,’ caught up in the same bungled reception of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades that afflicted the art and writings of Joseph Kosuth.23 However, the year after, Krauss had published ‘Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image’ (1974)

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in which she reconsidered Rauschenberg’s work in terms of human ‘interiority’ and, as intimated by her ongoing reflections on Minimalist art, in those of metaphor, viewing his imagery as an analogy for ‘the space of memory.’24 In Rauschenberg’s art, wrote Krauss, ‘the image is not about an object transformed,’ since individual images remained ‘things’ rather than ‘signs,’ let alone metaphors.25 The reading was not modernist in the Rosenbergian sense, but a blend of Greenbergian modernism’s ‘truth-to-materials’ and Surrealism’s associative register, even though (or perhaps because) Krauss’s break with Greenberg’s formalism was about the same distance behind her as her engagement with Surrealism was up ahead.26 It was the work as a whole that was allusive not the things in it, in a case of imagery as memory as material denoting a surface, not imagery as memory as association connoting depth.

Rauschenberg, allegorist: ‘Perpetual Inventory’ Krauss would shift position on this, too, with specific reference to the ‘new cultural alignment’ proposed by Sontag in ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility,’ which she advanced as Sontag’s ‘report from the front lines of the 1960s’ in the monographic essay devoted to Rauschenberg titled ‘Perpetual Inventory.’27 It first appeared in 1997 in the catalogue of the vast travelling retrospective of Rauschenberg’s work that began at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, not long after Krauss had helped pioneer the critical reconfiguration of Surrealism for post-structuralist or postmodern art history following its much earlier interment by Greenberg’s modernism.28 Quoting Sontag’s list of writers, Krauss insisted, rather too narrowly, that ‘Breton’s allegiance to psychoanalysis’ (where she might have referred to his calling as poet or identity as Surrealist or immersion in magic) ‘seems to put him specifically out of play,’ given that psychoanalysis posits a ‘source of emission (the writer)’ and ‘chains of association’ requiring ‘further associations to decode them’ and consequently insists on ‘the private depths of experience underwriting these connections.’29 She continued: Furthermore, it is the very nature of such connections as metaphoric that makes them alien to the ‘new sensibility’ Sontag invoked. The ideas of literalness, of deadpan, of the ruthless ‘cool’ that led Frank Stella to declare, ‘My painting is based on the fact that what can be seen is there. . . . What you see is what you see,’ seems to join the whole post-abstract expressionist cohort in its rejection of psychological depth and emotiveness.30

Sontag’s mystifying enlistment of Breton cued Krauss to consider certain declarations made by Rauschenberg that are susceptible in this regard, especially when compared to his avowed impatience with colour symbolism in the early 1950s and interest in ‘materiality as a field of forces apart from metaphorization,’ which had nevertheless implicated his own Black Paintings (1951–3), completed at his Fulton Street studio, in the eyes of some.31 These included his explanation of the title of the silkscreen painting

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Crocus (1962, Figure  1.1) in which he indulged an analogy by saying: ‘the white × emerges from a gray area in a rather dark painting, like a new season.’32 It sounds odd given his denial to Dorothy Gees Seckler of ‘subconscious relationships’ and, as Krauss muses, ‘is quite a metaphoric thought for someone who does not want to accept the connotations spun off from the colour black.’33 There were also his replies in interview with David Sylvester in 1964, conceding the unmanageable connotative condition carried by bricks and the ‘psychological implications of a glass of water’ with reference to another silkscreen painting, Persimmon (1964)34 (see Plate 1).

Figure 1.1  Robert Rauschenberg, Crocus (1962). Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas, 61.375 × 37.5

× 2.25 in (155.8 × 95.1 × 5.7 cm). Collection of Linda and Harry MackLowe, New York. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

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These two canvases had already been established as nothing less than Exhibits A and B in the coming of the postmodern announced by Douglas Crimp. By appropriating the images of Diego Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647–51) for Crocus (among others) and Peter Paul Rubens’s variously titled Toilet of Venus (1613–14) for Persimmon (also among others), Rauschenberg had moved from painting to printing, Crimp argued, and ‘definitively from techniques of production (Combines, assemblages) to techniques of reproduction (silkscreens, transfer drawings). And it is that move that requires us to think of Rauschenberg’s art as postmodernist.’35 It was an event by which ‘[n]otions of originality, authenticity, and presence, essential to the ordered discourse of the museum, are undermined,’ which Crimp conceded was far from what Rauschenberg himself would have wanted.36 Nevertheless, Krauss was attuned to that reception, deeply indebted to Craig Owens’s extraordinarily broad reading of both modernism and postmodernism in the two-part essay ‘The Allegorical Impulse’ (1980), which was engineered chiefly by way of Walter Benjamin’s treatment of allegory, and where Rauschenberg was given principal credit again, ‘on the threshold of postmodernism’ in Combines Odalisk (1955/1958), Rebus (1955) and, of course, Allegory (1959–60), for the break from modernism through ‘[a]ppropriation, site-specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization.’37 Owens reinforced Rauschenberg’s significance by connecting what he saw as postmodern allegory’s emphasis on the textual over the visual to Steinberg’s interpretation of the artist’s displacement of art from nature to culture; and even further by linking appropriation to Crimp’s understanding of Rauschenberg’s ironization of the museum through the Combine as a dumping ground for its images (it is further bolstered, we might add, by indicating the roots of appropriation and hybridization in the ‘levelling’ insisted on by Cagean literalism).38 Owens admitted, without any obvious irony, ‘the error, regularly lamented by commentators, of generalizing the term allegory to such an extent that it becomes meaningless.’39 Two years later, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh followed up on the implications of Owens’s suggestion of a still-untheorized, buried history of allegory in modern art since Dada, finding it where he sought it in unsurprising places: Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q (1919) was revived as ‘one of the first instantiations of a Dadaist allegorical montage’ and Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing was rediscovered as ‘one of the first examples of allegorization in postwar New York School art’ (Johns’s Flag of 1954–5 came in a close second, naturally, and the lineage that Buchloh’s narrative established from Dada up to contemporary art remained unperturbed by Surrealism, which was not even mentioned).40 Krauss would take her leave of ‘Perpetual Inventory’ with a swipe at the iconographers, insisting that ‘the convinced iconographer is almost impossible to dissuade.’41 It was true to form, so to speak. The refusal of content long promulgated by Greenberg’s formalism had a surfeit of willing students like Krauss and Michael Fried at Artforum in the 1960s whose ‘workaday authoritarianism’ had one legacy in the programmatic anti-iconography of the allegorists.42 But the allegorical school of Rauschenberg scholars that opposes iconography has been at least as culpable of similar acts of deduction. Owens had begun inductively, moving from local allegorical evidence initially in the work of Robert Smithson towards a general hypothesis about art since about the mid-1950s, but in doing this ‘The Allegorical Impulse’ performs a deductive swerve, where the general law or axiom put in place is augmented to

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accommodate the array of material to hand (ranging from Rauschenberg’s work to current art); Buchloh’s article joined it at the end of the swerve, conjuring a historical unification, stabilization and rationalization of a massive, erratic canon across the twentieth century.43 Krauss was well on her way to an allegorical reading of Rauschenberg in ‘Perpetual Inventory,’ but it was one that was partly facilitated by Surrealism thanks to her acknowledged debt to Sontag’s ‘report from the front lines of the 1960s,’ dosed with a metaphorical inflection quite unlike those narratives proposed by Rose and Meyer.44 The essay is the culmination of the slow motion entrance of metaphor into debate about 1960s art from ‘literalism’ to allegory, rehearsed above, paradoxically justifying a reading of Rauschenberg’s work then and now through Surrealism. That way of understanding it is intimated in ‘Perpetual Inventory’ across Krauss’s interpretation of two of the artist’s projects of the same period in a way that was still quite intuitive and without any knowledge of the plethora of evidence from the mouths of Surrealists that I will be presenting in this book: they are the black-and-white images collectively titled ‘Random Order’ (1963) covering five pages of the first issue of the short-lived Location (Figure 1.2), the magazine edited by Thomas B. Hess and Rosenberg, and the ThirtyFour Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno.

Figure 1.2  Cover of Location, no. 1, spring 1963 (author’s collection). © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022.

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Krauss allied ‘Random Order’ unambiguously with Surrealism by way of Breton’s theoretical volumes of autobiographical text and photographs, Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937), calling it ‘Nadja-like . . . aleatory and associative’ with a ‘dreamlike quality of what impresses one as a nocturnal atmosphere no matter if some of the photographs were taken in daylight’ (only one was not, in fact), packed with ‘associations, metaphors, connotations,’ serving her reading by putting ‘Breton back in the interpretive picture.’45 Yet Krauss veered away from strengthening the comparison with Surrealism through metaphor by arguing instead for the indexical nature of ‘Random Order’ by way of a circuitous route (impossible to abbreviate coherently here) that keeps actual Surrealism (Surrealism as theorized by Surrealists) at arm’s length by means of Denis Hollier’s rereading of autobiographical text and photograph in Nadja as indexical, and Barthes’ charge in his early sixties writing on the ‘muteness’ of photography that maintained the medium has a denotative factuality, which is, nonetheless, as Krauss says, ‘abuzz with connotations.’46 The ‘attempt’ by Rauschenberg, as Krauss puts it, suddenly tentatively, ‘to triangulate memory, photography and text,’ gives itself to her understanding of ‘Random Order’ as an ‘allegory’ for ‘the oscillating space of painting in which inside and outside, virtual and actual, depth and surface are bound and parted only to be bound and parted again.’47 The word ‘metaphor’ might have been used there without any loss of meaning, but Krauss’s intention was to remain within the compass of the postmodern (‘allegorical’) Rauschenberg, retaining therefore the distance usually thought to exist between Rauschenberg and Surrealism, which Krauss confirms provisionally by calling her bold comparison between ‘Random Order’ and Nadja ‘counter-intuitive.’48 It is true that both texts avoid merely rational, sequential narrative and are powerfully connotative (though in different ways), and it is worth pointing out what Krauss omits: that Nadja had been translated into English only three years before the appearance of ‘Random Order.’49 Nevertheless, the most cursory direct visual assessment of the two placed sideby-side instantly brings out the manifest differences, which are so flagrant that they embarrass the writer. Rauschenberg’s is essentially an extended collage made up of reproductions of two silkscreen paintings (one of overlapping and otherwise treated photographs, the other a Max Ernst-like array of forms), a straight snapshot and two cropped assortments of crookedly mounted, taped down, juxtaposed photographs of disparate subject matter mingled with overwritten handwriting (meant to yield a Cagean levelling) within a thin review in square format (Figure 1.3) while Breton’s undertaking is a smaller, stand alone, conventionally typeset book (Figure  1.4) interspersed with mainly one-to-a-page photographs where the collage principal is nowhere to be seen. Moreover, Rauschenberg’s magazine clippings, urban snapshots and determinedly literalist (though ultimately and inescapably associative) photographs of details of his studio in ‘Random Order’ (windows, grubby step, kitchen surfaces, toilet) here (Figure  1.5) are as aesthetically and epistemologically remote from Jacques-André Boiffard’s for Nadja of a now-historicized, banal, unmistakable Paris (Figure 1.6) – not ‘returning to a degree zero of representation’ as Michel Beaujour once inaccurately put it, probably with the Nouveau Roman in

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Figure  1.3 From Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Random Order,’ Location, no. 1, spring 1963, 28. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022.

Figure 1.4  Cover of André Breton, Nadja (1928). Association Atelier André Breton. © Gallimard. Photo: Association Atelier André Breton.

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Figure 1.5  From Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Random Order,’ Location, no. 1, spring 1963, 29.

Figure  1.6  Jacques-André Boiffard, André Breton, ‘The words BOIS • CHARBONS,’ Nadja (1928). Association Atelier André Breton. © Gallimard and Mme Denise Boiffard. Photo: Association Atelier André Breton.

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mind, but humming connotatively with past events and prophetic promise – as are the purely illustrative ones elsewhere in Breton’s volume.50 No wonder Krauss did not reproduce them for our convenience when her essay was originally or subsequently published.51 ‘Likeness’ between ‘Random Order’ and Nadja is only really sustainable through the scenic route she takes through Barthes and the photograph-as-index, which, she concedes wisely, is a ‘chronological convergence’ in the early 1960s that is ‘convenient but fortuitous.’52 However, the other Rauschenberg project Krauss introduces to insist on her allegorical reading of the artist, the illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, does serve as a historically situated support for her argument, given the ‘oneiric feeling’ and ‘“image logic”’ she agrees the images share, in which the ‘mental spaces of dream, of memory, and the imagination are equally upright.’53 But that venture can be diverted from a solely allegorical reading to one that begins a reintroduction of metaphor in order to convey an understanding of Rauschenberg’s work, for the purposes of this book, as available to Surrealism and therefore to an alternative interpretation to the literalist one that once occupied the core of the sixties sensibility.

Rauschenberg, poet: John Cage and the illustrations for Dante Rauschenberg probably commenced the illustrations for the Inferno immediately after the run of his important solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery of 4–29 March 1958 and possibly on his dealer’s suggestion; shortly, therefore, before the Surrealists became acquainted with his art.54 Over the years, the confirmed literalist gave various reasons for carrying out the lengthy task; nowhere, of course, did he say it was because he thought his work shared similar properties of allusion to the poet’s. The illustrations were completed not long after Bed (1955) had been displayed and claimed, in a limited way, by the Surrealist group in Paris at its eighth collective exhibition titled Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) of 1959–60; in fact, at the very moment the suite was unveiled in its entirety at Castelli’s on 6  December 1960, where each 36.5  x 29.9 cm transfer drawing hung over a summary of its canto written on the artist’s request and through conversation with him by Michael Sonnabend, Rauschenberg was showing Bed again with the Surrealists elsewhere in New York, at the exhibition Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain.55 Soon after, in May 1961, the illustrations for the Inferno were reproduced in order, on a small scale that made them difficult to see well – in addition to their magazine photograph-size figures, their often substantial areas of grisaille reproduce badly anyway, especially in black and white – in the second issue of the trilingual Milanese journal of current art Metro edited by the critic and writer Bruno Alfieri, with several commissioned texts. This constituted ‘the most comprehensive presentation of Rauschenberg’s art to date’ in one informed estimation, notably advanced in the twenty-eight individual blocks of commentary by art critic Dore Ashton and, regarded as a sensational coup by Castelli, an appreciation of Rauschenberg by Cage.56 The whole

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series was swiftly purchased anonymously then donated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1963 from where it toured extensively up to May 1967 through England, Austria, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Holland, Belgium then back to various cities in the United States, taking multiple stops in each country, while an opulent box of facsimiles was prepared in an edition of three hundred featuring extended commentaries on every illustration and canto by Ashton, each set containing an original lithograph, published in 1964.57 Cage had known and admired Rauschenberg since their earliest encounters at Black Mountain College and the artist’s first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1951, watching at close quarters for a decade as the oeuvre rapidly developed and grew. His text on Rauschenberg that first appeared in Metro in 1961 is perhaps the single best-known piece of writing on the artist, but its original purpose to accompany the Dante cycle in the journal has hardly ever been noted, probably because it was immediately separated from it and anthologised in the volume Silence (1961). Cage mentions Dante in it four times, once casually with reference to the red outline of Rauschenberg’s own foot at the top of the drawing Canto XIV: Circle Seven, Round 3, The Violent against God, Nature, and Art (1961); then in the other cases linking Dante to Rauschenberg through a Zen-inspired idea of the US artist’s mind: that is, as ‘uncluttered’ and therefore receptive in an unusually effortless way to the medieval poet, and as artlessly primed for illustration.58 ‘It did not occur to me to ask him why he chose Dante as a project for illustration,’ wrote Cage in a characteristic moment of showy inscrutability, before resorting to his recent reading of Wittgenstein: ‘[p]erhaps it is because we’ve had it around so long so close to us without bothering to put it to use, which becomes its meaning.’59 Cage deepened his tribute to Rauschenberg’s artistic ‘naivety’ along similar lines with the avowal: ‘Dante is an incentive, providing multiplicity, as useful as a chicken or an old shirt.’60 It is absurd in the spirit of Dada, of course, and smug in the manner of Cage, but the objects are well chosen to maximize the bathos and the main point: great art does not require a great theme; in fact, it is better off without a theme at all. The theme of no-theme or no-thing gets us close to the nest of meanings that Cage was contriving when he wrote on Rauschenberg’s ‘poetry,’ a term he used with far greater frequency in his text on the artist than in any of the others it was collected alongside in Silence. According to Cage, Rauschenberg’s poetry had nothing to do with metaphor and everything to do with nothing. That was what he identified with on his original viewing of the White Paintings in spite of his subsequent metaphorical lapse in calling them ‘airports for the lights, shadows, and particles.’61 He communicated it in a kind of Zen reworking of a Dada manifesto – its style poached from none other than André Breton channelling Louis Aragon – in his first statement on the artist published in the New York Herald Tribune in chief art critic Emily Genauer’s column, a few weeks after the two- and seven-panel pieces were revealed to the usual baffled public at Rauschenberg: Paintings and Sculpture; Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings, the joint show held with Twombly at the Stable Gallery, New York in

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September–October 1953: ‘No subject/No image/No taste/No object/No beauty/No message/No talent/No technique (no why)/No idea/No intention/No art/No feeling/ No black/No white (no and).’62 For Cage, the poetry in Rauschenberg’s art was, then, a quality of intangibility: ‘his poetry has moved without one’s knowing where it’s gone to’; a flight out of art into life, improvisation and surprise: ‘[p]oetry is free-wheeling. You get its impact by thumbing through any of the mass media’; but primarily a levelling and juxtapositional visual experience, though not one of interpretation: ‘[o]ut of seeing, do I move into poetry? And is this a poetry in which Eisenhower could have disappeared and the Mona Lisa taken his place?’ ‘He has removed the why of asking why and you can read it at home or in a library. (These others are poems too),’ ‘[a]s for me, I’m not so inclined to read poetry as I am one way or another to get myself a television set,’ and most prominently among art historians since, used as a headline for the Rauschenberg effect: ‘everything, a pair of socks, is appropriate, appropriate to poetry, a poetry of infinite possibilities.’63 This meaning of poetry for Cage is confirmed clearly enough elsewhere in his text on Rauschenberg but meets with some contradiction when we look outside of it. His foreword to Silence states emphatically that in his early education and during his time at Black Mountain College in 1952: ‘a concern with poetry was early with me,’ but his understanding of it seems to be more like the avant-garde prose idiom of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.64 Cage’s belief that poetry ‘is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words’ is quite dissimilar to how he used the term in writing of Rauschenberg and his work.65 The meaning shifted again when he was asked in interview in the late 1960s about his admiration for Norman O. Brown and Henry David Thoreau: Cage: Brown particularly and compellingly demonstrates in Love’s Body [1966] that to bring our body to its fullness we must open ourselves to imagination. Brown’s notion of true life is poetic. And he has seen quite well that politics on the other hand consists in suppressing life, at least wherever it is poetic. Daniel Charles: And do you picture this poetic life as following Thoreau’s example? Cage: Yes, to the extent that Thoreau envisioned anarchy without police . . . . Charles: Why do you insist on that word poetry? Cage: There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.66

In the latter statement, Cage clearly drew close to his degree zero reflections on Rauschenberg and poetry that have a parallel with other, highly influential ones in Silence that have since enjoyed wide circulation – ‘I have nothing to say and I am

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saying it and that is poetry,’ ‘Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it . . . )’ – but the rest show that Cage was typically unconcerned about either strict consistency in his use of the word ‘poetry’ or about a definition of it.67 The Surrealists were well into their reading of Brown by the time of that interview, and Cage’s remarks on imagination, eroticism and anarchy in the context of poetry are much closer to Surrealism than the composer would have wanted or than anyone else has noticed.68 That is because Cage shared with Rauschenberg an equal aversion to Surrealism; his submission of the term ‘poetry’ in his text on the artist was certainly not made in support of the metaphorical or allegorical operations that are said to be carried out by poetry in Surrealism, nor does it connect to the writings of Dante.69 As he spelled it out in Silence: ‘[w]hat I am calling poetry is often called/content. I myself have called it/form.’70 But it was obviously the content not the poetic form of the Inferno that Rauschenberg was drawn to illustrate (metaphorically) and that had led Breton to give Dante a founding status in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) by declaring: ‘if one is to judge them only superficially by their results, a good number of poets could pass for Surrealists, beginning with Dante.’71 The Inferno is not just any object, not a ‘mere incentive,’ as Cage wrote; it is a poem of extraordinary variety, voluminous richness and vertiginous standing. A chicken and an old shirt do indeed possess ‘multiplicity,’ as Cage conceded, already edging out from denotation into connotative territory; but Rauschenberg’s project for Dante was of an entirely different order, which Cage’s Zen levelling and literalism could not delimit. It bonded uncomplicatedly with poetry in the grandest, allegorical and metaphorical tradition through the ‘inexhaustible points of departure’ that Ashton spoke of when she described the many hours she spent with Rauschenberg in his studio reading the Inferno and looking at the drawings in preparation for her commentaries for the book of facsimiles.72

Rauschenberg and metaphor: Dore Ashton on the illustrations for Dante Given the ubiquity of Cage’s text on Rauschenberg and the great success and prestige of the Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, it is little wonder that the term ‘poetry,’ in its different registers, stuck fast to the artist early on. But then, as I noted in my introduction, at least some of those among the earliest admirers who latched onto Rauschenberg were already steeped in viewing art in a ‘poetic’ way that had been counselled by Surrealism. Ashton was one of them and like Lucy Lippard she displayed her sympathy towards the movement often; she was also one of the first reviewers to express support for Rauschenberg’s work.73 This makes her role as commentator on the illustrations for the Inferno in Metro a confusing one. Her opening statement joined the poet and the artist at the hip with the words: ‘[a]n allegory is a veiled presentation of a meaning implied but not expressly stated,’ which might situate her response in the literalist/postmodern tradition of reception.74 From there on, though, what stays

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with the reader is her fearlessness throughout the texts in deducing Rauschenberg’s endeavour and the artist’s relationship with Dante’s poem by recourse to the words ‘simile,’ ‘metaphorical’ and mainly ‘symbol.’75 Ashton had briefly pondered, unproductively, the operation of allegory in the oeuvre of Rauschenberg, just as he was completing the illustrations for the Inferno but before they were made public, by way of Allegory at the close of her muted if not particularly critical review of his solo show at Castelli’s gallery of 29 March–16 April 1960. ‘The allegory, of course, is incomprehensible,’ she wrote, but added that, for us, so were the long-forgotten original meanings of those of Piero di Cosimo and this had not reduced the importance of the art, a point she would repeat in her commentaries on Rauschenberg/Dante in Metro.76 The Surrealist slant on Rauschenberg’s art had already materialized by then, beginning with the display of Bed at exhibitions of Surrealism, as I detail in my subsequent chapters. It was already well known that metaphor is central to Surrealist art. This is frequently traced to the attribution given from outside the group by Roman Jakobson of the ‘patently metaphorical attitude’ of Surrealist painters,77 which was known to and repeated by Barthes.78 But the stance had been long determined by the poetic attitude demanded by Surrealism in daily life, not just of the poet in verse and prose and the artist cutting across styles (in the way Owens attributes to allegory after Jakobson),79 but of the citizen, too, decisively defined by Breton in the Prague lecture ‘Surrealist Situation of the Object’ in 1935: The poet, whose role it is to express himself in a more and more highly evolved social state, must recapture the concrete vitality that logical habits of thought are about to cause him to lose. To this end he must dig the trench that separated poetry from prose even deeper; he has for that purpose one tool, and one tool only, capable of boring deeper and deeper, and that is the image, and among all type of images, metaphor.80

The operation of metaphor in the visual arts can be found insisted upon by Breton from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s in the writings collected in Surrealism and Painting (1965): in his observation of 1928 of Yves Tanguy’s painting where ‘[e]very creature in this place participates metaphorically in the life we have chosen to live,’ through his eulogy in 1939 to the art of André Masson manifesting ‘plastic metaphor in a pure state, by which I mean literally uninterpretable’ and his midlife recollection in 1941 of the ‘explosion of lyricism’ effected by Marc Chagall’s work in 1911, when he believed (surely inaccurately) that ‘metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,’ to the assessment of the game of the ‘Exquisite Corpse’ later that decade as ‘an infallible means of sending the mind’s critical mechanism away on holiday and fully releasing its metaphorical potential’ and the salute late in life to Jean Benoît’s costume, made at the time of EROS for the ceremony The Execution of the Testament of the Marquis de Sade (1959), as a ‘metaphorical entity.’81 Now, when Surrealism and Painting was published in its final expanded edition in 1965, it included Breton’s late essay on René Magritte of the previous year referring to a recent ‘extremely penetrating and important restatement’ by Dore Ashton, no less,

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of the primary role of metaphor.82 Ashton’s declaration had been made in December 1962 in the company of the art critic Hilton Kramer, Steinberg and others at the legendary symposium on Pop art, published in Arts Magazine in April 1963 during the period Ashton was immersed in regular conversation with Rauschenberg about the Inferno while working on the extended texts to accompany the illustrations, and it was meant to sink the claim for Pop’s ‘naturalistic bias’ as Lawrence Alloway had recently posited it through direct contrast with Surrealism.83 She reported further that Alloway had elsewhere extolled Pop’s ‘urgent quest for unadorned or common reality’ and had held up Pop as ‘an antidote to idealism’ because art had traditionally evaded the real and therefore ‘“can be made a metaphor of an ideal order,”’ countering in particular Surrealist metaphor in his one-page text for the catalogue of Jim Dine’s show that opened in March 1963 at the galerie Ileana Sonnabend.84 Engaged in ‘an elementary game of naming things,’ Pop artists had decided to ‘banish metaphor,’ said Ashton, which was necessarily ‘a complicating device, one which insists on the play of more than one element in order to effect an image.’85 The yearning ‘to reduce reality to the solid simple object which resists everything – interpretation, incorporation, juxtaposition, transformation – appears again and again in modern art history,’ she announced, but ‘it is always delusive.’86 Then came the statement that charmed the Surrealists and would be quoted by Breton: ‘The artist who believes that he can maintain the “original status” of an object deludes himself. The character of the human imagination is expansive and allegorical. You cannot “think” an object for more than an instant without the mind’s shifting . . . . Not an overcoat, not a bottle dryer, not a Coca-Cola bottle can resist the onslaught of the imagination. Metaphor is as natural to the imagination as saliva to the tongue.’87

Ashton’s brilliant metaphor for metaphor, to argue what readymades and Pop art were not, exceeded art to touch on the very operation of the mind’s unruly tendency towards association: the operation of association in cognition, later called by Paul Ricoeur ‘the fundamental metaphoricity of thought.’88 Her critique of ‘Pop artists and certain literary and musical figures’ was made slightly in advance of Meyer’s much more approving disclosure of the new cultural paradigm of ‘radical empiricism,’ and Ashton, too, implicated Robbe-Grillet in the ‘rebellion against metaphor.’89 However, she had a particular bone to pick with the Cagean version of her collaborator on Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. Lumping Rauschenberg together with Pop artists, as was still the habit at the time, she defended his work from a position that was unmistakeably sympathetic towards Surrealism in its summary of the diverse operations of chance in art: John Cage praises Rauschenberg because he makes no pretence at aesthetic selection. There is a ring of Surrealism and Lautréamont in Cage’s observation that between Rauschenberg and what he picks up is the quality of an encounter – but not the metaphorical encounter of sewing machine and umbrella – only a chance encounter in the continuum of random sensation he calls life.90

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Ashton’s public censure of the depleted aesthetic of an ‘impoverished genre’ because it ‘shuns metaphor’ was really a complaint against the way the art was interpreted by critics and the artists themselves, not the art itself.91 It helped to articulate a position that was at odds with the ‘literalist,’ ‘factist,’ ‘materialist,’ ‘unadorned,’ ‘elementary’ (and so on) status given Rauschenberg’s art by supportive critics, art historians, cultural commentators and friends, as allegedly tuned to an artistic, literary and philosophical proclivity in the 1960s, evident in both France and the United States. I have shown that it was a stance largely held to by Rauschenberg and confirmed in the utterances of Cage, even though I have also begun to demonstrate with particular reference to the Inferno project how frequently the artist and even his most congenial commentators have shifted into allusive mode in their reflection on his work. Who can blame them? What could be more natural (or cultural)? Cage himself seemed to draw an analogy between the atmosphere of the Inferno and Rauschenberg’s ‘perilous’ experiences while illustrating them – allegorizing ‘a stay in Florida and at night, looking for help, a walk through land infested with rattlesnakes. Also slipping on a pier, gashing his chin, hanging, his foot caught, not calling for help’ – while Thomas Crow and Graham Smith have recently speculated that ‘Dante’s journey provided Rauschenberg with a metaphor for his own life up to that point,’ since he was, like Dante, in his mid-thirties when he embarked on the venture.92 In other recent commentary, long after the shelving of metaphorical readings in the postmodern passage from the literal and vernacular to the allegorical, Krauss estimated ‘a whole variety of connotational dimensions’ given by photography to the illustrations for the Inferno, Julia Blaut gave notice (probably after Ashton) that their surface of dense bandings ‘are used expressively to evoke such intangibles of mood, sound, and smell,’ Branden W. Joseph complied with Cage’s text to testify that ‘an analogy with television seems to encompass nearly all of the transfer drawings’ most salient features’ and Joanne Morra saw in them ‘an archaeology of the American unconscious during that time,’ elsewhere running through a lengthy analogy between the illustrations and the Freudian unconscious.93 While they are not ‘Surrealist’ interpretations, responses like these to the oeuvre, which are often accidental, unconscious or casual, and might contradict what is otherwise being argued, show a tendency to respond to art metaphorically and reveal that metaphor is a cognitive predisposition. They suggest that the Surrealist loyalty to metaphor is not merely ideological but comes naturally, or at least comes naturally in the service of a culture. As I noted in my introduction, the line of enquiry and historical moment of this book are proposed by the writings and curatorial activities of the Surrealists. If I improvise those in certain places beyond their texts, my interpretations of works by Rauschenberg such as Monogram (1955–9) and Bed, given here for the first time, are either manifest there or extracted by me from the latent material that I have collated from Surrealism across the 1960s. My approach will, no doubt, meet with resistance from certain invested art historians, especially since it follows a path laid by the Surrealists that sometimes has junctures that are critical of the artist (by contrast

30

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

with the customary toadying that tarnishes most of the writing on Rauschenberg’s art today), but an extensive reading of the oeuvre through Surrealism is due and has been a long time in coming. It was explicitly resisted by Rauschenberg and his dealers in the mid-1950s when the artist made a set of works neighbouring Surrealism that were subsequently suppressed for fear of ‘their derivative nature’ and concern that ‘their existence might have been damaging to his reputation’ in a period when Surrealism was an object of disdain among US critics and artists.94 As late as 1983, in fact, Rauschenberg’s dealer Ileana Sonnabend intimated to Rauschenberg scholar Roni Feinstein that ‘the time was perhaps still not ripe for a discussion of Rauschenberg and Surrealism.’95 Ashton predicted it, though, on the occasion of the same retrospective of the artist’s work at the Guggenheim in New York that had brought about Krauss’s ‘Perpetual Inventory.’ Persevering in her view of the Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, which she knew so well, as the artist’s ‘magnum opus,’ Ashton took careful aim once again at the degree zero interpretation of the artist that is often associated with Cage and was consented to by Rauschenberg, but had been protested, as we saw in my introduction, by the Surrealist José Pierre, and to which I pose a Surrealist challenge throughout this book: The talkers of ‘no history,’ who so strenuously denied, with Rauschenberg, any provenance for his enfant terribilism, will now have to become Ringmeisters in his three-ring circus . . . by imposing some kind of order on his willed chaos. . . . As far as I know, there are no sewing machines or dissecting tables in Rauschenberg’s art, but there are plenty of ‘as beautiful as . . . ’ encounters. . . . I suspect that it will be the deep spadework of the Surrealists that will make it possible for the ringmasters to read historical intelligibility into Rauschenberg’s half-century of ludic labors. The goat, the bed, Dante: what they have in common is precisely the Surrealist prescription of juxtaposition, an endless painting of the unlike in ever-changing perspectives. Images. Dante and Kennedy. Goat and tire. Up and down. In and out. Never at rest, always spurring the viewer’s response by enjoining his imagination to countenance the unlikely. Above all, the contingent.96

­2

Intruders in the Surrealist domain: Bed, Target with Plaster Casts, The Consumer

Although the link between Marcel Duchamp and Neo-Dada has been made many times and is regarded by historians of twentieth-century art as crucial to the current understanding of art after modernism, the one between Surrealism and Neo-Dada has been given barely any notice, probably because the two have seemed too distant from each other technically, iconographically, theoretically, thematically and conceptually.1 However, this was not the way it was always seen and emphatically not in France. One recent study asserts that the rare uses of the term ‘Neo-Dada’ in that country were made with the idea of a ‘strong assimilation to Surrealism’ in the years up to about mid-1962.2 After that point, the hypothetical affiliation with Surrealism was eroded as the galerie Ileana Sonnabend played down the European aspects of its artists, particularly after Pop became identified as a ‘school’ whose specifically ‘American’ features were stark, novel, controversial and marketable. As art historians continue the task of rendering Duchamp’s extensive role within Surrealism after the Second World War, it becomes clearer that he was a significant figure between the movement and Neo-Dada, manifested mainly in his contributions to exhibitions of Surrealism in France and the United States.3 This chapter assembles the key case studies from display contexts and related publishing ones in Paris and New York to begin to assess how the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns was understood by Surrealists and contemporary critics in those two countries at the very end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s as mediated by Surrealism before it was steered fully if temporarily onto the path signposted ‘Neo-Dada,’ de-Europeanized as ‘Pop art’ and subsequently gathered up by theories of the postmodern.4 For a variety of reasons, Surrealism was resurfacing in both art history and as a contemporary, organized movement internationally throughout the period I chart in this book and I record this as space allows and where it is of significance to the Surrealists’ interpretation of Rauschenberg’s art. Within the weave of this curatorial, theoretical, historical fabric, we can begin to discern a Rauschenberg contiguous with Surrealism and start to draw out its main features.

Concerning Surrealism and Neo-Dada The first significant use of the unloved term ‘Neo-Dada’ was made by art critic Robert Rosenblum in Arts in May 1957, figuring as an adjective rather than a proper noun in a brief review of the show New Work of 6–25 May held at Leo Castelli’s apartment

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Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

that discerned ‘a vital neo-Dada spirit’ in Johns’s Flag (1954–5) by bridging it with ‘the reasonable illogicalities of a Duchamp readymade’ (the tag was not applied by Rosenblum to Rauschenberg’s work, but his collage Gloria of 1956 impressed equally as ‘alternately rough-edged and elegant, hilariously funny and grimly sordid’);5 the label surfaced for the second time in the issue of Art News of January 1958 that carried a review of Johns’s first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, used less emphatically as a still-abstract noun for Johns, Rauschenberg and others alongside a reproduction of Johns’s Target with Four Faces (1955).6 It had taken on quite a stable and uncontroversial usage by 1960, even though the pejorative connotations were never far away and its career would be brief as a coherent descriptor.7 The proliferation of Neo-Dada in the United States from 1957 to 1963 up to the establishment of ‘Pop art’ as a term and the rise of the art of Rauschenberg and Johns over that period were continuous with a series of ‘legacy’ manifestations in New York that centred on Duchamp but also took in Kurt Schwitters and have been frequently cited.8 An aura surrounded the name of Duchamp by the early 1950s when Rauschenberg would have encountered his work, but it is not currently known exactly when that took place. He certainly viewed it when he attended the 1953 exhibition Dada, 1916–1923 at the Sidney Janis Gallery where versions of readymades and some other work were shown alongside six of Schwitters’s collages. After viewing the first of the four Schwitters retrospectives that took place at the same gallery from 1952 to 1962, Rauschenberg reportedly said that he felt as though ‘the whole exhibition had been made just for him.’9 Although they are quite distinct from one other, Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) and Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts (1955) were Neo-Dada signature works that emerged from early in this period. The first carried identifiable features of a bed: pillow, sheets and blanket ‘ready made’ in both senses, as a support for the kind of spattered treatment usually dished out by over-serious abstract expressionist painters, so it was bound to be viewed ironically (and not to the detriment of Dada); the second was less forthrightly aggressive, combining through its selection of body parts, including breast and penis, the absurdity of Dada and materials of Merz (the sides of the construction are covered in pasted newspapers) with the flat, abstract design of what was then contemporary art, though with Johns the dry humour even more obviously tilted the game. Their first owner was Leo Castelli who had briefly shown Surrealist works in Paris just before the war, been friendly with some of the European Surrealists in New York during it and gave Rauschenberg and Johns their now legendary monographic shows in his gallery early in 1958.10 The constructions were hung at the respective events; Bed was one of just two exhibits sold at Rauschenberg’s (to Castelli, the other was returned) while Target with Plaster Casts appeared in the Johns showcase (Figure 2.1) as one of only two or three works (the scholarship conflicts on this) that failed to sell. The two important solo exhibitions at Castelli’s gallery were attended by the French critic Michel Ragon who visited the studios of both artists and would be the first in France to use in print the terms ‘Neo-Dada’ and ‘Pop art,’ in May 1961 and February 1963, respectively.11 Following a four-year stay in the United States, Ragon reported back extensively on the current art scene in that country to an international but mainly French public early in 1959 in an article in Cimaise dated ‘November 1958.’12 He predicted the success of both artists but was cautious on Johns – ‘We mustn’t cry

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Figure 2.1  Photograph of Leo Castelli at Jasper Johns exhibition, 1958 (Archives of American

Art). © DACS Jasper Johns, image courtesy of Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. © Jasper Johns/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.

“Fraud” too quickly’ – while being effusive on Rauschenberg, mainly because ‘one of his most original qualities is to ally a Dada spirit with a grand classical pictorial knowledge.’13 The Surrealists would indeed cry ‘fraud’ on Johns by 1963; as for Rauschenberg, Ragon’s interpretation might very well have constituted a dialectic neat enough to attract their attention, yet they would have rejected its two cultural points of reference.14 They were about to seek a reading of Rauschenberg’s work that had no need for either Dada or classicism, but was formed by a coalition of Surrealism’s longestablished aesthetico-poetic position, recently adjusted to accommodate a new ethical dimension, and driven by contemporary political events. In the meantime, Surrealism set a stage for Rauschenberg and Johns.

EROS: Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Nicolas Calas Contrary to some accounts, the work of Rauschenberg had been available for viewing in Paris a little before Bed made its first appearance in France, its third journey to a European city and fifth documented showing anywhere, at the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) of 1959–60 (an itinerary that demonstrates its function early on as Castelli’s workhorse for representing Rauschenberg in Europe).15 This was the largely overlooked display of three Combines at the inaugural Paris  Biennale held

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Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris in October 1959 where Talisman (1958) could be seen for the first time in Europe, and Forge (1959) and Photograph (1959) for the first time anywhere, at the moment Rauschenberg’s work was just taking on an international standing after a brief bout of interest in Italy in 1953, the year before the appearance of the earliest Combines.16 The work of Johns had also been accessible in Paris not long before EROS, at his first, unsuccessful solo show in the city at the beginning of 1959 at the galerie Rive Droite. The Surrealists’ exhibition provides glaring historical evidence that the proximity of Surrealism and Neo-Dada was recognized, which is not reducible merely to the theme of the exhibition (since eroticism was a register worked in by countless artists who had not been invited to participate). It had received backing by June or July 1959 and took place at the galerie Daniel Cordier from 15 December to 29 February 1960.17 Cordier had long atoned for his pre-war involvement in Action Française and in the years following his illustrious service in the Resistance had established himself as a collector and a dealer with a reputation for promoting avant-garde art with an erotic content, giving monographic shows to Hans Bellmer, Jean Dubuffet and the Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström, among others.18 Organized by André Breton and Duchamp with the assistance of the young Surrealist José Pierre, who had joined the Paris group in 1952, EROS meant to explore eroticism in many of its forms, from sadomasochism to necrophilia and ritualistic cannibalism. Breton acknowledged that the show was inspired partly by the publication of Georges Bataille’s Eroticism in 1957 (and was sandwiched between that and Bataille’s last book The Tears of Eros of 1961).19 Including contributions from sixteen women, EROS articulated Surrealism’s move towards an increasingly progressive awareness of gender, sex and sexuality, while sticking to its unwavering mission to arrest the larger public’s attention, contest its values and allow entry only to the ‘initiated.’ Placed among the seventy-five Surrealists past and present from nineteen countries that were represented at EROS, Rauschenberg and Johns were allowing their work to be considered in a very specific, pre-historicized context. Alyce Mahon states that their inclusion was down to ‘Cordier’s links with New York,’ which were indeed strong, particularly with the Leo Castelli Gallery.20 But as Steven Harris has recently shown,21 it was actually following an initial enquiry by Breton to Duchamp about artists in New York who might be contacted, on the suggestion of Duchamp who had visited the studios of both (which were then on separate floors in the same building at 128 Front Street in Lower Manhattan) for the first time a few months earlier in late January 1959 – not with their mutual acquaintance John Cage who became close to Duchamp a little later, but with the Surrealist sympathizer Nicolas Calas whom Duchamp had known since the late 1930s22 – and finally by Pierre’s invitation that Rauschenberg and Johns were directly invited to make what Pierre later called their ‘slightly accidental’ appearance in the exhibition.23 Duchamp’s meeting with the two artists coincided with Ragon’s remarks on them in Cimaise and also, as Harris indicates, with Calas’s first reference to Rauschenberg and Johns in his writings.24 This occurred in the essay ‘ContiNuance’ in Art News in February 1959, later republished in a slightly abbreviated version as ‘Heirs U.S.A.,’ which to my knowledge is not only the earliest published consideration of their work by anyone in

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35

the Surrealist orbit but also the first attempt to imply shared attributes between their art and Surrealism.25 Calas sought a recent lineage for modern art that began with the arrival of Surrealism in the United States at the beginning of the Second World War, observing its role in the origins of abstract expressionism. Since he believed Rauschenberg’s ‘painted surfaces fall into abstract-expressionist patterns emphasizing a sense of rawness,’ Calas’s art history fixed those, too, at only one remove from Surrealism.26 But there was a difference and it lay in a rejection by the US artist of the (Surrealist, ‘Freudian’) symbol in favour of what Calas called the ‘sign.’ Whereas the symbol carried a point-for-point meaning for the Surrealists, he believed, the sign did not in the art of the abstract expressionists and Rauschenberg: It remains to understand what is happening to that fowl or that goat or those old boots, enthroned or encaged in the Combine. What has happened to The Bed [sic]? Framed, it hangs vertically. A stiffened pillow rests on a folded back quilt, to the tiresome geometric pattern of which the lower part of the bed is reduced. The pillow and the pattern are all that remain of reality when the beloved object underwent the abstract-expressionist vivisection . . . .27

­alas’s meandering, imprecise, dialectical reflections on Rauschenberg’s early C signature-yet-standalone Bed as a scene of readymade intimacy permanently invaded by abstract expressionist brutality, as well as his more elliptical references to Odalisk (1955/1958) and the just-completed Monogram (1955–9), which he must have seen in a photograph or in the artist’s studio (because the goat had yet to be paraded before its first public when ‘ContiNuance’ appeared), constitute a kind of poetic rumination as art criticism. They are typical of Calas’s art writings from 1959 onwards and characterize those he devoted to Rauschenberg and Johns in the 1960s, as I show in more detail in later chapters. The vagueness, obliqueness and sheer under-explanation of their scrutiny, limply attending brief paths of enquiry that meet awkwardly and often seem of only minor consequence, might be symptomatic of Calas’s increasingly veiled use of language that was of a piece with his return to writing poetry, happening at just that time after a lengthy hiatus of around twenty years.28 The frustrating style was perhaps compounded by the necessity to write to deadline and tendency to publish a great deal, as Calas did for many years from this point. His comments certainly reflect a continuing engagement and even involvement with Surrealism, however ambivalent in this period. They sit uncomfortably alongside an indulgence of the language of French structuralism, so much that they are at odds with readings of Rauschenberg’s Combines soon to be generated by Surrealists in Paris. This is demonstrated in the leading question in ‘Heirs U.S.A.’ among the set of demands that Calas put to Johns’s work (to which he devoted more space in this text than Rauschenberg’s), asking of Flag, Gray (1958), the numbers paintings and target constructions: ‘[w]hat is the function of a sign that has lost its significance?’29 Yet in spite of the invitation made by those works to ponder the signifier, Calas perceived a specifically ‘poetic’ imagery, ambiguity and especially eroticism in the art of

36

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

Rauschenberg and Johns that obviously had an antecedent in Surrealism, an enemy in Clement Greenberg and, therefore, a rapt audience in Leo Steinberg who would soon find leverage in the art of Johns and Rauschenberg to land some of the most damaging blows on modernist art history and formalist criticism.30 Since Calas referred directly to both Bed and Target with Plaster Casts in ‘ContiNuance’ early in 1959, he might well have acted alongside his friend Duchamp, also mentioned in the article, in recommending to Breton their loan to the Surrealists and inclusion in EROS later that year. Harris records the letter to the Leo Castelli Gallery that followed in which Pierre specifically requested ‘The Bed [sic] on the recommendation of Marcel Duchamp’ for the show.31 Castelli and Rauschenberg happily complied. On 10  September, Castelli answered this and the letter sent directly to Johns on behalf of himself and the two artists informing the Surrealist of ‘how delighted we were for them to be invited to participate,’ adding that he would ship Bed directly from Kassel, where it had been dispatched with Thaw (1958) and Kickback (1959) to documenta 2 by Frank O’Hara (then working as special assistant on the International Programme of the Museum of Modern Art, New York); Target with Plaster Casts would accompany it to Paris because ‘we think that it probably is the piece that Marcel Duchamp had in mind when he invited Jasper Johns to participate in the show.’32 Harris reminds us that the two works had already caused some controversy to the point of being censored.33 The previous year, Bed had been sent with Factum I and Factum II (1957) to an exhibition of young US and Italian artists held at Gian Carlo Menotti’s Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy from April to September 1958, but was refused entry to the main gallery and remained in a storage room, ascribed to its lurid appearance by Calvin Tomkins.34 The whole story had been available to Duchamp in the New York Herald Tribune in June where Bed is called an ‘army cot’ in Emily Genauer’s column (where Cage’s ‘No subject/No image . . . ’ statement on the White Paintings had appeared in December 1953), quite plausibly given Rauschenberg’s stint in the US Navy in 1944–5.35 Genauer went on to quote the critic and curator Giovanni Urbani who did a good job of figuring Rauschenberg as a perfect Dadaist while pompously attempting to justify the exclusion of all three of his works through one of those remarks that confirm its speaker’s intolerance by trying to deny it: ‘I feel,’ he said, ‘that our American collaborators have shown a lack of cultural responsibility. To hang such works as “art” would be an insult to the serious creative artists in the show, to the festival, to Spoleto itself. They are beneath our dignity: I am as opposed to censorship as anyone. But there comes a point at which a responsible critic must draw the line, and be prepared to defend his position. It is not a style of art I am resisting. It is an attitude, destructive and nihilistic.’ Mr. Menotti later told me he would back Urbani’s decision completely.36

Another palaver unfolded the following year in the months preceding EROS, this time at documenta 2 held from 11 July to 1 October where Bed was reproduced in the catalogue and had been installed, but was swiftly removed in Hans Haacke’s eyewitness account at the insistence of the art historian Werner Haftmann who was the assistant

Intruders in the Surrealist Domain

37

to artistic director and documenta originator Arnold Bode.37 Mildly incongruously, and apparently by contrast with the taste of Urbani, Haftmann had written favourably of Dada and, as editor at the Cologne publisher DuMont, would commission Dada: Kunst und Antikunst (1964) from Hans Richter two years later in which Rauschenberg featured as one of a handful of artists tolerated as worthy descendants in Richter’s final chapter ‘Neo-Dada.’38 Not so at documenta 2 where Bed was stowed in event secretary Rudolf Zwirner’s office for the duration of the exhibition, still lying or standing there at the time of the correspondence between Pierre and Castelli.39 The evident talent to disturb of Bed and Target with Plaster Casts – the latter underwent threats (or requests) of censorship at the hands of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Museum of Modern Art in 1958 (as originally told by Castelli) as well as the Jewish Museum in New York – must have been known to Duchamp when suggesting work by Rauschenberg and Johns for EROS in a period of increasing state censorship in France at the height of the Algerian War of Independence.40 In my introduction, I documented Rauschenberg’s recorded distaste for Surrealism in the following decade: did he feel the same way in the 1950s and voice resistance to the loan to discourage affinity and maintain some distance? There is no evidence that he did and the advice of his dealer would have won him over anyway. Castelli was well aware of the instantly canonical significance of the Surrealists’ event. He had attended not only the opening of Breton’s galerie Gradiva in Paris in May 1937, but also the renowned International Exhibition of Surrealism at Georges Wildenstein’s Galérie Beaux-Arts in the following year with his then wife the future Ileana Sonnabend.41 So it was that Bed was displayed for the first time in Europe at the third time of trying at the Surrealists’ EROS. The status of Bed and its setting in the spectacle did not disappoint (Figure 2.2). Hung close to the ground, it was shown with a cluster of paintings, sculptures and objects by artists in or close to the Surrealist group such as Joan Miró, Yves Laloy, E. F. Granell, Clovis Trouille, Pierre Molinier and others, densely grouped to relate the themes of sleep, dream, sex and death up to the end of one of the dimly lit corridors that linked the rooms of the extravaganza. It was afforded a privileged position, uninterruptibly viewable all along that corridor (in principle at least), placed next to Alberto Giacometti’s Invisible Object (1934), presumably to suggest a physical relationship between the standing trapped somnambulist and the standing bed, which are indeed proportionately matched to the extent that installation photographs give the peculiar illusion of Bed appearing about the size of an actual bed (so less like a picture and more like a bed again) beside the one-and-a-half-metre-tall statue, a misapprehension enforced by the low ceiling in that quarter of the exhibition and perhaps some distortion in the best-known photograph (Figure  2.3).42 Man Ray’s cartoon-like Virgin (1955) was sited overhead nearby suggesting irreverently and comically the Assumption as depicted in a Renaissance ceiling fresco. It extended metaphorically the formal interplay of horizontality and verticality, possibly conceived by Duchamp as an echo of the same displacement performed through readymades such as Fountain (1917) and Trébuchet (1917), and insisted upon by the priority given the upended Bed, whose emphatic summoning of the horizontal register signifying

38

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism

Figure  2.2  Anonymous, photograph of corridor showing Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) and Alberto Giacometti’s Invisible Object (cast c. 1954–5), at Exposition InteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS), Paris (1959–60). © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. © Succession Alberto Giacometti/DACS 2022. Photo: Association Atelier André Breton.

‘culture’ into modern art would soon help spark a trailblazing theory of postmodernism in the visual arts in the writings of Steinberg.43 Johns’s now almost-equally well-known Target with Plaster Casts could be seen at the end of the exhibition (see Plate 2) its target meant to rhyme formally, again, with the circular breasts of Max Walter Svanberg’s Portrait of a Star III (1956–7).44 Both overlooked the notorious Cannibal Feast (1959) installation by Meret Oppenheim, which itself rhymed, poetically this time, with the metaphorical activity of ‘mutilation’ suggested by the body parts in Target with Plaster Casts, and conceptually with the despoiled Bed out in the corridor.45

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Figure 2.3  Henri Glaeser, photograph of corridor showing Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) at Exposition InteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS), Paris (1959–60). Association Atelier André Breton. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. © Succession Alberto Giacometti/DACS 2022. Photo: Association Atelier André Breton.

­Surrealist intrusion: John Bernard Myers and Leo Steinberg Historical Surrealism was about to commence a slow return to favour on various fronts in the United States, tied in different ways to the emerging art of the time, just as the actual Surrealist group would undergo a revival in France.46 But this resurgence of interest was locked to a denial by some of any possibility of a continued social or artistic relevance for the movement in the 1960s, against any notion of the survival of actual Surrealism. This was particularly the case with critics and curators in the United States in thrall to formalism who went further, preferring to marginalize any political narrative at all in historical Surrealism (especially its relationships with communism and anarchism in the 1920s and 1930s) while situating the art and its concerns unthreateningly in the past, separate from those of current US art. When Surrealism made a rare showing between the late 1940s and 1960 as context for, or comparison with current art, then, safe distance was sought, as in this coy, evasive assessment given by William Rubin in 1960 of the allusive tendency of the ‘sometimes almost embarrassingly private’ materials used in Rauschenberg’s Combines: The iconography of the Rauschenberg pictures seems to reach back through time and consciousness, memory by memory. The juxtaposed coke bottles, mirrors,

40

Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism snapshots, stuffed animals, and kitchen utensils do not join in the SymbolistSurrealist manner of Lautréamont’s umbrella and sewing machine on the dissecting table. Not that they fail to evoke Freudian associations, but they are particular rather than archetypical in their interrelationships, and they never relinquish their autobiographical intimacy.47

Rubin’s text appeared in Art International during the run of EROS (it was prompted mainly by Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, running over exactly the same period as the Surrealists’ show in Paris), which might have acted as an uncomfortable reminder to formalists that Surrealist poetics offered a worthwhile route to the door of Rauschenberg’s imagery, even though Rubin would refer to the Surrealists’ exhibition in derisory terms at the other end of the decade. Moreover, the unusual preoccupation he revealed with content here and the reasonable opportunity that created for a bridge to Rauschenberg’s art for the poetic susceptibilities of the Surrealists would soon be buried under a formalist ‘literalism’ with which Greenberg’s idea of modernism would continue to burden art criticism and theory for years to come. Soon after, in the spring of 1960, a rare article on Surrealism appeared in the days following the closure of EROS (so possibly written during its run) in the Evergreen Review. Titled ‘The Impact of Surrealism on the New York School,’ it was written by the US gallery director and publisher John Bernard Myers who had been a young Trotskyite and Surrealist sympathizer before the war, then managing editor of the poetry magazine View from 1944 and was currently a friend of Rauschenberg.48 In his survey, Myers declared modern France morally defunct under President de Gaulle in the midst of the turmoil created by the war in Algeria and culturally in disarray following the supposed decline of Surrealism. He insisted on the central role now played by New York in artistic innovation, yet proposed that ‘the seeds which Breton planted in New York during the years in which he resided here’ had germinated not abstract expressionism but a ‘Second Generation.’49 Sidestepping the label ‘Neo-Dada,’ Myers chose thirteen from this cohort as modern exemplars of Surrealism. Myers’s article was accompanied by four colour reproductions of work by the ‘Second Generation’ including Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts (with three doors firmly shut, among them the one that hid the penis) and three black and white ones including Rauschenberg’s Canyon (1959) (here titled The Eagle); both would hold the interest of the Surrealists well into the 1960s. Johns was identified by Myers, with a consenting reference to Calas’s ‘ContiNuance’ of a year earlier, as ‘the Surrealist of Naming Things’ – a phrase noted (sceptically) not long after by Steinberg in his important essay on Johns50 – whose ‘painting eschews . . . both Sign and Symbol.’51 Rauschenberg’s comparable literalism then merited this dubious tribute from Myers: Robert Rauschenberg is the Surrealist of the Re-found Object. Not for him the beautiful piece of driftwood on a beach which looks like a bust by Houdon. Not for him the pebbles which look like moonstones. Just as one who has listened to Tchaikovsky all his life one day actually hears the music, so Rauschenberg finds a bed by incorporating an actual bed in the painting; a landscape by allowing real

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grass, moss and plants to grow in the canvas; gives us a whole room through a swatch of wallpaper; and a stuffed goat by means of a stuffed goat. He ‘finds’ the singularity, the uniqueness of ‘Action Painting’ by painting two which are exactly alike. One may in actual fact get ‘into’ a Rauschenberg by opening a door. He is not Dada because he does not destroy; he adds.52

It was not the worst part of his ‘poetic’ text, which showcased elsewhere, in its designation of Grace Hartigan as ‘the Surrealist of Unknown Landscape,’ Richard Stankiewicz as ‘the Surrealist of White Laughter’ and so on, the kind of art writing that gives Surrealism a bad name by abusing the lyrical licence given it, mainly by Breton. Alongside the outright inconsistency in Myers’s use of the Surrealist tag for post abstract expressionist artists like Johns and Rauschenberg is direct repudiation of Surrealism’s poetic theory. This is found in his emphasis on and rejection of the term ‘like,’ and therefore analogy, in the understanding he displays of the unnamed Bed, Growing Painting (1953), Hymnal (1955), Monogram, Factum I and Factum II and Interview (1955). It was meant to conjure up and contradict Breton’s renewal of Surrealist poetics by recourse to analogy in the essay ‘Ascendant Sign’ (1948), which had decreed: ‘[t]he trigger of analogy is what fascinates us: nothing else will give us access to the motor of the world. Whether it is stated or implied, LIKE [COMME] is the most exhilarating word at our command. It gives free rein to human imagination, and the supreme destiny of the mind depends on it.’53 Although Myers was intent on aligning Rauschenberg’s art with Surrealism, then, to the benefit of both, he ended up furnishing a reading of the oeuvre that wholly conflicts with the one that French Surrealists were about to give of it by employing, precisely, the analogical terms of Breton’s brief essay, as I establish in my next chapter. Yet, most importantly as far as his own aims were concerned, Myers’s claim that Rauschenberg, Johns and their generation of artists in the United States had common cause with Surrealism was made with the very clearly stated intention of modifying the art historical narrative, contended most explicitly in the case of Rauschenberg whom he ventured to relocate from the lineage of Dada and, consequently, set free from the fashionable if contentious category of ‘Neo-Dada.’54 In the same year as Myers’s article, artists and critics living in New York at the beginning of the new decade who thought that Surrealism, like Dada, was a historical movement and no longer existed, at least since the closures of Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century in 1947 and the Julien Levy Gallery in 1949, had that misapprehension confirmed by the English-language translation of Marcel Jean’s History of Surrealist Painting. Jean’s study, which had come out in French the previous year, gave over one brief paragraph to the ‘extremely disappointing results’ gained from collective Surrealist activity since 1947.55 Coinciding with the opening of EROS, the book was well received by art historians and a larger public as the most comprehensive study of the subject to date. Equally, its accuracy and range were greeted with scepticism by Breton and the Surrealists who now set about confirming the idiosyncrasies and currency of the movement for a US audience through the exhibition Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain held at Maurice Bonnefoy’s recently relocated and extended

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D’Arcy Galleries in the dealers’ locale on the Upper East Side at 1091 Madison Avenue, New York, from 28 November 1960 till 14 January 1961.56 Proposed following correspondence begun with Breton by the former international businessman Bonnefoy soon after his visit to EROS, a few weeks before the publication of Myers’s article, and staged at the very moment Pop art was breaking the surface of the New York art scene, Surrealist Intrusion was directed by Breton from afar in Paris and Duchamp on site, and managed in its day-to-day particulars from July 1960 by José Pierre and Édouard Jaguer.57 Pre-Pop works by tenacious Belgian Surrealist loyalist E. L. T. Mesens and Fahlström (about to become acknowledged as a fully fledged Pop artist, admired by both Rauschenberg and Johns) were included in Surrealist Intrusion among about 150 works by fifty-eight artists, nearly all Surrealists.58 Also present in Surrealist Intrusion, situated in an alcove in the final room close to work by Max Ernst (the sculpture Mad Moon of 1944) and Wolfgang Paalen (the painting Meditation of 1948) who had both been long associated with Surrealism, Rauchenberg’s Bed and Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts made a second visit to the Surrealist fold (Figure 2.4). Shown together on this occasion with little breathing space

Figure  2.4  Anonymous, photograph showing Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed and Jasper Johns’s

Target with Plaster Casts at Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain, New York (1960–1). Collection David Fleiss, Galerie 1900–2000. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. © Jasper Johns/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. © Succession Wolfgang Paalen et Eva Sulzer. Image: Collection David Fleiss, Galerie 1900–2000.

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in an overburdened display, the first was idiosyncratically bound to the wall as usual while the second assumed a squat bestial or anthropomorphic air, propped up on two blocks on the floor in the corner like a sculpture for the one and only time, as though it were supposed to join in the imaginary trade off of floor and wall begun by the displaced Bed. This decision might have been forced on the curators because a window in the small room denied it wall space (though that quarter of the photograph is hard to read), culminating in a kind of Jarryesque makeover of Johns’s assemblage by the Surrealists and Duchamp (Figure 2.5). As well as recently befriending Duchamp, Rauschenberg and Johns had just begun to collect his work. They would have been pleased, therefore, that the context for Bed and Target with Plaster Casts at Surrealist Intrusion was at least partly Duchampian

Figure 2.5  Alfred Jarry, Veritable Portrait of Monsieur Ubu (woodcut, 1896). Image BNF.

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again, since both were shown in a room that included the end of a green hosepipe that wound through the seven main spaces of the labyrinthine gallery as a modern, readymade parody of Ariadne’s thread. The room also included ‘a pair of firedogs with some wood slightly burnt without chimney,’ as they were described in a letter to Breton from Duchamp, who was one of those responsible for such installation features as these and the small mirrors placed next to the works throughout the show – reflecting their audience like the glass of Duchamp’s signature work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even or Large Glass (1915–23).59 It was probably Duchamp who placed the ironic light between the closed blinds above and behind Target with Plaster Casts (it might be meta-ironic since it is hard to imagine a window in the corner of the room: so blinds have been closed to prevent sunlight entering from a non-existent window and a lamp has been added as substitute). The blinds are the same width as Johns’s assemblage, creating the visual illusion of extending it up to the ceiling to reach the same height as Rauschenberg’s Bed.60 Even without a full record of the Surrealists’ responses to the spectacle of Bed (see Plate 3) at EROS and Surrealist Intrusion, we can be sure that their construal was as distinct from the Cagean one as the now familiar if simplistic art historical one that slots it in the niche created by the close confrontation between Duchamp’s readymades and certain varieties of flicked, dripped, smeared or splashed abstract expressionism, spelling out a Franco-US avant-garde lineage at the most. As Castelli had witnessed, beds had already made an appearance in a Surrealist manifestation when four were positioned right side up as structural props and proxy gallery benches in the layout of the 1938 group exhibition in Paris; their capacity for poetic augmentation is captured in Robert Benayoun’s entry for ‘bed’ in the ‘Lexique succinct de l’érotisme’ that featured in the catalogue for EROS, which was the third longest (behind ‘breasts’ and ‘perversion’).61 No doubt relieved to witness the return of the body to US art after abstraction, or at least the indexes and evidence of its passage, Pierre wrote at the time of EROS: ‘Rauschenberg’s Bed, in its firework display of pictorial pollution, seems destined by the very exorbitance of its appearance to excite the impulse of the spectator beyond associations of depressing ideas.’62 Unlike the narrower if connotative sex/ crime/murder narrative of Bed that had already been put forward, the Surrealists saw in the Combine an extended, dialectical Freudian metaphor of sex and death, birth, sleep and illness, as well as activity/passivity, laziness/work (given the importance of the bed as arguably the principal site of Surrealist activities) and representation/‘the real.’63 The upright bearing of Rauschenberg’s framed Bed and its location against the wall potentially superimposes, juxtaposes or, better, ‘condenses’ and ‘displaces’ (because Sigmund Freud’s language for his theory of dreams is unusually appropriate to this, the very object on which we dream) sleep, dreams and perhaps sleepwalking, while layering them further onto the act of painting. The ‘collaged’ elements of Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts (see Plate 4) make a sufficient fit with a history of collage in Dada and Surrealism to draw the work into its historical narrative, and it is towards collage that readings have inclined since the 1980s.64 This drift has been quickened by the whiff of sex and death that the object emanates, made prominent through its figurative and signifying content, equal to

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Figure  2.6  René Magritte, The Eternally Obvious (1930). Oil on five

separately stretched and framed canvases mounted on acrylic sheet, 167.6 × 38.1 × 55.9 cm. The Menil Collection, Houston TX. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Paul Hester.

that of Bed. As several observers have pointed out, the painted casts of male and female body parts, posted into the row of nine wooden boxes that form a strip at the upper edge of the construction, dovetail with a well-established language of bodily fragmentation found in Surrealism; in the mannequins used by its artists, for example, in the photographs of André Kertész and those by Hans Bellmer of his Doll (1935), of paintings by René Magritte such as The Eternally Obvious (1930, Figure 2.6) and of numerous other works that featured in Surrealist journals and exhibitions.65 For the most part, the Surrealists overlooked the available queer, iconographic interpretations of both works that have been drawn out by art historians particularly over the last three decades.66 Nevertheless, an unease about (male) sexuality as a spectacle is detectable in an act of censorship from one quarter or another (probably Bonnefoy or whoever held the camera) in the photograph of the room containing Target with Plaster Casts taken at Surrealist Intrusion in which the hinged door of the box containing the cast of the penis painted green has been closed, recalling the prim concealment of a breast in Matta’s Poster for Arcane 17 (1944, Figure 2.7), installed also in New York, but years earlier in April 1945, at the Gotham Book Mart as part of a shop window display designed by Duchamp for Breton’s new book Arcane 17 (1944).67 Steinberg was pondering the art of both Rauschenberg and Johns in the period of the two Surrealist exhibitions. He would have read all about EROS in the highly descriptive, mildly disappointed review in Arts by the magazine’s Paris correspondent Annette Michelson, complete with one-and-a-half page spread of Henri Glaeser’s now-famous photograph of Bed in unfamiliar company, though it is unlikely he travelled to Paris

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Figure  2.7 Marcel Duchamp, shop window display for Arcane 17 (1944) at Gotham Book

Mart. Installation view of Lazy Hardware, Gotham Book Mart with Marcel Duchamp and André Breton’s reflection in the window, New York. Photo by Maya Deren (1945). Photographs, c. 1886–1968, undated, Alexina and Marcel Duchamp Papers, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives. © Estate of Maya Deren. Image courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives.

to see it; it is inconceivable, on the other hand, that he would have missed Surrealist Intrusion in his home city.68 There Steinberg could have joined the audience that witnessed the potential ‘symbolic’ depths of Bed (in only its third showing in the United States) and Target with Plaster Casts sounded in the final room – the first lifted through the creative act from floor to wall and the second lowered in the gallery itself from wall to floor – placed among the iconographic, symbolic, psychoanalytic, poetic contexts generated by historical Surrealism. Subsequently, in 1965, Steinberg would state that in spite of its vertical placing, Bed ‘continues to work in the imagination as . . . the flat bedding in which we do our begetting, conceiving, and dreaming,’69 while in 1961, in the wake of Surrealist Intrusion, he had publically turned over the question: ‘How improper is it to find poetic, metaphorical, or emotional content in Johns’s work?’70 Steinberg’s searching consideration of the art of Rauschenberg and Johns in parallel with the Surrealists’ evaluation of it took place at a time when both artists were sniffed at by Greenberg and when Johns like Rauschenberg still approved the

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Cagean rhetoric of ‘deadpan impersonal objectness’ for his work, as Steinberg put it later.71 Caught between Greenberg and Cage (whose hostility towards Steinberg’s published essay on Johns was reported back to the critic by the artist), Steinberg’s uneasiness is palpable.72 ‘Research of this kind was unthinkable in 1960,’ he would say later, ‘solitude, abandonment, desolation . . . nothing in the art talk of the day jibed with what I was seeing.’73 There might have been no such actual research around in the art bubble in New York inhabited by Steinberg, but he read the art journalism by Calas who had strayed from the formalist orthodoxy enough to state in 1959 in ‘ContiNuance’ that the US flag was ‘converted into poetry’ by Johns’s Flag on Orange Field (1957), sold at the 1958 solo show at Castelli’s.74 It is worth adding finally that it is something of an art historical curiosity that Steinberg’s core ‘symbolic’ readings of Rauschenberg and Johns stop at neither the eye nor the other senses but are taken up by the operation of the imagination before works of art and in that way they run closer to Surrealism than the more guarded interpretations of Surrealist sympathizers, Calas and Myers.

L’Écart absolu: The Consumer The Surrealists’ curatorial contemplation of the significance of Rauschenberg’s work extended implicitly to L’Écart absolu (1965), the last exhibition of Surrealism that Breton curated. It took place under the sign of Charles Fourier’s utopian philosophy and was unusual for a Surrealist group show in its focus on a sustained polemicism, insisting on Surrealism’s ‘absolute deviation’ from all manifestations of consumer capitalism and its critique of technology and the heedless fixation on ‘progress.’ It has been noted that ‘[Herbert] Marcuse’s all-out assault on the ideology of the “consumer society” in his One-Dimensional Man [1964] provided part of the theoretical background’ of the show, and Marcuse had declared his sympathy with Fourier’s thought in Eros and Civilization in 1955.75 Ninety-three exhibits were crammed into the small space of the galerie de l’Oeil for the duration of the show through December, many from Breton’s own collection while several more had been made specifically for the theme of the exhibit.76 These included the collective object, the Désordinateur (1965, perhaps translatable as Miscomputer), which took a critical position against ‘American technology,’ advertising, sport and the rerouting of individual human desire in modern industrial society, as would be argued similarly by former Surrealist Alain Jouffroy in his elucidation in the next decade of the account of modern life made by Rauschenberg’s work – here, towards consumer items.77 The enduring fascination held by the Surrealists for Bed could be found in the show in the form of the fabricated anthropomorphic mattress Le Consommateur or The Consumer (1965, Figure 2.8). Apparently a collectively assembled work conceived especially for L’Écart absolu by the painter and poet Jean-Claude Silbermann and now long-lost, The Consumer dominated the exhibition and was remembered as a Jarryesque concoction by one of the Surrealists: The character, the central totem of the exhibition was The Consumer, a kind of scarecrow close to four metres in height, with arms outstretched, made of a

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Figure  2.8 Marcel Lannoy, photograph showing the collective object The Consumer (1965, destroyed) at L‘Écart absolu, Paris (1965). Mixed media, dimensions unknown. © Suzy Embo/ Fotomuseum Antwerpen (2022). Photo: Archives Pierre Faucheux/IMEC.

monstrous pink mattress, fully lined, hemmed and padded. A warning siren took the place of a head. His strumpot housed the porthole of a washing machine, which spun newspapers at intervals. A Frigidaire opened in his back from which a bridal veil issued. Silbermann, who had designed and built it, had given him a voice: his speech consisted of the prattling calls of taxi radios.78

Kept upright by dehumanizing modern conveniences deemed essential, such as the television that formed the giant’s single eye, a washing machine as belly and fridge as heart, The Consumer mocked the bourgeois dream of the perfect home through its absurd decontextualization of what had become the basic appliances of domesticity in the 1960s: ‘goods whose habitual use effectively removed them from the discursive realm,’ in the words of Kristin Ross.79 Its crucifix format, complete with halo of loudspeakers, seems to look back at and synthesize, in a more explicitly irreverent statement about modern consumerism and its worship, Rauschenberg’s standing Bed and Giacometti’s ‘praying’ figure The Invisible Object as they had appeared together overlooked by Man Ray’s ascending virgin at EROS in 1959–60, while replaying the anthropomorphic, Ubuesque mien of Target with Plaster Casts at Surrealist Intrusion, this time raising the figure onto three angular stumps instead of two. If there were still any doubt about the long-lasting, heady effect produced on the Surrealists by that essential work by Rauschenberg at the earlier event it is dispelled by Pierre’s remarks made at the end of the decade in his major article on Rauschenberg

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Figure 2.9  Marcel Lannoy, photograph showing detail of the collective object The Consumer (1965, destroyed) at L‘Écart absolu, Paris (1965). Mixed media, dimensions unknown. © Suzy Embo/Fotomuseum Antwerpen (2022). Photo: Archives Pierre Faucheux/IMEC.

in the magazine L’Oeil: ‘I remember the emotion of my friends when, at the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme held at Daniel Cordier in 1959, Rauschenberg sent Bed on the advice of Duchamp.’80 In fact, the spirit of Duchamp himself was present in The Consumer, too, at the later L’Écart absolu, through the car number plate attached to the giant, reading ‘HT 110QT’ (Figure  2.9); meant at once to pun on the pushy phrase acheter sans discuter (buy without haggling) and to refer to the credit boom on automobile sales (the number of cars in the Paris region had doubled to two million since EROS), it also paid tribute to the author of L.H.O.O.Q. (1919).81 The strange, temporary equivalence between old and new at EROS and Surrealist Intrusion – between Surrealism and Neo-Dada – when the historical lineage of the work of Rauschenberg and Johns was still fluid and untheorized, looks a lot stranger to us now than it did to its audience then. It shows Surrealism attempting to cope with a forty-year history in a moment of intense political unrest and in the middle of a period in which, as Ross pointed out, ‘new’ was the operative term in French society and culture: Nouveau Roman, Nouvelle Vague, Nouveau Réalisme, Nouvelle Figuration, as well as the encroachment into France and Europe of Neo-Dada.82 Although the narrative of Rauschenberg’s French reception is becoming better known to art historians working on the 1950s and 1960s, conveniently demonstrating the task of historical, cultural and even national bridge-building that the artist’s work

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could achieve, the picture was not so cleanly cut to audiences at the time, which could therefore accept Neo-Dada on Surrealist ground. The rediscovery of Dada by art history and artists in the 1950s, alongside the growing collegiality between Duchamp and Rauschenberg and Johns from 1959, is now part of the narrative of twentiethcentury art and is much better known than the ever-rising tide of praise for Duchamp in Parisian Surrealist periodicals in the fifties.83 Bias of historians towards the resurgence of Dada in Neo-Dada can be explained partly by the sequential, generational model of critical (art) history in which paradigm exhaustion leads to new directions for art and, in this case, disinterest displayed by historians in the continuation of Surrealism in the post-war period. More to the point, that disinterest is really a suppression because the prolonged existence of Surrealism and Duchamp’s closeness to the movement enacts an inconvenient counter-narrative. When both histories are entertained – of the revival of interest in historical Dada and the continuation of Surrealism into the 1960s  – the strategic location of recent Neo-Dada work by Rauschenberg and Johns among Surrealist painting and sculpture at EROS and at the end of Surrealist Intrusion – as though Neo-Dada were a contemporary flowering or renewal or even an indication of the future of Surrealism – is not as surprising as it first seems. Rauschenberg and Duchamp were never more than admired from afar by Surrealists and both showed hostility or aloofness towards Surrealism to a greater or lesser extent. Yet the apparition of The Consumer at L’Écart absolu shows that the Combine and the readymade could nevertheless be made to conspire at the very fulcrum of Surrealist poetics and polemics, in the movement’s exhibition space as much as in its criticism. In the four chapters that make up the second part of this book, I look at a handful of specifically political responses to the art of Rauschenberg from writers and artists within the Surrealist movement and others very close to it who maintained a respect for his work. They articulated this through a critical defence and an interpretation of the oeuvre that were shaped manifestly or implicitly by the Surrealists’ historically established, ongoing discussions of poetry, politics and ethics.

­3

Opposer: The poetics and politics of Canyon in Paris and New York, 1961

After his early stay in Paris in 1948, Robert Rauschenberg would not return until April 1961, departing for Europe with Jasper Johns for various events and initiating what would be several years of travel.1 These included his first, unsuccessful (no sale) solo exhibition in France held in the capital from 27 April till 8 June at the galerie Daniel Cordier, where the Surrealists’ Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) had taken place the previous year, helping prepare the ground for it;2 Johns’s second show at the galerie Rive Droite ran from 13 June till 12 July (his first, reviewed by Pierre Restany in Cimaise, had happened there in January 1959 and was a flop, as I noted in my previous chapter).3 Notwithstanding its eventual commercial failure, Rauschenberg’s exhibition was assessed positively by Michel Ragon in a joint review in the weekly cultural newspaper Arts that gave short shrift by comparison to the apparently tired Surrealism on display at the concurrent Max Walter Svanberg retrospective at the galerie Raymond Cordier, the Swedish artist’s second solo show at that location and third overall since 1955 in Paris, which came armed with the full support of the Surrealists in polemical mode.4 Rauschenberg’s work became entangled with politics at that first exhibition on French soil. This might have been anticipated to an extent, because the period in which the artist found an audience in France was a particularly volatile one politically in that country. The positive interpretation of Rauschenberg adopted and developed by Surrealists at that moment was entailed by the intense political reflection taking place within the movement during the period. It was rooted in Surrealism’s pre-war anti-colonialism, which was joined in the post-war period to an anti-militarism and rejection of consumerism that naturally found their main adversary in the United States. The Surrealists’ responses to colonial conflict must be examined initially here because they are fundamental to an understanding of the movement’s attraction to Rauschenberg’s work and their interpretation of it against the contemporary political events in which it became embroiled.

Surrealism and colonialism I: France, Vietnam, United States The Surrealists’ prompt reaction, then increasingly unrestrained, revolutionary behaviour at the time of the Algerian War of Independence came about because, like the rest of the radical Left, they were constantly alive to manifestations of anti-colonial

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struggle. This is evident across three different generations of Surrealists in Paris alone. Surrealism’s support for colonized peoples is usually traced back to the important 1925 tract ‘La Révolution d’abord et toujours!’ that appeared in the fifth number of La Révolution surréaliste, provoked by French intervention in the Rif War in Spanish colonial Morocco.5 It had been displayed again more recently in the prescient declaration Freedom Is a Vietnamese Word, published as a pamphlet in April 1947, not long before the opening of Le Surréalisme en 1947. Four months of relatively low-level rural insurgency in Vietnam had led to a national uprising against the French presence in the nation on the night of 29 March 1947, which went largely unreported in France.6 In the months following the insurrection and the Surrealists’ polemical though sketchy account of it in their tract, provisional governments were set up in the regions where the Viet Minh had taken control.7 But the situation soon magnified disastrously, leading to severe repression and butchery by the French, then starvation and illness of the Vietnamese in what is now called the First Indochina War, condemned only by the Communists who were too distracted by events at home to take action in a meaningful way.8 The United States was appreciably involved in France’s domestic policy before the conflict began. At the end of the Second World War, the French government had begun to ask the United States for money, receiving a loan of $1 million in 1945; the Marshall Plan (1948–52) was announced on 5 June 1947 and would bring $2.8 billion in grants and loans to France, dividing public opinion as to how such dependency could influence French politics, unionism and culture.9 Yet the Marshall Plan dollars were far exceeded by the more discreet financial support given to France by the United States to fund the war in Vietnam from 1950 to 1954, perceived as ‘an anti-Communist crusade’ against Ho Chi Minh to avoid accusations of colonialism against the former colony.10 Towards the end of French involvement in the conflict in 1954, more than three quarters of its cost was being paid by the United States, which had handed over $3 billion in total.11 High French military losses had affected public opinion by 1952, but neither those nor Ho’s peace overtures had persuaded France to seek an end to the war at that time, under pressure to persist by the United States where Vietnam had become increasingly viewed in geopolitical terms as the Cold War deepened.12 Both countries routinely underestimated the Viet Minh. When the French surrendered after suffering appalling casualties at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu between March and May 1954, they retreated from a disfigured and traumatized country about to undergo even worse over nearly twenty years at the hands of the United States, which gave its support to the Catholic anti-Communist, anti-democratic Prime Minister Ngo Dien Diem while the French turned their attention to Algeria.13 Pointing to the historical relationship between profit, war and nationalism, the Surrealists’ statement Freedom Is a Vietnamese Word protested French authority in Vietnam (still called ‘Indo-China’ by the French) where ‘capitalism, having abused the most noble watchwords of freedom in the name of patriotism, intends to establish total control to continue its traditional imperialist policies and re-establish the power of its bourgeois financiers, army and clergy.’14 Distributed near the beginnings of the conflict in Vietnam, the Surrealists’ pamphlet came only two years after France’s suppression of the uprising that began in the Algerian town of Sétif, which is usually seen as the first

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spark of independence in Algeria.15 If this was a far-sighted prognosis by the Surrealists in the postcolonial era after the war, then it carried another, as is now well known, tied initially to capitalism, but fatefully to not-too-distant interventionist US foreign policy and escalating militarism. Unsurprisingly, the Surrealists’ anti-colonialism made special cases of the United States and Soviet Union as the Cold War commenced. Philippe Roger has the Surrealists down as the ones pioneering anti-Americanism from as far back as the 1920s, claiming ‘[i]f any discourse had mutually sustained and justified fetishism for the Revolution and hatred toward America [up to May ’68], it was of course the Surrealist movement’ [sic].16 Able to provide barely any actual evidence of this from that period or after, Roger falls back on the ripe anti-Americanism in Breton’s April 1949 lecture meant for a rally against dictatorship and war organized by the new anti-capitalist, anti-Stalinist, socialist movement the Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire: I hate as much as anyone, and as they themselves must hate, the way in which the USA behaves towards my friends the blacks and more still, if that is possible, the way in which it behaved towards my friends the Indians. I have a horror of the sexual hypocrisy that reigns in the USA and of the shameful licence it leads to. . . . The USA: nothing is more contrary to my mind than their cheap pragmatism, nothing disgusts me intellectually like their great discovery of the Digest, nothing revolts me as much as their superiority complex. I loathe their control over Central and South America under the guise of money. In the face of the extension of their imperialist designs to the Old Continent, I deny furiously that the stupidity of Coca-Cola and its executives and bankers could triumph over Europe . . . .17

Targeting mainly colonialism and intended to whip up a receptive audience, Breton’s own ‘digest’ of US racism, genocide, meddling abroad, and social and cultural inferiority now sounds cartoonish in parts and somewhat ungrateful in the face of the assistance that nation had provided Europe as a whole and Breton as an individual during the recent world conflict. But it was given the year after the Marshall Plan funds began pouring into Europe, faced by immense resistance in some quarters of France due to what those dollars bought for the United States, which amounted to ‘the greatest international propaganda operation ever seen in peacetime’ in the words of one historian.18 Breton’s sentiments were shared by many across the political spectrum and are an index of French anxiety at the extraordinary confidence felt by the United States after the war as it spread its influence by military, financial and cultural means. Breton could not have known about it in any detail at that moment, but there had already been eleven interventions in the affairs of other states by US armed forces and/or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) since the Second World War up to 1949.19 In spite of its massive military investment in South Korea in the years immediately following the RDR event at which Breton was invited to speak, successive administrations were able to sustain anti-colonial rhetoric in the post-war period up to the 1960s as a cloak for geopolitical manoeuvring, which served as an irritant to relations with France when the French were at war in Indo-China and Algeria.20

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Supposedly covert US interference in Cuba attracted enormous unwanted publicity at the time of the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961.21 Trade restrictions with that nation and others were dwarfed by subsequent brazen, catastrophic efforts at expansionism into Vietnam in the decade through military means, making such anti-colonial pronouncements sound even more absurd. The Fifth Republic under Charles de Gaulle’s presidency from 1958 adopted an overtly anti-US foreign policy in opposition to an Atlantic community dominated by the United States. Works by Rauschenberg of the time such as the winged assemblage Coca-Cola Plan (1958) played to an audience hesitant about the implications of the Marshall Plan and uneasy at growing US interventionism across the globe, which was bound to project its own meanings onto such works whatever Rauschenberg had intended, and this affected the reception of his work in France generally and among Surrealists and their friends specifically. It was as much cultural imperialism as racism at home and military action abroad, threatened or real, on the part of the United States from the 1940s that fuelled Breton’s ardent language. It found some justification in what one US critic later called the ‘naked, prepossessing self-confidence’ of abstract expressionism and its backers by 1950, ‘a metaphoric equation of the grandeur of one’s homeland with religious veneration.’22 Anxiety in France at the prospect of ‘colonization’ by the popular culture of the United States, made way for by billions of dollars of Marshall Plan support and abetted by undercover aid operations by the CIA funding avant-garde and intellectual programmes, was hardly exclusive to Surrealism or even intellectual or political discourse, as richly catalogued by Roger. In the 1950s, the Surrealists were a few among many, including their former friend Louis Aragon,23 who observed with suspicion if not outright hostility the economic boom brought about by rampant incursions of consumerism into their country on the US model: extraordinary increases in ownership of cars, television sets and domestic appliances, along with growth in income, household consumption and the proliferation of credit.24 France’s Gross Domestic Product grew by 33 per cent between 1951 and 1958, while industrial production surged by 54 per cent; only West Germany and Italy experienced superior economic growth.25 As one writer on the subject has put it, so far as the rise of the consumer society in France went: ‘[w]hat began in the late 1950s was virtually completed in the 1960s.’26 Prosperity after decades of war and economic stagnation did not prevent the Surrealists from joining in the complaint of the Communist Party against Americanization or ‘Coca-colonisation,’ even as they distanced themselves from the Cold War partisan politics that motivated Aragon.27 Like others on the Left, the Surrealists protested vociferously against the brutal Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution in November 1956.28 In fact, if anything, Breton feared equally the consequences for France of a weakened United States before a strident Soviet Union because the restrictive cultural influence of the French Communist Party was already enormous and placed limits on Surrealism’s capacity to make its voice heard.29 However, this did not weaken the Surrealists’ opposition to aggressive US-style capitalism or allay Breton’s deprecation of what he took to be the moral disposition of that country. The deeper reason for this is that throughout the period, and beyond the manifestly perceivable world of tangible things and events, there was a more fundamental attitude

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taken towards the United States as the civilization formed by capitalism that found its most resolute opponents among the Surrealists. This is to say that capitalism understood as a positivist, rationalist, progressivist system, asserting (and dependent upon) conformism, standardization, efficiency, and competence of both people and goods, found its defeated yet unyielding opponent in the Surrealist precedence given madness, the unconscious and occultism, and practices of, or submission to laziness, dreams, subversion, chance and flânerie. More than anything else, the inevitable literalism insisted upon by the ‘cheap pragmatism,’ in Breton’s term, of US-style capitalism found its adversary in Surrealism’s poetic enterprise. The long-standing and unquestioned centrality given poetry by the Surrealists, then, would be inseparable from their favourable opinion of Rauschenberg’s art as opposed to the archetypal traits of the nation in which it originated.

Surrealism and colonialism II: France, Algeria, Rauschenberg As early as 9  December 1954, only weeks after the war had begun in Algeria on 1  November, an event that had once again passed barely noticed by the French media and public, the Surrealists had joined the Comité de lutte contre la représsion coloniale.30 As Carole Reynaud Paligot recorded, ‘[t]he mobilisation of the Surrealists in favour of insurgent Algerians had been rapid, as opposed to other intellectuals,’ some of whom began to stir from the middle of 1955.31 This early allegiance had been followed from 1954 to 1958 by their adherence to at least five committees formed on behalf of imprisoned Algerians and objectors to the war, while the Surrealists had also contributed significantly to the Comité d’action des intellectuels contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord (which Breton had helped set up).32 The Surrealists’ dedication to the Algerian cause was defended and expounded in their main review of the second half of the 1950s Le Surréalisme, même, where articles in 1956 and 1957 drew attention to Messali Hadj, the imprisoned leader of the Movement national algérien (MNA).33 They would frequently demonstrate publically and protest in print against the war in that decade and the next.34 Between the Liberation and 1958, France had seen no less than twenty-eight different heads of government come and go. The first and last of these was de Gaulle who had reassumed leadership as prime minister then president from 1  June 1958, due mainly to the catastrophe now clearly materializing in Algeria after the uprising in Algiers and ‘Algiers Putsch’ of 13 May following nearly four years of war. De Gaulle was able to secure full powers to rule by decree for six months, a ‘rest period’ for the National Assembly for four months and a mandate to submit a new constitution to the nation. With the end of the Fourth Republic and de Gaulle’s return to power, then, a period of instability seemed to the Surrealists and their friends to be giving way to one of dictatorship. As the Communists in the Assembly cried ‘Le fascisme ne passera pas!’ the Surrealists helped set up and contributed significantly to the unambiguously titled review Le 14 Juillet, which remonstrated against de Gaulle’s powers.35

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The foremost undertaking to which the Surrealists committed themselves over Algeria was the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War or Declaration of the 121 (1960). Issued as a loose leaflet because no journal or representative of the ‘free press’ in France was willing or legally able to publish it in whole or in part, the document was immediately considered a major statement against colonialism and continues to be recognized in that way, opposing the war, condemning military authoritarianism and racism, and asserting the legitimacy of resistance to colonialism in Algeria and aid given to Algerian combatants from France in the face of censure from the main political parties and press, while defending and encouraging conscientious objection and desertion from the French army.36 It was conceived, drafted and edited mainly by militant writer Dionys Mascolo, Surrealist Jean Schuster (who had together initiated Le 14 Juillet), Maurice Blanchot, the Surrealists and their friends, then signed by them, several Nouveaux Romanciers including Alain Robbe-Grillet and many others (though not, as Kristin Ross reminds us, the established and emerging stars of theory: no Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Philippe Sollers and so on).37 The Declaration of the 121 was dated 1 September 1960 and had a powerful effect on both the leaders of the revolution in Algeria and public opinion; altering the political climate in France and bringing hundreds of thousands onto the streets in support of the supposed 121 throughout the nation (there were twice as many signatories by the time of the second distribution dated 27 October, in fact), it was ‘soon better known outside of France than at home,’ recalled Blanchot.38 The Surrealist writer and polemicist Robert Benayoun had made a particularly strong personal investment in the Declaration of the 121. Moroccan by birth, he had an acute historical awareness of the Surrealists’ very public anti-colonialism since their opposition to the Rif War in 1925, the year before he was born, and he was one of only four Surrealists with Breton, Gérard Legrand and Schuster who appended their signatures in the first instance with the idea of deflecting the potential dismissal of the document as a specifically and typically Surrealist protest.39 Many Surrealists including José Pierre signed the Declaration of the 121 when it was reprinted in October and the task of debating and drafting the tract while giving their time to the Algerian cause had taken precedence for all the Surrealists over other projects. That included the preparations for Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain in its late stages, which led to a piqued letter of 5 October to the uncomprehending Maurice Bonnefoy who had complained of missed deadlines in the preparation of the catalogue and seemed completely unaware of the magnitude of the Declaration of the 121.40 Indeed, all the signatories bore the professional and personal consequences. According to Benayoun’s testimony in a letter to Franklin Rosemont of February 1963, for the Surrealists these included punishment from the state, persecution by the police and death threats from the fascist, paramilitary Organisation de l’Armée Secrète or OAS.41 In the short term, the main threat to the president and government came not from protestors, intellectuals and revolutionaries like the Surrealists, but from the French generals who had initially welcomed de Gaulle back into office in 1958 as the leader whom they believed would retain Algérie française and justify the loss of life suffered

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by the army. At the same time, they expected de Gaulle to protect the nation and army from the same disgrace that had followed surrender in the Second World War in 1940 and the failure at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 that had concluded the Indochina War. This dissent on the part of the leadership of the army led to the socalled ‘Generals’ Putsch’ of 20 April 1961, corresponding precisely with the failure of another attempted putsch in the Bay of Pigs. In the aftermath of the overwhelming Yes vote received by de Gaulle’s referendum on self-determination held at the beginning of that year in France and Algeria, reflecting growing public disquiet about the war, Generals Challe, Jouhaud, Salan and Zeller attempted to take control of Algiers. On 23 April, with part of the army in revolt and the government in fear of a march on Paris, ageing Sherman tanks rolled up to positions outside official buildings including the Palais Bourbon, seat of the National Assembly, in a kind of ironically colonialist symbol of French subordinacy due to reliance on US militarism and benefaction since the war (Shermans were already obsolete in the United States).42 Air movement around Paris was halted, public transport stopped and the cinemas closed. Parisians discussed the crisis in the cafés, which remained open, and watched mesmerized as de Gaulle addressed the nation on television, ordering civilians and army to block the rebels by any means, while his prime minister, Michel Debré, warned of imminent rebel paratroopers about to descend from the skies.43 Nothing of the kind transpired in the end because the attempted putsch was uncoordinated and lacked support.44 By 27  April, the day of the opening of Rauschenberg’s first solo show in France at the galerie Daniel Cordier, the drama was over and the ringleaders of the simmering military insurrection were either under arrest or had taken flight. Rauschenberg was on the spot and recorded events pretty much as they reached the public in the transfer drawing Untitled (de Gaulle) (1961) (see Plate 5). It is a denser, more intricate and complex composition than the ones that followed in that decade; disjointed, it tilts this way and that before running off in shards of printed text forming a loose clutch to the right, reflecting the air of claustration, chaos and instability of the moment. Although Rauschenberg did not read French, he could see plainly enough across the media and on the streets that the only story in town was the colonial war and its immediate repercussions, indicated just as patently in the drawing by the stamped ‘DE GAULLE’ in the lower right quarter, the three reproductions of the president’s face as though transmitted by a poor television signal to multiple sets and four of ‘Alger’/‘Algérie,’ together with maps of Algeria, the image of a tank under de Gaulle’s name and, at top centre, the Palais Bourbon, threatened by clouds of watercolour and traversed by long, pencil-thin, closely set strokes that barely bring it to visibility. The headlines Rauschenberg traced convey the high stakes; the largest lettering is reserved for the word ‘PARACHUTE’ at centre left – like the situation, understandable with no French – its capital letters highlighted over white gouache, in the right order but individually reversed, swinging like skydiving paratroopers above the impress of a car steering wheel nearby, a form that rhymes with the circular rim of an open canopy (parachutes had been a staple of Rauschenberg’s oeuvre since the inclusion of a flare chute to the lower right of the Combine Untitled of c. 1955) and might double as the target they aim to land on. The drawing could hardly

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have been more illustrative of the disruption caused by the affair and its commentary in the newspapers and television, along with the mood of public anxiety. Naturally, that was shared by Cordier, his colleagues and those in the media and art world who were supposed to report on Rauschenberg’s exhibition, meaning that its preparation was poor, the private view feebly attended and the gallery not even open the following day.45 Cordier spent some of his time behind the closed doors reporting back to Rauschenberg’s dealer Leo Castelli, concealing the disappointing turnout while confirming the influential and social dimension of the event over any immediate financial success: ‘[t]he opening took place last night in a very friendly atmosphere, with lots of people, and the exhibition looks like a great success – out of curiosity at least.’46 Remarkably, as the days passed, the exhibition accomplished something significant in spite of the conditions under which it was organized. It ‘stunned the Paris artists,’ according to Calvin Tomkins, and was ‘an enormous success’ in that sense,47 giving a first exciting glimpse of Rauschenberg’s work to Arman and Martial Raysse, both of whom starred in the concurrent break-out Nouveau Réalisme show A quarante degrés au-dessus de dada in May.48 One week before that Nouveau Réalisme exhibition began, Rauschenberg’s nowrenowned interview with André Parinaud, carried out on the suggestion of former Surrealist and Rauschenberg advocate Alain Jouffroy, appeared in Arts, then edited by Parinaud himself, a few weeks into the run of Rauschenberg’s own show.49 Taking up the back page of that issue of May 1961, the same number in which Svanberg’s solo exhibition suffered by contrast with Rauschenberg’s contemporaneous showing at Cordier’s gallery courtesy of Ragon, it was given an evident priority that easily competed with the profile inside of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and a review of the recent reprise of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.50 It was an unusual event because US art rarely featured at all in Arts; contemporary Surrealism, on the other hand, had been taken more seriously in the publication since the early 1950s than was commonplace in that decade when the historicization of the movement by writers, curators and academics had the effect of neutralizing consideration of it as an active force in the present. Accordingly, Arts had frequently carried interviews with and essays by Breton and other Surrealists or their friends, but hardly ever extended the same accommodation to US artists, especially young, barely known ones like Rauschenberg. Parinaud had shown himself to be a compliant and even ingratiating interlocutor for the duration of the radio interviews with Breton in 1952, but he intended to be less so with the young US artist.51 Acting as translator in the interview, Ileana Sonnabend later reported to Tomkins that Parinaud tried to turn Rauschenberg into a representation of what was ‘sick, materialistic, and degraded’ in the society of the United States, but the artist’s candid and thoughtful answers were both vibrant and available to competing avant-garde factions, winning over not only Parinaud but also artists in Paris.52 For them, according to Sonnabend, ‘Rauschenberg became a hero’ through his exhibition and interview: ‘[h]e took them out of painting,’ she added, ‘and into something else – life, maybe.’53 By this, Sonnabend meant that Rauschenberg’s art composed of humble bric-a-brac and used, lost or discarded materials, together with his unpretentious elucidation of its motivation, demonstrated to those impatient with the metaphysical

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intimations of eternity, transcendence or the sublime that surrounded some of the writing around US abstract expressionism and Nouveau Réalisme that not only could significant art be distilled from the ordinary, close-at-hand and even mundane, but that it could bear full justification from its maker. Sonnabend was not referring to Surrealist artists, yet in the midst of warfare, political unrest and social dissent in Paris, the Surrealists and their friends would discover in this interview an ally of a different kind in Rauschenberg. The following month, José Pierre became one of only three critics who wrote on Rauschenberg’s Cordier show alongside Ragon and Restany – the national crisis that depleted attendance played its role – but Pierre’s allegiance to Surrealism meant it was a quite dissimilar version of the artist to theirs who emerged.54 In a wide-ranging round up in Combat-Art of current art events in Paris that took a generally critical tone overall, Pierre compared what he called the ‘fake audacities in the service of the nouveaux riches’ of the ‘Néo-Dadaistes’ (meaning, in this case, the Nouveaux Réalistes and their contemporaries: Jean Tinguely, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri and especially Yves Klein) with the work of Rauschenberg, where he saw under the fraught conditions ‘neither a cry of revolution nor a deliberate provocation but an act of presence and of existence.’55 The word ‘deliberate’ was important because, according to Pierre, the apparently effortless reflection of life carried by Rauschenberg’s work had not prevented Bed (1955) from being ‘one of the most provocative objects’ at the EROS exhibition.56 He would return to this quality of the artist’s work at the end of this decade, as an ‘astonishing lightness’ and ‘ease unknown even to the Dadaists.’57 These were traits that would receive identical critical treatment later still outside of Surrealism, but obviously indebted to it, from Pontus Hultén who would affirm ‘the ease of Rauschenberg. There seems to be no effort,’ arguing that his work ‘radiates poetic feeling’ because ‘the making takes place almost in a state of trance.’58 Pierre would soon extend his opinion of Rauschenberg’s artlessness – his achievement of unforced results comparable in their visionary aptitude to Surrealism’s reputedly passive extraction of unconscious material through automatism – from provocation to politics. Pierre was scathing in Combat-Art about the ‘unfathomable foolishness’ of Parinaud’s questions to Rauschenberg in the Arts interview the previous month, but he esteemed as many others soon would the oppositional role of the artist as Rauschenberg had set it out there in the widely celebrated remark: ‘[t]o be a painter [in the USA] means to oppose.’59 Accordingly, Pierre interpreted Pilgrim (1960, Figure 3.1), which had been reproduced with that interview and also as the principal work in the foldout brochure for the solo show at Daniel Cordier, as a statement against the contemplative, domesticating role of museum, boutique and apartment.60 He understood these institutional and proprietorial contexts as exerting a lethal effect on works of art and as nothing less than the determining factors in the very creation of the art of Burri and the others, which Pierre construed in conflict with Rauschenberg’s artistic project. Whether Rauschenberg would have liked it or not, then (though it is hard to believe that the potential for such an interpretation would have escaped him), the chair in Pilgrim, attached to but facing away from the wall-mounted, non-figurative painting

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Figure  3.1 Robert Rauschenberg, Pilgrim (1960). Oil, graphite, paper, printed paper and

fabric on canvas with painted wood chair, 201.3 × 136.8 × 47.3 cm. Private collection. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

bearing strokes of colour that extend onto the chair, was read by Pierre as a metaphor and corrective to the ‘gallery art’ of both Nouveau Réalisme and abstract expressionism. The ‘message’ the Surrealist took from the work was a polemical one: artists and viewers should turn their backs on such art, its collectors, dealers and institutions following the path formed by those thick lines of paint towards a receptivity to life. In this sense, Pierre believed art could make moral statements about society and commerce that were comparable to those of sociology and philosophy, but they were, nevertheless, metaphorical: implicit within the structure of the artwork.61

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This was a mission that Pierre would entrust to Rauschenberg’s Combines well into the 1970s, long after his fulsome acclaim for the artist had tempered. He would aver that the Combines performed a dialectic that was ‘at once a criticism of abstract expressionism and Pop art – both equally guilty of concentrating only on one aspect of things: the spiritual or the material aspect,’ whereas the ‘amazing series’ of Combines from Charlene (1954) to Coexistence (1961) contained ‘a moral as well as an aesthetic meaning, since their aim is to reconcile man’s spiritual and material activities.’62 Pierre obviously believed that was what Surrealist art had always sought to achieve. He had implied as much by rounding out his overview of contemporary gallery events in Combat-Art in 1961, as though it were the natural conclusion to his reading of Rauschenberg work, with a plug for the current show of young Surrealist painters then being held in the spaces of the Théâtre le Ranelagh.63 In that way, quite contrary to Ragon’s unfavourable evaluation of Svanberg by comparison with Rauschenberg in Arts the previous month, Pierre linked the intention behind Surrealist art to Rauschenberg’s work, as had been attempted at EROS and Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain. The work had an ethical content, far from the ‘numbness’ and ‘intellectual response that acknowledged pointlessness by making a subject out of it,’ as Max Kozloff retrospectively read the influence of Rauschenberg and Johns on US art during the Cold War.64 From that point, an ethical and specifically political version of Rauschenberg gathered pace in Surrealism, led by Pierre and Benayoun.

Between politics and poetry: José Pierre and Robert Benayoun Later in 1961, The Museum of Modern Art in New York staged its revisionist history of modern art, The Art of Assemblage from 4 October to 12 November. Rauschenberg’s work was united with that of the Nouveaux Réalistes in an exhibition positing an alternative lineage for twentieth-century art to the modernist version (it was the year of the publication of Clement Greenberg’s selected writings Art and Culture), privileging collage and construction from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés (1897) through the art of Cubism, Dada and Marcel Duchamp, Surrealism and Neo-Dada to early sixties assemblage and junk art. Rauschenberg’s work was perfectly at home at The Art of Assemblage since his favourites Kurt Schwitters and Duchamp were the most comprehensively represented artists there. Benayoun attended The Art of Assemblage; like Pierre he was willing to seek common cause between Surrealism and some current art that was close to Neo-Dada and Pop. He might also have attended the public event that accompanied the exhibition, titled ‘The Art of Assemblage: A Symposium,’ held at the museum on 19 October where Duchamp and Rauschenberg appeared on the panel of five contributors.65 Back in Paris, Benayoun set up a recorded discussion with Pierre in which the two signatories of the Declaration of the 121 mulled over the merits of The Art of Assemblage. It was published in the periodical La Brèche: Action surréaliste and saw the upstart Nouveaux Réalistes predictably trounced, while Rauschenberg figured as the most important artist of his generation.66 Benayoun would have also attended

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Rauschenberg’s show at the galerie Daniel Cordier, so like Pierre he had become adequately acquainted with the Combines that year, which he surmised to be poetically anti-American; or, to be more accurate, they were for the Surrealists as explicitly critical of the ‘American way of life’ as metaphor and allusion can allow. This was a view that had not been fully articulated by Pierre in Combat-Art. Benayoun argued that Rauschenberg stood apart from both the degradation entailed by the materials used by the Nouveaux Réalistes and the literalism of Pop and junk artists, such as Jim Dine, John Chamberlain or Richard Stankiewicz. The two Surrealists saw all of those artists as emphatically concerned with modern manufacturing, labour, consumerism and the machine, yet uncritical of them: ‘erect[ing] pathetic altars to the automobile industry, to plumbing, and to ironmongery.’67 Rauschenberg, on the other hand, was driven not so much by a mere wish to reflect the modern city and the creation and circulation of its goods than by an obligation to inquire into the meaning of social acts. Consequently, Benayoun and Pierre concluded: ‘a very strict spirit of investigation seems to guide his assemblages.’68 Where Pierre had praised Pilgrim earlier in the year for its allusive refutation of the monetization of avant-garde art, Benayoun took the then-recent Canyon (1959), first displayed at Castelli’s gallery in 1960, as a means of establishing the elliptical Rauschenbergian comment on the modern United States (see Plate 6). Bearing the words ‘Labor’ and ‘social,’ this Combine was present in The Art of Assemblage on only its second showing (along with Talisman of 1958) and was reproduced in colour in the catalogue of the exhibition.69 The infamous stuffed bald eagle that is both carrying and perched on an open cardboard box fixed to the lower half of the Combine comes into irresistible juxtaposition with the ‘shabby’ pillow – to use Benayoun’s word – fastened to a piece of wood that lies flat against the canvas and suspended from the lower edge of the panel, breaking the frame of the assemblage and insisting upon the presence of the wall (in both its museum installation and its accurate reproduction) against which the whole is attached.70 Benayoun only hinted at an iconographic reading of Canyon, so I will draw it out briefly here against the background I have sketched so far to recuperate the implied Surrealist reading that the waters of history have washed over. Notwithstanding the potential for a mythic theme, brought to Canyon by the bird in the mural, which the Surrealists like others could have seen as a thread running through other Combines of the period such as Monogram (1955–9), there is a good reason that the eagle and pillow are the two items of this complex tableau latched onto by Benayoun.71 To the poeticopolitical ‘Surrealist sensibility’ of the early 1960s, they nod at once towards a fantasy of a dead or dormant, preserved yet cheaply antiquated, proud though destitute United States, further emblematized by a postcard of the Statue of Liberty nearly obliterated by paint; meanwhile the dialectic triggered by the stuffed bird and the pillow of Canyon – of animal and human or nature and culture, verticality and horizontality, movement and rest, mobility and immobility, flight and dream – replete with numerous Freudian implications as in Bed, would have only confirmed the value of the lyrical licence of Rauschenberg’s art to the Surrealists. The juxtaposition is intuited as a thing of beauty even before consideration of these factors, even the one of the bird with feathers on

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the outside and the pillow with feathers on the inside, of these two main elements both ‘stuffed,’ of the implications for both of weight and gravity or of the formal rhyme that binds them above and below. Benayoun’s advocacy of Canyon in La Brèche was confirmed within Surrealism a few years later when Breton had the same Combine reproduced in the revised, third and final edition of Surrealism and Painting (1965). And French critics such as Jouffroy, as well as novelists like Nouveau Romancier Claude Simon, cited Canyon frequently in the 1960s and after.72 Having already stated in print his opinion of Rauschenberg, Pierre was quick to show accord with Benayoun’s admiration in the Surrealist context of La Brèche. He spoke there of the poetic content of Rauschenberg’s Combines in a manner that contrasts with the two Surrealists’ treatment of Arman’s Accumulations (‘a veritable apotheosis of clutter’73), as well as their comments on the purveyors of décollage: The originality of Rauschenberg is to present elements that sometimes turn up in the category of scrap while transcending the ‘assemblage’ of scrap parts by a lyric dimension [dimension lyrique], making him the heir of those members of that recent American school who were known as the most dynamic and explosive. By means of that lyric dimension, Rauschenberg escapes most often the rut of refuse in which so many artists complacently get stuck – whether that is the specialists of the torn poster ([Raymond] Hains, [Jacques] Villeglé, [François] Dufrêne) or Burri and his canvases made of bags that have been sewn, shredded, burnt . . . 74

In its meaning of an emotional or imaginative excess, ‘lyric’ as it is used here is intended to recall Breton’s allocation to Surrealism of the mission to ‘systematize’ a ‘lyric behaviour’ at the expense of ordinary causality in Mad Love (1937).75 Breton had confirmed in that book the relevance of such behaviour to poetic analogy by seeking it in ‘the continuous and perfect coincidence of two series of facts considered – until further notice – as rigorously independent,’76 just as he had earlier sought to replace ‘the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism’ in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) with Pierre Reverdy’s 1918 formulation of the poetic image: The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. ­The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be – the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.77

Consistent with this, Breton would later extol ‘the spontaneous, clairvoyant, insolent connection established under certain conditions between two things whose conjunction would not be permitted by common sense’ in the important post-war re-evaluation of poetics and analogy specifically, ‘Ascendant Sign’ (1948).78 Through its implicitly alchemical argument that the analogical image moves irreversibly from one reality to another, creating ‘a vital tension straining toward health, pleasure, tranquillity, thankfulness, respect for customs,’ no text could be more appropriate to

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the effort by Benayoun and Pierre to perceive a transmutation of the emblematically Rauschenbergian base materials into art.79 In their discussion, Benayoun and Pierre were opposing the ‘lyrical,’ as understood by Surrealism and long accepted as part of its DNA, to the ‘literal,’ in that term’s function of defining and limiting. In other words, Surrealism has an allusive, connotative orientation as compared with the inert, denotative position that the Surrealists saw as the prop for the work of Nouveau Réaliste artists in The Art of Assemblage, such as Hains and the others, to whose number they added Fontana whom they thought of as equally unable to transcend his materials due to a lack of poetic sense.80 So this aesthetico-poetic approach by which the Surrealists evaluated Rauschenberg’s work already had an ethical element. It would be developed as the means by which they could disengage the US artist’s connotative practice from the ‘Americanized’ consumerism of Nouveau Réalisme as well as junk art and Pop art. Benayoun and Pierre approached this by adding to their analysis the other and related aspect of the political: Benayoun: In the case of Rauschenberg, the status of scrap is exceeded by the fact that his painting harbours an element of subversion. In his titles, the elements of his composition, one perceives a cry of protest, a social and undoubtedly political demand that explains the embarrassment of certain art critics when they confront them. Pierre: Others seek to discover an order, aesthetic and uniquely aesthetic, in base, abject things. Rauschenberg aims much higher.81

The political, anti-imperialist Rauschenberg hypothesized by the Surrealists here was a persistent feature of their discussion of his work and rescued it from the contamination they thought it sometimes received from both Nouveau Réalisme and Pop art in France.82 It is a version of the artist that gains some credence from remarks made by Rauschenberg himself a few years later against directly targeted political or social art: ‘[w]hen you just illustrate your feeling about something self-consciously – that is for me almost a commercial attitude,’ however, he added: ‘[i]f you feel strongly, it’s going to show. That’s the only way the political scene can come into my work – and I believe it’s there.’83 To the Surrealist optic, then, the work is not merely ‘saturated with political meaning,’ but merges with and even emerges as an ethical imperative.84

­Between Happenings and Pop: Benayoun and Otto Hahn As I noted, in spite of the high political stakes that nearly sabotaged it, Rauschenberg’s solo outing at the galerie Daniel Cordier had been a local success with some artists in Paris and a handful of interested critics. But the artist achieved his real breakthrough in France with the sequential two-part, ‘past and present’ event at the galerie Ileana Sonnabend, held at its original home over two rooms on the first floor of 37 quai des Grands-Augustins from 1 to 16  February then 20  February till 9  March 1963, the first part retrospective displaying work from 1954 to 1961, the second of recent work

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from 1962 and 1963. Only about twelve or so of Rauschenberg’s Combines and a few drawings in total had been seen in France between 1959 and 1961; twelve more could be appraised at Sonnabend’s gallery in 1963, followed by fourteen silkscreen paintings in the second ‘contemporary’ show, where the aim was to present Rauschenberg comprehensively as apart from but recognizably succeeding abstract expressionism and journeying further along his own self-created path in the new work.85 The strategy was pursued in the characteristically upmarket catalogue that the gallery devoted to its artists, which sought to forge a stronger identity for US art and, more specifically, Pop art, mildly entertaining the link with Duchamp but not the one with Surrealism.86 It included fragments from Ragon’s article and Parinaud’s Arts interview with Rauschenberg – concluding on this occasion with the much-admired phrase highlighted by Pierre in Combat-Art in 1961: ‘[t]o be a painter means to oppose’ – as well as some extracts from the essays by Gillo Dorfles and the already-well-known one by John Cage, both from Metro in 1961, the latter co-translated by Jouffroy’s friend, another former Surrealist, Jean-Jacques Lebel, who had seen the Daniel Cordier show in 1961 and already held both Rauschenberg and Cage in high regard.87 The display at Sonnabend’s gallery in 1963 was a turning point for Pierre who would identify there a malfunction in Rauschenberg’s powers, precisely at the 1961–2 juncture that separated the first show from the second chronologically. As I show in some detail in my final chapter, Pierre perceived in Rauschenberg’s take up of the silkscreen technique a dwindling of the artist’s poetic intuition for which the Surrealist would blame Cage, which might help explain why he did not review the exhibition. Other Surrealists persevered with Rauschenberg up to and beyond his acceptance of the Grand Prix to Best Foreign Artist at the Venice Biennale in June 1964.88 Evidence of this can be found two years after the Art of Assemblage discussion, again in La Brèche, in Benayoun’s article attacking Pop and Happenings titled ‘Où rien n’arrive,’ dated ‘February 1964.’89 It was probably provoked by the favourable piece by Otto Hahn published on the same subject in January in Les Temps modernes in which Rauschenberg and Johns were called, not unusually, the ‘direct fathers of Pop art,’ much to the delight of Sonnabend who had excitedly reported its contents to Alan R. Solomon, Rauschenberg fan and newly appointed commissioner of the US pavilion at that year’s thirty-second Venice Biennale, as evidence that Rauschenberg and her other artists were attuned to and furthering a major transformation in European intellectual life.90 Among other things, Benayoun took aim at the now-rarely discussed but thenwell attended and widely reported performance The Construction of Boston, scripted to commission by the poet Kenneth Koch and staged once only at the off-Broadway Maidman Playhouse on 5  May 1962.91 Neither Duchamp’s presence in the audience nor the antics onstage of Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle and Tinguely assuaged Benayoun’s jadedness at the bright and breezy reports of the fifteen-minute spectacle.92 The Surrealist understood the new genre as a kind of nihilistic mask placed over Pop art’s otherwise-politically compliant, commercially digestible gallery exterior, concluding rather flatly on the general phenomenon of Happenings: ‘[n]othing in all this is very new.’93 In spite of Rauschenberg’s evidently whole-hearted participation in

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Happenings, though, Benayoun hastened to make a special case for him with further reference to Canyon, which was well on the way to becoming a canonical work for Surrealism, nudged one again towards a political critique in 1964 as war escalated in Vietnam and the Civil Rights Act worked its way slowly into law: This generalization does not include Bob Rauschenberg whose titles, inscriptions and collages, applied to assemblages like Canyon of 1959 (the stuffed eagle) have always functioned in a manner that is clearly antipatriotic and subversive. I regret that this artist, an involuntary precursor of Pop, who is dissociated from it by the more purist critics like Thomas Hess, will likely be implicated by force of association through events like The Construction of Boston.94

Benayoun was referring to Art News editor Hess’s unsympathetic, pin-sharp diagnosis of Pop in the journal the previous November (the same year he co-edited the first issue of Location that included Rauschenberg’s ‘Random Order’), which insisted: ‘[i]t is impossible to conceive of a Pop painting being produced until some plans are laid for its exhibition. Without its public reaction, the art object remains a fragment. (Thus neither Rauschenberg nor Johns fits the category.) Here Pop relates directly to Happenings.’95 Benayoun’s ‘Où rien n’arrive’ seems informed by that resolute contention throughout. Surrealists such as Pierre and Elisabeth Lenk were also in the process of deriding Happenings, as simultaneously fifty years out of date and utterly contemporary. That is to say, they believed events staged by Pop artists and their friends were in accord with the ‘desperate irony’ of Dada’s theatrical performances of 1916–22, in which, equally: ‘the atrocity of war is reduced . . . to the dimensions of a ridiculous absurdity,’ in Pierre’s words, as well as an escapism perfectly symptomatic of the period after the Second World War that had extended into the anxiety fostered by the Cold War.96 Forty years on from the Manifesto, Surrealists were in rather a vulnerable position to be throwing around accusations of outdatedness. Their exhibition L’Écart absolu the following year gave critics the opportunity to make that case emphatically. Among them was Hahn, whose favourable position on Pop was taken quite overtly alongside an antagonism towards Surrealism, in spite of his contemporary, favourable writings on André Masson.97 For Hahn, L’Écart absolu served as an occasion to attack the movement’s unfashionable ‘art of association’ in the ‘synthetic universe’ of Pop, artificial insemination, the jukebox, tranquillizer, supermarket and the inevitable Coca-Cola.98 Citing RobbeGrillet as a precursor of Pop and Happenings at the head of a list of writers, artists, filmmakers and musicians whom he thought made Surrealism look irrelevant, from James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and Jean-Luc Godard to the Rolling Stones, Hahn gave Rauschenberg a place of honour in the anti-Surrealist, anti-poetry offensive: ‘[t] here is Rauschenberg who creates an objectivity of the visual from which all hierarchy is banished, since in this world everything, at the same moment, has the same importance. By the same token, he rejects the ridiculous term “poetry” and replaces it with “actualité.”’99 Hahn exaggerated Rauschenberg’s meaning, of course. When he had been asked by Parinaud if his work was ‘une tentative poétique,’ the artist had replied ‘[c]’est une

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actualité,’ but it was hardly a refutation of poetry, a term with which he was usually comfortable.100 Yet, here again, the acclaimed interview provided an admirer with the means to turn the artist to his own purposes, helped along in this case with support from Cage’s levelling aesthetic and Jouffroy’s notion of ‘réalisme ouvert’ (discussed below), and to identify by critical comparison what was lacking in recent art and culture elsewhere. Whether under scrutiny by Surrealism or its enemies, Rauschenberg alone, it seems, came out of every dispute, including the Surrealists’ offensive against Happenings and their selective evaluation of Pop, smelling of roses.101 The treatment they dished out to ex-Surrealist Jean-Jacques Lebel for his incursions into Happenings offers a sharp contrast and will be glimpsed in my next two chapters. There I detail how Lebel’s ongoing preoccupation with poetry and politics after his departure from the Surrealist group, alongside his penchant for performance, shaped further publishing and curatorial contexts for Rauschenberg’s art.

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Surrealist of the re-found object: Beholding Jean-Jacques Lebel and Monogram in Front unique

The critical response in France to the art of Robert Rauschenberg was heavily influenced by the campaign run by Ileana Sonnabend, his friend and admirer since 1951 (when she was still married to Leo Castelli who was then unconvinced by the artist’s work), at whose Paris gallery Rauschenberg had no fewer than four solo exhibitions from its opening on 15  November 1962 (with a Jasper Johns exhibition) up to 1964.1 In the year her gallery launched, Sonnabend invited an acquaintance to dinner: the young, ex-Surrealist artist and agitator Jean-Jacques Lebel, just returned from one of his yearly trips to New York.2 One project that came out of that meeting was the translation by Lebel and Ileana’s second husband Michael Sonnabend of the extracts from John Cage’s 1961 text on Rauschenberg that would appear in the exhibition catalogue of the galerie Sonnabend double exhibition devoted to the artist in 1963.3 Lebel had been interested in Cage’s work for many years and was introduced to the composer by Marcel Duchamp and his wife Teeny;4 his immersion in Rauschenberg’s art began in October 1959, when he had stood mesmerized before Talisman (1958) with Alain Jouffroy at the Paris Biennale.5 From that point, Lebel played an important and distinctive role in the reception of Rauschenberg’s art in Europe, through or close to the wider circle of Surrealists and ex-Surrealists. In this chapter and the next, I examine the forms that it took.

Jean-Jacques Lebel and Surrealism Lebel was auspiciously prepared for the task of promoting Rauschenberg in Europe because he was extraordinary well placed socially and intellectually, as well as being perfectly bilingual. He was born in Paris, but when he was three years old his family travelled to New York due to a commission received by his father Robert Lebel to organize an exhibition of nineteenth-century French painting to be held in Ottawa, Canada, which was ultimately cancelled, leading to the Lebel family’s residence in the United States for the duration of the Second World War and to Jean-Jacques seeing it out as a kind of infant comrade of André Breton and other Surrealist immigrants.6 In September 1952 at the age of sixteen, Lebel began a correspondence with Breton (possibly after reading the radio interviews with André Parinaud, just published

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as Entretiens 1913–1952) then joined the Surrealists in 1955.7 In the years after, he ‘continued to travel back and forth between Paris and New York.’8 Lebel had much of his earliest exposure as an artist in Italy, which he visited repeatedly by train, initially exiting Paris for Florence in the mid-1950s to avoid the draft into the ‘dirty war’ in Algeria, illegally and sometimes perilously supporting fellow draft resisters still in France while studying techniques for the restoration of antique painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence for three years.9 Lebel signed three Surrealist declarations between November 1956 and June 1959; his painting L’arbre fruitier (1956), more like a mythic bird than a fruit tree, was reproduced full page in the third issue of Le Surréalisme, même in 1957 (in this same issue his father Robert published important material from his forthcoming, decisive monograph Marcel Duchamp of 1959) and an automatic drawing by him appeared on the opening page of the first issue of the monthly BIEF: Jonction surréaliste in November 1958.10 At the close of the decade, Lebel showed a readably figurative oil painting at the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) titled Barbelô (1958), meant to designate the divine female principle of Gnosticism. However, he was listed in the catalogue not as a Surrealist but among ‘Nos invités’ with non-Surrealists such as Rauschenberg, Johns, Enrico Baj, Max Walter Svanberg and Clovis Trouille, demonstrating that his position within Surrealism had become at least tenuous by the end of 1959.11 In April of the following year, word would be spread of Lebel’s ejection from the Surrealist group in BIEF, apparently for a gregariousness that the Surrealists read as ‘arrivism’ and a ‘total confusion of values.’12 This was the very same Surrealist Parisian monthly that had reported in June 1959 on the series of events constituting the Giorni surrealisti di Milano of the last four days of April that year.13 Comprising exhibitions, conferences, interviews, poetry readings, film screenings and publications, it was meant to publicize the beginning of Surrealist activity in Milan, led by Lebel and supported by the Centre français d’études et d’information, and the launch of a new, mainly French-language Surrealist journal titled Front unique, which advertised both BIEF and Le Surréalisme, même on the back of its first issue (Figure 4.1). Also based in Milan, Front unique was edited by Lebel and his then-dealer Arturo Schwarz, a Surrealist sympathizer who wrote for the review under the name ‘Tristan Sauvage,’ but who is best known today for his closeness to and promotion of Duchamp from the 1950s and as author of The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (1969, revised 1997).14 Published initially with less fanfare as an affiche-revue or wall poster in six issues over 1955–8, Front unique had premiered at Lebel’s first solo show in Florence in 1955 and was intended and expected by the Surrealists to serve both their cause and the revolutionary one in Algeria, under a punning title (front = forehead) apparently referring at once to individual thought and collective action.15 To those ends, the first issue in full journal format in spring/summer 1959, advertised conspicuously at the Galleria Schwarz beside the first international exhibition of Surrealism held on Italian soil, included poems, brief essays and works of art by Surrealist sympathizers and members of the group such as Robert Benayoun and José Pierre, as well as Breton, Victor Brauner, Duchamp, Wifredo Lam, Gérard

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Figure 4.1  Cover of Front unique, no. 1, spring/summer 1959 (private collection).

Legrand, Joyce Mansour, Matta, Benjamin Péret, Jean-Claude Silbermann, Svanberg and so on, alongside discussions of the situation in Algeria.16

­Front unique, John Bernard Myers and Monogram Far greater provocation followed in the second issue of Front unique dated winter 1960 (Figure  4.2). Facing down the scandal, prohibition and censorship that surrounded the Declaration of the 121 in France, the incensed Lebel had copies of the statement

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Figure 4.2  Cover of Front unique, no. 2, winter 1960 (private collection).

inserted into Front unique as a loose, green flyer (see Plate 7), setting an empty page in the review to avoid legal pursuit: I had to leave a blank page twenty-eight so the publication could be shipped to Paris and pass the customs. If my memory is correct, 1500 copies of the magazine were printed but I had 10000 copies of the leaflet printed. Of those, 1500 were inserted by hand [in Paris], the remaining 8500 being distributed by my anarchist buddies at political rallies, street demonstrations, etc. in Paris. . . . I was not among the very first 121 to sign the manifesto since I was in Milan . . . and by the time I received the text from [Maurice] Nadeau and could send him my signature by express mail, the first batch of signatures had already been made public. My signature was part

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Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism of the second batch, a couple of weeks later. This was important to me since I was then twenty-four years of age and in danger of being called into the army to fight my Algerian comrades, which, of course, was out of the question.17

The act echoed the now much better-known double blank page ‘protest’ that had just confronted the reader on pages 194–5 of Jean-Paul Sartre’s periodical Les Temps modernes in September 1960, created there by the printer’s reluctance under threat of police action to typeset the Declaration of the 121; that was exceeded by the defiant Lebel who distributed the offending document in Front unique anyway. This is the context in which Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–9) was reproduced in the review, inevitably if unspecifically charged with both Surrealist and political connotation. Overleaf from the blank page and inflammatory insert in this second issue of Front unique appeared an article by John Bernard Myers on the activities and artistic acquaintance of the European Surrealists while in the United States during and just after the war, titled ‘Note sur le Surréalisme aux Etats-Unis.’18 Commissioned by Lebel when he had met Myers in Venice earlier that year, the text was an abbreviated version of the one published by the latter in the United States that spring in the Evergreen Review, ‘The Impact of Surrealism on the New York School,’ which I discussed in my second chapter.19 Like the longer article, the one in Front unique includes some detailed background on the activities of Breton and the Surrealists in the 1940s, dwelling more than the earlier one had on familiar ground such as the importance of Surrealism for Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, the coolness shown towards the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud by US artists, Breton’s eventual failure to consolidate group activity in New York and the subsequent triumph of the ‘existentialist’ rhetoric of ‘spontaneity’ over Surrealist ‘objective chance’ in the art historical account of abstract expressionism. But the article also carried speculations that were unusual for the time on the durable legacy of Surrealism for the next generation, meaning current poets and artists such as the Beats, Johns, Rauschenberg and Larry Rivers, which Myers claimed was acknowledged by them: The next generation bears the influence of Surrealism with less reluctance. We can genuinely say that Action Painting is an extension of Surrealist chance. The critics Harold Rosenberg and Hanna [sic] Arendt have each had their say with regard to abstract expressionism, which was invented by journalists fond of formulas. A cynical blow to the idolaters of Action Painting and Spontaneity was the exhibition by Robert Raushenberg [sic] where two ‘Action Paintings’ side-byside and perfectly identical could be seen. Raushenberg [sic], Jasper Johns and Larry Rivers are certainly not indifferent to black humor and other activities of the Surrealists that have been previously ignored.20

On the thinnest of evidence, Myers once again linked a few others to Surrealism as he had in the Evergreen Review, such as Richard Stankiewicz and Grace Hartigan, while the case for continuity between the new generation and the Surrealists was furthered partly by way of a photograph of Lebel and Alain Jouffroy with their friends the gallery

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owner Raymond Cordier and the Beat poet Gregory Corso misbehaving on Jean Gautherin’s 1886 bronze statue of Denis Diderot on Boulevard Saint-Germain. More worthy of note is that whereas Myers had referred merely in passing in his article in the Evergreen Review to Rauschenberg’s ‘stuffed goat’ as a Surrealist ‘Re-found Object,’21 here in Front unique it is reproduced in its full glory as a mascot for his text (Figure 4.3): the just completed, still-unsold, slightly misdated Monogram in what must have been its first outing in a French-language publication.22 Now regarded on a par with Bed (1955) as one of Rauschenberg’s vital contributions to twentieth-century art and of an equal fame to the Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Monogram had its inaugural display early in 1959 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in a three

Figure  4.3 Photograph of Monogram in Front unique, no. 2, winter 1960, 30. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022.

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artist event featuring Norman Bluhm, Jean Dubuffet and Rauschenberg, followed by only one other showing before its appearance in Front unique, also in New York at the Stable Gallery in 1959–60. The work would have been seen by Myers at both and probably also at the artist’s studio, already garnering its reputation as a groundbreaking if not revolutionary work.23 Later, in 1962, it would make its first journey to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm to appear at the 4 Americans exhibition, alongside Bed, Charlene (1954), Odalisk (1955/1958) and Pilgrim (1960), before it was purchased in 1964 by the museum’s director Pontus Hultén as part of a determined programme of buying in and showing US art there.24 However, by the end of the 1960s and at least up to 1973, during which period it did not go out on loan, Monogram was perceived by some in Stockholm as ‘a symbol of the American cultural imperialism that had invaded Sweden after the end of World War II,’ and the previously (and subsequently) much-loved goat was further scorned as a reminder of US military expansionism: ‘Monogram became a scapegoat,’ writes Hiroko Ikegami, ‘as a symbol of American invasion in the era of the war in Vietnam.’25 By contrast with the stigma Monogram came to carry in its early Stockholm era due to its US heritage, its equally symbolic placement in Front unique in 1960 was meant to liberate the revolutionary energy of the work initially through juxtaposition with the support displayed in the review for Algerian resistance, especially as stated in the Declaration of the 121, and more elusively through direct relation with its ‘Surrealist’ elements that I will be exploring here, precisely in alliance with the origin of the work in the United States. Situated in the contexts of Front unique and Surrealism, a few months after Bed had appeared at EROS and at exactly the time that notorious Combine resurfaced at Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain in New York, the pre-Stockholm Monogram was an emblem not only of resistance to conformity in the visual arts, but of a hostility to the State, of intellectual independence and intransigence, specifically inflected by the history and ongoing influence of the movement in the United States during the war, as that was understood by the sympathizers of Surrealism. The art critic Françoise Choay had discerned in 1961 only superficial resemblance between Combines and Surrealist objects, but Rauschenberg had already done enough before Monogram to merit stronger comparison with Surrealism. This has formed a steady stream of comment up to the present day. Branden W. Joseph has characterized the collages, hangings and boxed works or Scatole personali and Feticci Personali (the second group presumed lost) fabricated by Rauschenberg in Rome in 1952–3 as ‘brief, digressive investigations into Surrealism.’26 Elsewhere they are said to possess ‘[m]etaphorical associations of literal apertures and enclosures, passages of veiling, pendency, and penetrability.’27 However, it was likely the work of Joseph Cornell that Rauschenberg had most immediately in mind for those through the more or less yearly Cornell exhibitions in New York since 1946, notably at the Egan Gallery where the parents of Rauschenberg’s then partner Susan Weil had bought three works in 1949, and from a minor acquaintance with the older artist that included visiting Cornell’s home on Utopia Parkway to move works to the gallery.28 As for Monogram itself, as early as 1966, Max Kozloff could write of ‘a work so recognizably Surrealist as a goat stuffed through a tire’ (see Plate 8).29 In a later,

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Figure 4.4  Meret Oppenheim, Object (Breakfast in Fur) (1936). Fur-covered cup, saucer and

spoon cup 10.9 cm in diameter; saucer 23.7 cm in diameter; spoon 20.2 cm long, overall height 7.3 cm. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Purchase. Acc. n.: 130.1946.a-c. © DACS. © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

much-quoted interpretation, Robert Hughes read it as a gay counterpart to Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered Object (Breakfast in Fur) (1936, Figure  4.4), which therefore ‘fulfilled André Breton’s description of the Surrealist ideal: “Beauty will be erotic-veiled, explosive-fixed, magical-circumstantial, or it will not be at all.”’30 More recently, Monogram has been viewed as ‘a Surrealist encounter of two discrete elements that together turn the familiar [sic] . . . into the unfamiliar or uncanny’;31 and elsewhere as the incursion of the ‘Surrealist object-assemblage aesthetic’ into the Duchampian readymade.32 However, such evaluations alongside the Surrealist object are little more than formalist comparisons or leaps of faith without a deeper conceptual examination of Surrealist poetics in the visual arts. Further potential iconographic interpretations of Monogram suggest themselves along Surrealist lines, corresponding more or less neatly with ethical, artistic, mythic and occultist discourse within Surrealism. But it is not so much the nature-trapped-byculture reading of Monogram that is germane here, nor exactly the related one of the lone, indolent, Angora goat as the dupe or Aunt Sally in a bizarre circus act or fairground game (the forlorn air of the stuffed animal is better beheld when its head is viewed front right at a low angle (Figure 4.5), ‘keeping his eye on our folly,’ as Walter Hopps once ironized it);33 nor is it the mythic reading, available also in Canyon (1959), or the sacrificial, ritualistic one that is enhanced by the priapic symbolism of the garlanded,

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Figure 4.5  Robert Rauschenberg, detail of Monogram (1955–9). Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Photo © Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022.

pilloried, neck-, ear- and face-painted goat with damaged head (Figure 4.6); nor even the talismanic one, closer to post-war Surrealism, advanced further in the title and equally implied by the Combine titled Magician in the same year and Talisman in the previous one, of Monogram as lucky charm, fetish or shrine and the artist as modern sorcerer (Rauschenberg had earlier ascribed magical powers to the Feticci Personali and his superstitious nature has been underplayed in the scholarship).34 These interpretations seem merely thematic or reductively symbolic at best, opportunistic at worst and insubstantial or fortuitous somewhere in the middle. A contextual exploration of Monogram takes us further into Rauschenberg’s compositional process and the creative choices that concluded in this work, and also towards the logic of Lebel’s inclusion of it in Front unique as a Surrealist, revolutionary artefact. Rauschenberg divulged, typically unpretentiously, the calculated tasking of the imagination that went into the creation of Monogram, revealing that he added the tyre

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Figure 4.6  Robert Rauschenberg, detail of Monogram (1955–9). Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Photo © Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022.

with white paint (to heighten the tread) to the goat because he ‘wanted to have fantasy enter in’ on what would otherwise have been an overly realistic element in or on the tableau, which immediately nudges Rauschenberg’s assemblage closer to Surrealism than, say, Pablo Picasso’s unornamented, iconic Goat (1950, Figure 4.7) on its equally improvised yet more restricted ‘pasture.’35 The ensuing juxtaposition of the two unlike objects, goat and tyre, on a horizontal surface that has little to do with either (in what is, admittedly, a more complex work than that) consequently recalls the example of the relentlessly aired quotation of the Comte de Lautréamont, thought by the Surrealists to convey an exemplary image: ‘as beautiful . . . as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.’36 It is as an image with a poetic drift that Monogram carried a Surrealist appeal to Lebel and his friends by contrast with the later, avowedly postmodern, literalist view of it as ‘art’s first convincing presentation of the postmodern animal,’ ‘obstinately occupying the centre of the gallery floor in all its glorious dumb thingness’ and prompting a ‘confrontation’ through its incursion into the space of the viewer.37 This interpretation is at least weakened by the raised, distancing platform that the goat stands on and it is thwarted decisively by the transparent container that has protected the whole Combine since at least the

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Figure  4.7  Pablo Picasso, She Goat (1950). Plaster (wicker basket, ceramic ware, palm leaf,

metal, wood, cardboard and plaster), 120.5 × 72 × 144 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2022. © Adrien Didierjean/Agence photographique de la RMN – Grand Palais des Champs Elysées.

early 1970s but is hardly ever present when Monogram is reproduced.38 In rejecting Hughes’s interpretation, Rauschenberg himself purportedly avowed in literalist mode: ‘[a] stuffed goat is special in the way that a stuffed goat is special,’ but a reading of Monogram by way of the Surrealist image gets us closer to the movement of its ‘poetry’ that Rauschenberg and his admirers have so frequently claimed for his work.39

The dialectical image in Rauschenberg and René Magritte Suzi Gablik described as follows the operation of the poetic image in Lautréamont in her discussion of its primary lesson for René Magritte: If its connections with the rest of the world have been broken in some brutal or insidious way, an object will become separated from the field in which it normally

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functions. And once removed from its habitual field, it will collaborate with unforeseen elements. When objects are isolated in this way, both from their usual surroundings and from their recognized function or role, a certain ambiguity is produced, and an irrational element is introduced on the plane of concrete reality. The resulting image thus escapes from the principles of reality, but without having lost its reality on the physical plane.40

Gablik’s metaphorical language assists accidentally in the initial transposition of the reading to Monogram. The inert goat is given prominence by detachment from the flock, stranded on a movable stage of painted canvas and wood with a few other objects and transfer drawings, seemingly designed to mimic both the broken-up syntax and sepia-tinted tones of Kurt Schwitters’s ageing collages, which Rauschenberg would have seen at the two solo exhibits of 1957 and 1959 held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York over the period of rumination on Monogram, and to act as a parodic stand or pedestal.41 It is bridged with Surrealism more convincingly where Gablik compares Magritte’s enquiry into words, images and things with the collage and three-dimensional work of Rauschenberg and Johns, such as Bed and Flag (1954–5), producing a new art after modernism and heralding ‘the replacement of illusionism with actual objects’ causing ‘a whole new set of dialectical solutions to emerge,’42 meaning here the elimination of ‘the previous distinction, or separation, between the real object and that which represents it.’43 Magritte’s invention of his own juxtapositional method in 1933 – whereby familiar objects are not chosen for their lack of relation to each other but their relatedness: not sewing machine and umbrella but foot and shoe, for instance, or egg and birdcage – retained what Gablik called a ‘dialectical process, based on paradox.’44 She elaborated as follows: ­ is method was essentially that of trying out assumptions in a series of speculative H drawings until an answer was found to each familiar object. The underlying principle for nearly all the work that followed was based on a kind of Hegelian dialectic of contradictions, in which a union of opposites operated as the mainspring of reality. He pursued these investigations until just before his death. . . . an image for Magritte would often be the result of complex investigations – an authentic revelation after a long period of calculated reflection.45

The value of this process for a reading of Monogram in Front unique is already hinted at in a structural similarity between Rauschenberg’s felicitous, economical and surprisingly snugly fitting union of tyre with goat and certain simple and humorous doodles by Magritte in letters, or even final works that manifest the same rumination, such as the gouache The Cut Glass Bath (1946, Figure 4.8) and the later coloured drawing The Vocation (1964, Figure 4.9). While the coalition of Magritte’s objects had the same role as in Monogram – ‘its sheer improbability excites the mind’ in one estimation – their titles perform a similar task to the writing appended to Duchamp’s readymades, to goad the imagination onto unforeseeable byways of speculation by baiting what Samuel Beckett

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Figure 4.8  René Magritte, The Cut Glass Bath (1946). Gouache on paper, 48.5 × 34 cm. Private collection, London. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. © Photothèque R. Magritte/Adagp Images, Paris, 2022.

Figure  4.9 René Magritte, The Vocation (1964). Coloured pencil on paper, 22.6 × 29.5 cm. Current location unknown. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. © Photothèque R. Magritte/Adagp Images, Paris, 2022.

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referred to in Molloy (1951) as the mind’s weakness for analogy.46 It was a strategy also engaged in by Rauschenberg, the supposed literalist, whose titles range, appropriately, from the atypical ultra-literalism of Bed to the wordplay of Odalisk with Monogram somewhere in the middle, titled quite specifically to allude to the interlinked elements of a monogram but surely meant like Magritte’s to intrigue its audience, which is to say to set off a reverie or chain of associations; or, as one of Rauschenberg’s admirers put it, perhaps too candidly for the artist: ‘he prefers titles with multiple connotations.’47 In Gablik’s main case study, Magritte’s juxtapositional method was played out across the many exploratory though quite spare drawings that sought an answer to the question, in the artist’s own words to Gablik: ‘how to show a glass of water in a painting in such a way that it would not be indifferent? Or whimsical, or arbitrary, or weak . . . ?’48 The trial and error was concluded after the hundredth or hundred and fiftieth drawing, according to Magritte, in the dialectical object comprising glass of water (meant to contain liquid) on top of open umbrella (meant to repel liquid), which became the painting Hegel’s Holiday (1958) (see Plate 9), because of the pleasurable release the German philosopher might have gained from pondering ‘this object which has two opposing functions.’49 Magritte reached this solution in Brussels in the same year Rauschenberg began in New York his own ‘drawings,’ the lengthy campaign of the Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (1958–60). More to the point, he arrived at it in the period of Rauschenberg’s sporadic work on Monogram over the far more protracted span of five years across 1955–9, which was equally spurred though differently tested by a single object as a ‘problem,’ that of the quite ‘exotic’ $15 or $35 goat (accounts differ) rather than the entirely ordinary glass of water (an object that is, in fact, like the tyre, more ‘Rauschenbergian’ than the goat).50 The investigation is recorded in two drawings (Figure 4.10), two photographs (Figures 4.11 and 4.12) and a more elaborate plan and elevation sketch including watercolour (see Plate 10): trials seeking the right setting and accoutrements for the uncooperative goat, which tended to dominate any other objects it was positioned alongside.51 James Leggio inched towards a dialectical reading of Rauschenberg’s Combines from Bed to Monogram in a language close to Surrealism’s by way of the ‘category mistake,’ characterized as an ‘effective strategy used in literary metaphor,’ initially perceiving in the Combines a ‘free, unresolved dissonance of contradictory associations’ and ‘a sense that the conflicting elements somehow attract each other even as they are repelled’ where ‘[o]pposed pairs freely transpose with each other, but instead of creating mere random confusion, their collision sets off sparks of sudden recognition.’52 From there, Leggio went on to assert a ‘free dialectic of difference’ in the Combines, and a ‘dialectical sense of identity, a poetry of difference’ specifically for Bed, quoting the artist’s own words to Barbara Rose on the importance of ‘the internal dialectic of contradicting yourself, which is cathartic – the only thing that leads to something new.’53 None of this made Leggio think of Surrealism or its favourite philosopher Hegel. The same goes for Ikegami who, in dialogue with Thomas Crow, posits a ‘dialectical tension’ in Monogram, developed in the studies, between ‘an urge to move beyond and a force to resist such movement,’ which reduces to gravity and the challenge to it, at which point Ikegami seems to acknowledge the laxity (‘multivalent quality’) of such an unfalsifiable

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Figure 4.10  Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram: Preliminary Study 1 (1955). Graphite on paper, 11.875 in × 8.75 in (30.2 cm × 22.2 cm). Collection of Jasper Johns. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Figure 4.11  Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram: First State (c. 1955). Oil, paper, fabric and wood on canvas plus stuffed Angora goat and three electric light fixtures, approx. 190.5 × 118.1 × 30.5 cm. No longer extant. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Photograph ShunkKender © J. Paul Getty Trust.

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Figure 4.12  Robert Rauschenberg,

Monogram: Second State (c. 1956). Oil, paper, fabric and wood plus stuffed Angora goat and rubber tyre on wood, approx. 292.1 × 81.3 × 111.8 cm. No longer extant. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/ VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. © 2022 Estate of Rudy Burckhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

reading, especially once extended iconographically (since everything is caught up in resisting gravity or succumbing to it, including umbrellas, glasses and rainwater).54 A more rigorous dialectical reading of the main components of Monogram and safer guarantee, therefore, of its footing in the history of art and the logic of Lebel’s reproduction of it in Front unique, is made available if we narrow Ikegami’s interpretation by reimagining Rauschenberg’s Combine in the poetic field established within Surrealism between Lautréamont and Magritte. Under this restriction, attention is drawn more closely to the artist’s treatment of the specific capacity of the functioning of objects: firstly, the goat, ‘acquiescent, eternally patient,’ both grazing and inert with, significantly, its legs and hooves concealed by its fleece (which is longer than they are usually allowed to grow on Angoras) but compensated by the four small prints of a right human foot, transfer drawn on a single sheet of paper attached flush to the front edge of the dolly (Figure 4.13) (the missing heel from each impression is itself compensated by the single rubber shoe heel placed back at the centre left of the base, which also rhymes with the material of the tyre) (Figure 4.14); secondly, the wheelless tyre not set in motion like its ‘negative’ suggested indexically in the Automobile Tire Print (1953) and not even available for motion as was the tyreless wheel of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913), but assigned to restrain; and thirdly, the deceptively still, hingedtogether, two-part, asymmetrical ‘pasture’ or ‘raft’ upon which the goat both does and does not roam, once (but no more in Stockholm) vehiclized by wheels or castors, as

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Figure 4.13  Robert Rauschenberg, detail of platform of Monogram (1955–9). Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Photo © Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022.

Figure 4.14  Robert Rauschenberg, detail of platform of Monogram (1955–9). Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Photo © Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022.

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in the contemporaneous Odalisk, originally fitted by the artist some way in from the edges to be hidden from the viewing public.55 An interpretation of Monogram that takes account of the basic uses of its individual elements and how these are undermined, as in Surrealist objects such as Oppenheim’s Object and Wolfgang Paalen’s very Magrittean Articulated Cloud (1938, Figure 4.15) (similarly boxed in perspex in the Moderna Museet), confirms that Rauschenberg was not concerned with them merely as bodies resisting or not resisting gravity, which goes for all things; rather, he selected, amended and intermingled objects, which are objects that exist in our space, yes, but they are then defined under these juxtapositional conditions by movement, arrived at through Rauschenberg’s meticulous interference in their means of motility. Deftly contriving a synthesis of mobility and immobility, he ‘entrusts his news to the speechless dialectic of the Combine.’56 Leo Steinberg’s phrase was meant for the later, more traditionally sculptural assemblage The Ancient Incident (Kabal American Zephyr series) (1981, Figure 4.16). It is an equally dialectical object and nearly as Magrittean, as is its title, lacking only the absurdity of the unification enshrined in Hegel’s Holiday and Monogram. That was better achieved in another in the same series, Racketeer (Kabal American Zephyr series) (1983, Figure 4.17),

Figure 4.15  Wolfgang Paalen, Articulated Cloud (1937). Umbrella with natural sponge attached

by adhesive, height 50 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Succession Wolfgang Paalen et Eva Sulzer. Photo © Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

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Figure  4.16 Robert Rauschenberg, The Ancient Incident (Kabal American Zephyr series) (1981). Wood and metal stands with wood chairs, 219.7 × 233.7 × 50.8 cm. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Figure 4.17  Robert Rauschenberg,

Racketeer (Kabal American Zephyr series) (1983). Construction, 120.7 × 43.2 × 47 cm. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

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Figure  4.18 Jean-Jacques Lebel, Pretty Storm (1990). Construction: dimensions and location unknown. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy of Jean-Jacques Lebel.

a perfect intermediary between Magritte’s emblematic imagery and Lebel’s more Rauschenbergian work such as Pretty Storm (1990, Figure 4.18).57 But Steinberg’s phrase works well for what I have argued about Rauschenberg’s goat, as uncharacteristically pondered at length and satisfactorily resolved intuitively, yet unforthcoming and compliant in equal parts (I am not claiming that Rauschenberg, like Magritte, consciously utilized a rigorous dialectical method with a near-pedagogical goal in mind). In this reading of Monogram, the Ducassian image and its legacy, Hegelian or otherwise, in poetry, painting and the object in Surrealism, provide a juxtapositional basis for the comparison between Rauschenberg’s intuitive ‘method’ and Magritte’s along with the poetic frisson they beget, rather than one, say, between the carefully weighed up Monogram and the labour that Picasso put into the early stages of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), in which a composition was certainly sought through extensive deliberation, but not one that relies for its advancement, solution and payoff on the finely calibrated yet essentially spare recontextualization of limited elements in the service of a satisfactory incongruity.58 This proposition that the image in Surrealism, ‘revolutionary because it is the restless enemy of all the bourgeois values which keep the world in its present appalling

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condition,’ served as the poetico-aesthetic justification for the reproduction of Monogram in Front unique in 1960 is strengthened by consideration of the bond that existed between Magritte and Rauschenberg.59 In March 1954, before embarking on Monogram, Rauschenberg had viewed the exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery titled Magritte: Word Vs. Image, also attended by Johns. Both artists subsequently came to own work by Magritte through purchase or gift, including Rauschenberg’s acquisition of The Proper Image IV (Le sens propre IV, sometimes referred to as The Literal Image IV or The Proper Meaning IV) (1929), which had been included in that show.60 A distant acquaintance with Magritte was forged through none other than Suzi Gablik. She had known Rauschenberg since attending Black Mountain College in summer 1951 (after his first stint in 1948–9, Rauschenberg had returned there for a summer stay in 1951, remaining through the autumn, and after a brief break returned for the spring and summer terms of 1952) and Johns probably from 1953, whom she met at Marlboro Books on West 57th Street in New York where he worked.61 By some accounts Gablik introduced the two US artists to each other either shortly before or after the Janis exhibition, though in interview an amused Gablik could not recall her role in their union.62 Elsewhere, Gablik remembered herself age eighteen (so in 1952–3) as ‘a devotee of John Cage concerts and the avant-garde productions put on stage at the Living Theater . . . translating poetry by Baudelaire and Rimbaud and mingling whenever I could with glamorous artists at the Cedar Bar [sic] in Greenwich Village,’ rounding out her recollection with a remarkable and unique characterization: ‘[i]n those days, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were among my closest friends  – rarefied macho companions, as solid as redwoods.’63 For three decades, she wrote, Johns was ‘the person in whose company I was always happiest,’ while her friendship with Rauschenberg lasted till he left New York for Captiva Island, Florida, in 1970.64 During that period, in early October 1960 following her correspondence with Magritte, Gablik had journeyed to Brussels and moved in with the artist and his wife Georgette for what became a seven-month stay while she worked on her monograph (where The Proper Image IV is reproduced).65 Her letter exchange with Magritte might go back as far as Rauschenberg’s initial conception of Monogram in the mid1950s when Gablik had first devised the idea for a book on the artist; in any case, the correspondence soon ‘flourished,’ to use her term.66 Those letters of 1958–9 concerned with the dialectical nature of the image were extensive and Gablik came to own one set of the hypothetical drawings through which the process was enacted, which was concluded in the painting State of Grace (1959).67 Rauschenberg, too, owned one sheet of drawings by Magritte dating from the 1950s that reveal precisely the working method described to Gablik.68 The culmination of the project of Monogram in 1959 at the same moment of the Magritte-Gablik ‘dialectical image’ letters is, no doubt, a coincidence; the likeness of the Rauschenbergian image in a three-dimensional work to the Magrittean one in two dimensions is not; nor is the difference in medium relevant since I am referring to a conceptual, compositional process by which an image is arrested, so to speak, in a dialectic (Rauschenberg said in one of his more detailed accounts of the passage of Monogram towards completion that some of the stages it went through were

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rejected because he wanted to retain the object in the round, but at the same time he referred to it as a search for an ‘image’).69 To address this as an influence of Magritte on the younger artist would be overly assertive. However, to identify and rationalize contextually a comparable means by which a poetics of the image was reached that is historically so deeply rooted in Surrealism, where art history has insisted so stridently on the relevance of Dada and Duchamp to Rauschenberg, is to give explanatory force to the innocent presence of Monogram in Front unique in 1960 when that art historical orthodoxy was still in the process of being established and a Surrealist lineage could still be entertained for the US artist, even if Magritte was one Surrealist who never displayed much of a liking for Rauschenberg’s work.70

Front unique, revolution and Monogram Photographed in Front unique slightly cropped from directly in front of the goat at a viewpoint looking down from about three-quarter human height, making it look as though the creature is emerging from the painted tyre or has been cut in two by it, Monogram was situated within Myers’s text on Surrealism and US art in association with the seditious and insurgent bearing of the review, set by the heightening crisis in Algeria, and borne in both its content and language. This was reinforced by the insertion of the quotation by Leon Trotsky placed immediately above the reproduction of Monogram: ‘La Révolution doit conquérir pour tous les homes le droit, non seulement au pain, mais à la poésie’ (‘The Revolution must win for all men not only the right to bread, but also to poetry’). The resolute message, which had nothing to do with the Trotskyist past of Myers who was also well on his way to distancing himself from Surrealism by 1960 (and who later declared the movement had ended by 1949),71 carried an obvious subversive appeal to the Surrealists, ex-Surrealists and friends such as Schwarz (who had been in touch with Breton since 1942 and been expelled from his native Egypt due to his Trotskyist sympathies),72 and it had been cited at least once before as an epigraph for a Surrealist tract.73 Lebel confirmed the commitment of Front unique to the revolution in Algeria and its association of Monogram with revolution through his inclusion of the Declaration of the 121 in this second issue of the periodical and also his introductory remarks in it, which were led out by and incorporated a statement endorsing internationalism signed by the Surrealists dated June 1959, illustrated with a previously unpublished drawing said to be by Lenin that showed an insular network existing between solely US corporations that was entirely contradictory to such internationalism.74 The text by Lebel self-identified unambiguously as Surrealist and was followed in the review by articles by the Surrealist Jean-Louis Bedouin and others such as Édouard Jaguer and Ragnar von Holten who were close to Surrealism, as well as by reproductions of works by Jean Benoît, Wilhelm Freddie, Agustín Cárdenas and so on.75 At the same time, Lebel well and truly justified the recent complaints of the Surrealists about his extraSurrealist activities by including work in Front unique by an eclectic throng of artists

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who had little or no connection with the movement, such as Guido Biasi, Érro, Öyvind Fahlström, Karl Otto Götz, Alberto Martini and Amedeo Modigliani, as well as a brief text by Jouffroy and, edging further out, a poem by Corso, one of the Beat poets with whom Lebel had become friendly.76 But the crowning motif of the ill-assortedness of this issue of Front unique is to be found towards the end, where a dossier devoted to the ongoing project of Lebel and Jouffroy, titled Anti-Procès, is collected, including not only statements meant to clarify its aims and defend it from its accusers in the press, but a citation of perhaps the most detailed and damaging indictment of it: the Surrealists’ very own ‘tract de luxe Tir de barrage’ (1960).77 In this way, the increasing distance of Lebel and Jouffroy from Surrealism is gradually marked out across Front unique, from its first pages to these last ones of the second issue of the short-lived review, devoted to Anti-Procès, the main cause of their departure from the Surrealist group. It is unlikely that Rauschenberg knew that Monogram would be serving the cause of revolution in Front unique. In my next chapter, I ask how his work served Anti-procès by asking how that project served the revolution.

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Resistance artist: Bed at Anti-Procès

The self-avowed Surrealist intonation and revolutionary political agenda of Front unique did not prevent the review from showcasing a diverse roster of artists, a miscellany that increased between the first and second issues and demonstrates its close relationship and chronological overlap with Anti-Procès.1 Currently something of a footnote in art history, Anti-Procès was the travelling series of cultural events staged across April 1960 to June 1961 by Jean-Jacques Lebel and Alain Jouffroy, comprising and often-merging art, poetry, performance, music, film projections and lectures. The title was freely translated by its organizers on one occasion as ‘Down with Moral Judgements,’ resonant of Marcel Duchamp’s much-quoted closing words in interview with Jouffroy in 1954: ‘[t]he idea of judgement should disappear.’2 It included what is generally agreed to be the first Happening in Europe: L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely, put on in Venice by Lebel on 14 July 1960 and reported in the dossier carried by the second issue of Front unique, where emphasis was placed on the political content of performance as opposed to the Happenings that had been held in the United States since 1958.3 Although Laurel Fredrickson writes of L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely as ‘a translational adaptation of the legacies of the historical avant-gardes of Dada and Surrealism’ and argues that opposition to the undeclared war in Algeria helped ‘begin the transition from Surrealist theatre to Happenings,’ as chronicled in my third and sixth chapters in this book, Happenings would be rejected in 1964 as shopworn Dada in remarks made by Surrealists Robert Benayoun, André Breton, Elisabeth Lenk and José Pierre (who would nevertheless forgive Robert Rauschenberg his participation in them).4 By contrast, they were crucial to Lebel who understood the Happening as a political and poetic enterprise, deeply rooted in what Susan Sontag called in 1962 the ‘Surrealist tradition,’ yet conjoining the recent art of Rauschenberg and Öyvind Fahlström and the compositions of John Cage. In this chapter, I translate the metaphorical repercussions of Rauschenberg’s Bed within Lebel’s notion of ‘poésie directe,’ his preferred term to ‘Happenings,’ as it was positioned at the Anti-Procès venture in a fraught historical context, with the larger aim of restoring the metaphorical agency to Bed that once stirred Lebel and the Surrealists, and countering recent art historical naratives of the art of the 1960s that have given short shrift to both and their passionate activities in support of Algeria.5

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Poésie directe and Anti-procès Benayoun’s reaction to Happenings and Rauschenberg’s involvement in them had followed by a few years Lebel’s departure from the Surrealist group and came not long after Sontag’s take on the new genre, noted in my introduction to this book, which Benayoun would have known about (he was the main Anglophile among the French Surrealists and fluent in English). Sontag construed their overall ambience as oneiric and determined by a ‘Surrealist sensibility,’ generalizing beyond actual Surrealism to encompass a ‘Surrealist tradition’ that created ‘new meanings or counter-meanings through radical juxtaposition,’ but was established in the technique of the great precursor of Surrealism the Comte de Lautréamont.6 Although she mentioned in passing in her text the latest group exhibition Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain, which she must have visited because she was in New York when it was held there at the end of 1960 through the beginning of 1961, Sontag thought the ‘postSurrealist’ ‘prescriptions which [Antonin] Artaud offers in The Theatre and Its Double [1938, written 1931–6] describe better than anything else what Happenings are.’7 Sontag’s assertion of the pre-eminence of Artaud in the interpretation of contemporary culture shows her caught midway between approval of Surrealism and attraction to the critical legacy that succeeded it and, to a certain extent, was spawned by it. This was a trajectory set, once again, by the zero degree writing of Samuel Beckett and the Nouveau Roman, joined by Maurice Blanchot, who had written of the ‘infinite proliferation of emptiness’ of Artaud’s texts in La Nouvelle revue française in 1956, soon followed by the lofty status afforded Artaud by Michel Foucault in his History of Madness (1961) and by the platform given Artaud’s writings and their commentary in Tel Quel.8 Although Lebel stated his agreement with Sontag about the importance of Artaud to Happenings, his larger attitude towards the genre was determined otherwise by his Surrealist past.9 Sontag had inferred that the ‘abusive involvement of the audience seems to provide, in default of anything else, the dramatic spine of the Happening.’10 Writing in 1966, Lebel considered this a misapprehension brought on by a spectator seeking a standard narrative or conventional theatrical configuration where power continued to be directed downwards from performer onto audience.11 But contemporary culture as conceived by Lebel – who proposed affinities between Happenings, audience participation works such as Rauschenberg’s Combine Black Market (1961) and Fahlström’s ‘variable paintings,’ as well as certain works of modern theatre and music such as Cage’s – was evidence, rather, of a new empowerment of the regardeur/beholder whose ‘promotion to an active role marks a momentous change: the end of cultural feudalism and the beginning of the era announced by Lautréamont and the libertarians. Art, too, must be made by all and not by one.’12 This brought about a peculiar conclusion to Lebel’s disagreement with Sontag because it culminated in the very same initiator of the ‘Surrealist tradition,’ namely Lautréamont, through whom we saw Sontag establish Happenings as ‘radical juxtaposition,’ yet whose work was for Lebel an exemplary instance of poésie directe, the label he favoured over ‘Happenings.’13 The Anti-Procès project emerged out of poésie directe. By this term, Lebel meant to refer to ‘the poetic experience’ or ‘poetic act,’ not the pre-written work easily reducible

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to art.14 It was close to anarchist ‘direct action’ in its refusal of the dominant culture by means of a swerve from the habitual languages that culture depended upon and this was why the activities it described had a revolutionary role in society as ‘psychic events.’15 In later years, Lebel stated in interview that poésie directe had a distinguished lineage in France as well as a contemporary catalyst in Cage: I­t was a question, for me, of following the theory and practice of Artaud, of a theatre of magical operations, on one hand, and, on the other, in the context of the mutation triggered by John Cage (abolition of the frontier between art and life, attention paid to the everyday), to snatch languages from their conventional contexts and supports. You brought up [Arthur] Rimbaud. It’s him, in fact, who announces the surging of the poem into life. The ‘derangement of all the senses.’ The lived experience that ‘writes’ the writer. All this, it seems to me, is contained in the expression ‘poésie directe.’16

The two vectors of influence – the importance of Cage for Rauschenberg and Lautréamont/Rimbaud for Surrealism – are usually said to represent distinct avantgarde traditions.17 However, when tracked by way of Lebel’s poésie directe, which resituated the poem as a ‘synopsis of a lived experience,’ they intersect theoretically and historically with metaphorical and political precision at Anti-Procès.18 Sparked by a gathering in a Paris gallery held on 20 February 1960 towards the end of the run of the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme or EROS, where poetry by Artaud, Aimé Césaire, Robert Desnos, Henri Michaux and Benjamin Péret was read out to jazz accompaniment, Anti-Procès attracted a large audience in the three stages of its migration: from Paris at the galerie des quatre saisons (actually Pierre Prévert’s cabaret the Fontaine des Quatre Saisons) over 29 April–9 May 1960, to Venice at the Galleria Il Canale across 18 June–8 July 1960 (timed to begin on the same day as the thirtieth Venice Biennale as a kind of ‘anti-biennale’) then Milan at the Galeria Brera from 5–30 June 1961.19 It was extremely ambitious, including work by Surrealists, former Surrealists or soon-to-be-Surrealists such as Bona, Victor Brauner, Jorge Camacho, Agustín Cárdenas, Jacques Hérold, Wifredo Lam, Matta and Meret Oppenheim, alongside emergent current artists with no obligation towards Surrealism (which no doubt helped confirm the ‘confusion of values’ in the eyes of the Surrealists passing judgement on Lebel in BIEF a fortnight before the first Anti-Procès in Paris), such as Camille Bryen, César, Dado, Gérard Deschamps, Bernard Dufour, Françoise Dufrêne, Fahlström, Lucio Fontana, Raymond Hains, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Robert Lapoujade, Michaux, Bernard Saby, Jean Tinguely and Cy Twombly. Rauschenberg was among them and can be included in this second category. The Anti-Procès events took place under declarations of anti-racism and antinationalism by Lebel and Jouffroy. Lebel described the project years later as follows: an arts event devoted entirely to rejecting colonialism and, quite particularly, the torture being systematically practiced by the French military against Algerian political prisoners, both male and female . . . forty-eight international artists . . . simply through the presence of their works, took a stand against colonialism, the

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At the first Anti-Procès in Paris, Lebel and Jouffroy affirmed ‘the sovereignty of both poet and artist along with their systematic disobedience in the face of all dogmas,’ and ‘a refusal to respect the idols and the rules of the intellectual game.’21 Understandably, the Surrealists took remarks like these as admonishments. The same went for the introductory summary published by the pair later in the year in the dossier carried by the second issue of Front unique, coinciding precisely with the second distribution of the Declaration of the 121, contrasting the non-compliance of Anti-Procès with ‘the general sclerosis of intellectual activity, entirely entangled in criticism that the men who assume such activity address themselves to continually.’22 At the second event in Venice, a trilingual poster in Italian, French and English authored by Lebel and Jouffroy attacked the domination of the art market and both the Venice and Paris Biennales, alleging that Anti-Procès heralded a contemporary crisis in art internationally that would force a ‘rupture with official art comparable to the rupture Kandinsky, Futurism and Dada brought about from 1910 to 1916.’23 In spite of the authors’ implicit criticism of Surrealism, its central paragraph, assailing ‘Christian civilization and rationalism’ and demanding the ‘preliminary destruction of the morality, culture and religion of such societies as deny man sovereignty,’ mirrored closely the language of the Surrealist broadsides Lebel and Jouffroy had endorsed, particularly the anti-clerical leaflet of 1948 Back to Your Kennels, Yelpers of God, signed by Jouffroy.24 Alyce Mahon has, in fact, catalogued Lebel’s numerous, continuing theoretical and thematic ties to Surrealism through his art, language and polemics – his preoccupation with eroticism, myth, ‘primitivism’ and ‘outsider art,’ with the Freudian unconscious and Bataillean transgression, as well as his acknowledgement of the artist as seer through the unification of the real and the imaginary – at least up to his publication of his volume Le Happening in 1966 in which ‘his ideas were rich with Surrealist ambition and terminology.’25 Organized ‘in open contempt of any commercial imperatives, following a purely ethical criterion’ in Lebel’s recollection, Anti-Procès 3 in Milan was the high point of these activities.26 Its anti-authoritarianism and insurgency were plain for all to see upon opening its bilingual catalogue where Jouffroy’s Surrealist rhetoric of ‘the need to act on the world and to transform it’ and anarchist targeting of the courts, church, police, army and bureaucracy are rolled out beneath a photograph of a French policeman perfunctorily hauling away a protestor like a bag of sand.27 Lebel provided the other essay for the thin catalogue, crowned by a 1919 photograph of Lenin that prominently featured Leon Trotsky, which was equally incendiary in its proclamation of the ‘total insubordination’ of the enterprise, if somewhat defensive in its overall bearing in the face of the attacks that had been made from all sides on Anti-Procès since its first outing in Paris in April the previous year.28 The exhibition itself brought together artists ‘whose sole common ground was that they jointly declared themselves to be categorically opposed to torture and colonialism,’ Lebel remembered, and whose ‘quite dissimilar works – and, in some cases, masterworks,’ he wrote, ‘strove toward the same objective: denouncing the very principle of colonialist violence.’29 By analogy with Algerian

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Resistance fighters and draft resisters, and in line with the accent placed on ‘a resistance . . . born through a spontaneous assumption of conscience’ in the Declaration of the 121 (the only italicised word in the tract),30 as well as the stated aim in the poster of the Venice Anti-Procès to broach ‘the question of the resistance of artists and intellectuals,’ Lebel even went so far as to state later on that Anti-Procès had ‘supplied proof of the existence of Resistance-artists.’31 Among them was Rauschenberg.

Bed and Algeria The presence of Rauschenberg at Anti-Procès 3 confirmed him as ‘an early colleague and sometime associate’ of Lebel in the words of a writer on the French artist.32 Rauschenberg’s ‘masterwork’ Bed (1955) was shown at Anti-Procès 3 in Milan, its second outing in Europe (after EROS across 1959–60) and first in Italy at the second time of trying (though this one goes unrecorded in all of the main chronologies and exhibition histories on the artist), allowing Jouffroy and Lebel an opportunity to reacquaint themselves with the object and assert what they must have perceived as its topicality.33 Nicolas Calas had inferred an operation of domestic, sexual, surgical or animal cruelty in Bed when he averred in 1959 that ‘the beloved object underwent the abstract-expressionist vivisection,’34 and there have been many interpretations of Bed since it was first shown at Rauschenberg’s inaugural solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in March 1958 that dwell on the coalition of sex, crime and murder, as catalogued in the early 1990s by James Leggio and in spite of Rauschenberg’s own much-quoted opinion of it as ‘one of the friendliest pictures I’ve ever painted.’35 However, that violence took on a different slant at Anti-Procès 3, where, as in Front unique, Rauschenberg’s work was placed in direct juxtaposition with statements of revolution, anti-colonialism and solidarity with the Algerian people. The subtext of Bed at that event, then, lay not only in the increasingly bloody war in Algeria, which began the year before it was made, but, more specifically, powerfully and metaphorically, in acts of violence committed against a collective home and of physical and sexual abuse perpetrated upon individual citizens. Rauschenberg’s creation of Bed in 1955 had coincided with news of the uses of torture in Algeria, which would become more widely known after the Battle of Algiers (1956–7) when the military assumed the responsibilities of the police;36 torture quickly became ‘a growing canker for France, leaving behind a poison that would linger in the French system long after the war itself had ended,’ as one historian put it.37 A  significant publication in this regard was La Question (1958) by the FrenchAlgerian communist journalist Henri Alleg, the first and most widely read personal account of torture carried out by French paratroopers, which caused a national scandal when it revealed the institutionalization of the practice in Algeria (prefaced by JeanPaul Sartre in a slightly later edition, it was censored after six weeks).38 Alleg’s book and others that exposed the use of torture at the time, along with media accounts of massacres, mutilations and atrocities by both sides, were the means by which the war became reported internationally in 1957–8.39 Matta protested with the large painting La Question (1958, Figure 5.1), depicting a recumbent figure in burning, bleeding tones,

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Figure 5.1 Matta, La Question (1958). Oil on canvas, 200 × 295 cm. Private collection, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. Image Pace Gallery New York.

glowing like a lump of metal, fresh out the forge for a further pummelling. Jouffroy was quick to verify its origin in Alleg’s narrative, also confirming the larger indignation surrounding torture by both sides at the height of the conflict in Algeria, in the essay he wrote on Matta for the artist’s solo show held at the Surrealist-friendly galerie du Dragon from 10 June till 5 July 1958, and La Question was shown again at Anti-Procès in Paris in 1960.40 By contrast with the severe, angular machinery, bleak setting and imprecise space of the alien, robotic cosmos figured in Matta’s La Question, which had also been shown at the second documenta in Kassel in 1959, Rauschenberg’s tactile, commonplace Bed (also shipped to Kassel that year) brought an unbearable intimacy to brutality at AntiProcès 3.41 Whether perceived as hanging or conceived as prostrate, Bed possesses a ‘homey’ quality if not quite the ‘wistful domesticity’ observed by Lisa Wainwright in the Combines that run across the same period.42 Drawing upon Freud’s ‘uncanny,’ Wainwright argued that the domestic elements of Charlene (1954) and Collection (1954) are ‘made vaguely strange, as they hover in relation to adjacent objects with other meanings,’43 while she regards Bed as ‘Rauschenberg’s most aggressive use of fabric as a sign for comfort, security and domesticity’ in which ‘those objects which appear to signal the familiar (mother’s quilt) also issue the unfamiliar (the quilt now mutilated by an array of painted marks).’44 Wainwright turns appropriately to the inconclusive yet illuminating remarks made on Bed in 1963 by Rauschenberg supporter Alan R. Solomon, meant to identify the contradictory emotions stirred by

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the ‘frenzied painting’ despoiling the Albers-like design on the quilt of Rauschenberg’s principal work: How are our responses to the familiar and comfortable altered by the introduction of ominous and enigmatic associations? The thousand comforts of a patchwork counterpane (grandma, home, childhood, order) give way to the horror (joy?) of corruption (enrichment?) by paint (blood?), producing Exhibit A, an arena of violence (what crimes, what unconscious feelings, what essential disorder?).45

Writing the year after the end of what had long been called the ‘dirty war’ in Algeria, Solomon gave no more thought to that conflict in his deliberation of Bed than Rauschenberg did in creating it. But its sullied bedclothes and vertical register resonate when considered in the period of the war and the linkage of that outrage with modernization, domesticity and hygiene in France, as formulated by Kristin Ross: Algeria, far from constituting the ‘other’ of France in this period, is better seen as its monstrous and distorted double. Double in that Algeria, like France, will be the scene of some violent housecleaning; distorted, in that French men, who would never lift a finger to do housework at home in France, are put to work in the homes of Algerians. . . . For the Algerian, to be ‘at home,’ an inhabitant, is to be at the centre of the conflict: the Algerian inhabitant, unlike the French, is not necessarily depoliticized or privatized; to be at home is possibly the most politicized state, the most connected, in solidarity with, most vitally a part of, the nationalist struggle. In Algeria during these years, as in France, the inhabitant is central, the status of home dweller newly important, but the identity is inverted.46

Ross goes on to trace themes and metaphors of hygiene in French journalism from 1956 onwards, notably in the writings of Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet (making the most of one familiar quotation, among others, by Robbe-Grillet: ‘things are there. Their surfaces are distinct and smooth, intact’).47 The logic by which domestic hygiene was metaphorically extended from modern France to ravage ‘backward’ Algeria creates a powerful discursive context for the disconcerting inclusion of Bed in Anti-Procès 3 by Lebel and Jouffroy. Leggio demonstrated its capacity to connote along complex paths of allusion throughout his heavily inferential interpretation of the work as an analogy for the human body, to the extent that ‘there is a sense in which Bed, or any painting, can be not only evidence of a body but can be a body itself,’ leading to the suggestion that the pillow of Bed reinforces ‘the painting-as-suspended-body metaphor.’48 This proposition gains credence from rarely cited remarks made by Rauschenberg in 1958 that are very revealing about the origins of Bed, made a few months after it had been unveiled at his solo show at Castelli’s gallery. They concern a reproduction he owned of Francisco de Zurbarán’s Saint Serapion (1628, Figure 5.2), featuring an understated portrayal of the crucified and, ultimately, tortured, dismembered, disembowelled priest and martyr: ‘I used to have a very depressing Zurbarán over the bed. . . . I cut it out of Art News. It was like the

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Figure  5.2 Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Serapion (1628). Oil on canvas, 120 × 103 cm. Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford CT. Image Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum.

relation of a man to a sheet. He really looked as though he should be in bed – he may be dead but he looks as though he should be asleep.’49 Shown at Anti-procès when emphasis was being placed on ‘controlling domesticity’ in both France and her unruly colony, the bearing of Bed also creates the impression of publically airing dirty laundry while it is still on the bed.50 But more acutely, Bed mirrors precisely the means of torture by suspension or prostration of the body in bathtub or on flat surface.51 Rauschenberg’s Combine also seems potentially to allude to the domestic spaces and appliances that facilitated torture, in the unfinished apartment building in El-Biar that throws its terrible shadow across Alleg’s La Question.52 The makeshift bed features there as the site of inconceivable dread (‘There is not one of them who does not turn on his straw mattress at night with the thought that the dawn may be sinister’), as well as Alleg’s own suffering (‘I tried to lie on it on my stomach but it was stuffed inside with barbed wire’) and the author’s witness to that of others (‘I lay down again on my mattress, while a great rumpus of boots, blows and cries of pain invaded all the floors’).53 Such associations were virtually assured by the inclusion of a sound collage at the exhibition comprising first person testimony of torture and what Lebel called later ‘heartrending cries of pain and the most courageous insults uttered – in both Arabic and Kabyle,’ aimed by men and

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women at their torturers.54 At Anti-Procès 3, Bed was perfectly positioned, let us say, to probe the imagination of an audience shocked by media revelations of appalling physical and sexual cruelty in Algeria. The most repellent of these was the ordeal of Djamila Boupacha, a member of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Boupacha had been arrested with her family at home in February 1960 then beaten, brutally tortured and viciously raped until she confessed to planting a bomb in a café in Algiers, as recounted to the horrified readers of Le Monde by Simone de Beauvoir and L’Express by Françoise Sagan in June 1960.55 Matta responded with another large painting La Supplice de Djamila (1960, sometimes called La Question Djamila), while Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Boupacha (1961) received wide circulation and was reproduced on the cover of de Beauvoir’s monograph on her, published by Gallimard in 1962. The abhorrent revelations of 1960 had followed on from the resumption of the execution of Algerian insurgents in January on President Charles de Gaulle’s orders; they would be succeeded by new levels of atrocity initiated in Algeria from the beginning of 1961 by the rise of the anti-Gaullist, underground Organization de l’Armée Secrète or OAS, which carried out a series of increasingly high-profile bombings, stabbings and drive-by murders from May, in promiscuous and often-arbitrary operations that brought FLN reprisals and took place during and long after the run of Anti-Procès 3.56 In a broader interpretation of its capacity to connote, then, Rauschenberg’s Bed was as powerful if less explicit a statement within Anti-Procès 3 as Matta’s and Picasso’s were outside of it. Jouffroy perceived the passivity in Rauschenberg’s approach to making art as a faculty that guaranteed an inferential yield, stating three years later without reference to Anti-Procès: ‘[u]nlike one such as Matta, who judges his characters and rightly speaks out against torture, Rauschenberg . . . does not seek to intervene in the ideological debate or, if he does intervene verbally, it is always to accentuate the ambiguity of his approach . . . .’57 The talent of Bed to disturb at Anti-Procès was amplified beyond narrow factuality by the sheer scope of its allusive field, deftly translating reportage of civilian abduction and arrest, torture, murder and rape, which were magnified by the conscious and unconscious associations, memories, fantasies and fears of a troubled audience placed on trial by a dense and comprehensive symbol. Speaking of the Anti-Procès manifestations, Lebel would say later that ‘politics can be poetic, poetry can be visual and to do with sound.’58 It was manifestly not political nor a poem, nor was it direct in conveying a conscious meaning, but it was because of that charged unspokeness that Bed could resonate in the context of Anti-Procès as a meticulous instance of poésie directe. This reading obliges us to view the appearance of Bed at Anti-Procès 3 as an expanded, more focused sequel to its presentation at EROS, which had taken place in the period between the Alleg and Boupacha disclosures and in the months preceding the Declaration of the 121. The potential of Bed as a work of propaganda must have been recognized at EROS by Lebel and Jouffroy (who had recently written favourably of Surrealism in his journalism, as acknowledged by the Surrealists).59 Surrealist exhibitions had never been purely polemical events in the political or social sense. In the crisis circumstances of the France of 1959–60, though, with greater discretion than would happen at Anti-Procès, the Surrealists twinned not only the censorship under de Gaulle of erotic literature, such as the Marquis de Sade’s, with that of political dissent

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and journalism reporting the dirty war in Algeria, but also alluded through the idea of ‘scandal’ to the relationship between the sexual body and torture.60 The Declaration of the 121 had materialized in the midst of a larger outcry in France at news of murder and torture in Algeria, and it was specifically publicized and vindicated at Anti-Procès 3 in Milan, closely associated with the exhibition by Jouffroy in his essay for the catalogue and defended in his by Lebel.61 The centrality of the document to the exhibition is evident in its appearance in the protest painting initiated by Lebel and created with Enrico Baj, Roberto Crippa, Gianni Dova, Antonio Recalcati and Érro, Le Grand tableau anti-fasciste collectif (1960) (see Colour Plate 11), where a copy of the inflammatory tract is collaged on to the lower right of the picture as its ‘caption.’62 Partly indebted to collective drawings and paintings by Surrealists, to Matta’s hard-to-define spaces and take-up of popular graphic styles including those of science fiction, comics and graffiti (Jouffroy, Lebel and especially Érro held the Chilean Surrealist artist in very high regard at that moment), the Grand tableau also included a reminder of Boupacha’s rape, rendered by the scandalized Lebel towards the upper left of the huge canvas by way of a pair of ornate, spread legs decorated with eyes returning the viewer’s gaze, a motif borrowed from Picasso who had explored it in a group of paintings of late March 1932, most famously Nude Woman Lying in the Sun on the Beach.63 Part of the Grand tableau can be glimpsed to the right in the background of a group photograph of the exhibiting artists assembled at the opening of Anti-procès 3, which records Rauschenberg’s presence with other artists in the exhibition space at the opening (Figure 5.3). Looking tanned and casual, he is standing beside and perhaps listening to a just-visible Jouffroy, with Lebel, Ileana and Michael Sonnabend enjoying

Figure  5.3 Mario Dondero, photograph of organizers, exhibiting artists including Robert Rauschenberg and lenders at Anti-procès 3, Milan (1961).

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each others’ company in front of him.64 Lebel recalls that Ileana had arranged the loan of Bed from her former spouse Castelli, brought directly to Milan by the married couple who travelled with Rauschenberg from Paris where the artist’s solo show at the galerie Daniel Cordier was about to expire after garnering little attention.65 By contrast, early in the run of the Milan event, a few days after this photograph was taken, Lebel was arrested and the Grand tableau was confiscated by the Italian police, ‘probably alerted by the French authorities,’ again, according to Lebel himself, who was only too aware of the censorship of the Declaration of the 121 by the French state.66 The painting would not be seen again until 1985.

Politics and poetics: A portrait of Rauschenberg Did Rauschenberg know what Lebel and Jouffroy were getting him into by inviting him to show at Anti-Procès? One of the artist’s many devotees stated in 1990 that ‘[t]hroughout his career, Rauschenberg has been a political activist, supporting movements for peace, social justice and preservation of the environment’ and that ‘social commentary [has] always characterized his work,’ at least until he lost confidence in politicians by the 1980s.67 This is overemphatic and under-informative. It is true that today it is hard not to read the Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (1958–60), for instance, which had appeared in the Milanese Metro in the month before the Milan Anti-Procès, as a critical commentary on the modern world. After all, unlike Salvador Dalí, Rauschenberg created his Hell not in some imaginary space but by way of the media’s representations of this world, and it was a vision of the world specifically as Inferno, not Purgatorio and certainly not Paradiso (which, unlike Dalí again, he never got around to illustrating).68 Yet it was only really in the period from the Life magazine collages A Modern Inferno of December 1965, when he ‘had grown more sensitive to forces around him . . . political assassinations, racial violence, the war in Vietnam,’ as Mary Lynn Kotz concedes, peaking with the Currents silkscreens of 1970, that Rauschenberg gave himself to overt social comment.69 He confirmed this in a statement made at the time of his Leo Castelli Gallery exhibition of Cardboards late in 1971, which revealed the waning of this aspect of his practice: ‘[f]or five years I have deliberately used every opportunity with my work to create a focus on world problems, local atrocities, and in some rare instances celebrate man’s accomplishments.’70 As Dore Ashton put it in an article around that time, leading out with Rauschenberg’s oil-andsilkscreen Axle (1964) spanning the title page (and under the customary guidance of Ralph Waldo Emerson), in the 1960s: ‘Rauschenberg and others . . . became, almost against their will, social critics.’71 Rauschenberg would obviously have been opposed to the abuses of human rights in France and North Africa, but he was never fully able to see behind the headlines, was certainly not a revolutionary and never a non-conformist in its furthest sense of a critic of civilization itself like Lebel and the Surrealists. Moreover, his ostensible commitment to the causes proclaimed by Anti-Procès through his presence at the event needs to be balanced against the very open, diversely readable nature of his work in

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spite of its many references to US politics, society and culture. His shrewdly floated equivocation manoeuvred in favour of his work at home and abroad, as Hiroko Ikegami states, preserving Rauschenberg’s imperative to promote it in very different contexts in Europe.72 This is evident even in the photographic record since Rauschenberg is not to be seen in another group photograph of the Anti-Procès artists in Milan taken on the same occasion, posed this time before the highly charged, soon-to-be-confiscated Grand tableau. Nevertheless, Lebel had become hooked on exploring the US artist’s innovations from about 1960, undoubtedly abetted by discussion with Jouffroy. This is imparted by both his wall and floor-based work from that year such as Gauguin’s Spirit (1960, Figure 5.4), Portrait of Nietzsche (1961) and Désirée (ou Comment regarder un tableau) (1962), caught in a transition of divided- or shared loyalties somewhere between Breton’s easel-size ‘poem-objects’ such as the well-known Poem-Object (1941, Figure 5.5), which he had probably seen as a child in New York and almost certainly saw (like Rauschenberg) at The Art of Assemblage at The Museum of Modern Art in the autumn of 1961, and Rauschenberg’s larger Combines; he also tried his hand at transfer drawings in 1961–4.73

­Figure  5.4  Jean-Jacques Lebel, Gauguin’s Spirit (1960). Mixed media on wood, 128 × 101 ×

50  cm. Private collection. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy of JeanJacques Lebel.

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Figure 5.5  André Breton, Poem-Object (1941). Carved wood bust of man, oil lantern, framed photograph, toy boxing gloves, and paper mounted on drawing board, 45.8 × 53.2 × 10.9 cm. Kay Sage Bequest, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. © 2022, digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

Lebel’s attachment to the artist is confirmed unequivocally in his collage Portrait de Rauschenberg (1961) (see Colour Plate 12). The homage consists mainly of magazine and newspaper photographs, mostly positioned upright, stuck down on plywood and arranged like panels across three wide horizontal bands with Ripolin enamel and oil paint added. It bears more the appearance of a vertical notice board, or ‘bulletin board’ in the inventory of Rauschenberg’s symbolism catalogued by Leo Steinberg in ‘Other Criteria’ (1968, 1972), than any of the more determinably horizontal spaces itemised in that text.74 Although it conveys some of the same visual cacophony typical of Combines, taken by Rauschenberg to an extreme in some such as Untitled (c. 1954–5/1958) in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Lebel’s choice of images is more straightforwardly arch than Rauschenberg would normally allow. The same forthrightness manifests a marked polemic in Portrait de Rauschenberg served by a blunt humour and unambiguous treatment of visual and textual materials that were quite alien to the US artist. As in the Anti-Procès statements, Lebel aimed his criticism fairly candidly at art world commerce, getting across his message primarily by the bag of swag marked ‘$300’ and juxtaposition of clippings of text: ‘$2 Million Earmarked,’ ‘Defense by Color,’ ‘A Sensible Buy,’ ‘$ Rolling in,’ ‘the price of oxygen’ and ‘a Bargain.’ Later sculpture such as Little Boy, Je ne suis (presque) pas une bombe sexuelle (1981) and Drapeau (1989, Figure 5.6) further carry out his divergence from

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Figure 5.6 Jean-Jacques, Drapeau (1989). Assemblage, 167 × 81.5 × 50 cm. Collection Patrick

Bergers, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy of Jean-Jacques Lebel.

the ‘ambiguity’ of Rauschenberg’s work indicated by Jouffroy, by their inclusion of the props of early Rauschenbergian domesticity (a stool and pillow respectively) towards the creation, nevertheless, of conspicuous social and political comment. It has been argued in a rare comparison of their 1960s work that Lebel used cutout images and text ‘in a more raw, direct and unmediated way’ than Rauschenberg did, retaining their ‘inherent brutality’ and achieving a ‘disparate montage’ owed to Dada, while Rauschenberg’s Combines ‘paradoxically rescue “painting” because of their unified, painterly surface, even though his name is frequently associated with challenging it.’75 This is perceptive and reasonable, offering a rationale for the assertion made elsewhere that the label ‘Neo-Dada’ might ‘be applied far more fittingly to Lebel’s work than . . . to the Happenings of Allan Kaprow or the assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg,’ due to a self-conscious political and cultural provocation reminiscent of Johannes Baader.76 These factors can indeed be viewed as strengths of Lebel’s work, even if they do not so much highlight a weakness of Rauschenberg’s (which is not necessarily being implied). However, it was by Lebel’s coarser and cruder, heavily referential play – denotation clothed as connotation – that the artist’s Surrealist past (betrayed very beautifully in Portrait de Rauschenberg by the hand emerging from the trouser leg of the revolved airborne female to the left, worthy of Max Ernst in its seamless graft) and ongoing will to ‘change life by whatever means we find poetic,’ as he and Jouffroy so broadly put it at Anti-Procès in Venice, were compromised, by a priority

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placed by Lebel on the wish to imply, indicate and polemicize in his art.77 This is to say that Lebel’s is a teleological oeuvre orientated towards a (political) foil for the most part, developed from a conscious will to inform and persuade that is quite distinct from either Surrealist automatism or the improvisatory method of Rauschenberg, especially in this period where the latter gave a greater share to chance. Such is the case in Portrait de Rauschenberg, too. Far from alluding elliptically to the artist, it contains a mini-reproduction of the Combine Talisman (1958), the work of oil-and-collage on canvas that had seized Lebel’s and Jouffroy’s attention at the Paris Biennale two years earlier and never let go, as well as a photograph of Rauschenberg close to it in the upper right hand corner. The bluff references to his work abound in the clippings of the words ‘Royal Crown Cola’ and ‘THE JUNK PILE.’ Meanwhile, accompanying the usual tally of unclothed women to be found in Lebel’s work taken from advertisements and other sources are, unusually, a cluster of photographs of male bodybuilders, which might be considered early allusions to Rauschenberg’s sexuality.78 Any doubt about this is put to rest upon examination of the figure in underwear teamed with the muscleman at the lower left of the tableau; a collaged male head has turned the she – holding a target, no less – into a he, celebrating without subtlety the union of Johns and Rauschenberg whose journey to Europe together during the period of Anti-Procès 3 was further recorded, as shown earlier, by the photograph of the latter at the opening. It was a motley gathering of artists at all the Anti-Procès events, giving the Surrealists plenty of scope well before the third one in Milan to hound Lebel and Jouffroy for what was perceived as haphazardness and revolutionary posturing. This took place in Tir de barrage (1960), the broadside against the duo that confirmed Lebel’s estrangement and severed Jouffroy’s ties with the movement for the second time. The leaflet was a major statement occasioned mainly by Anti-Procès in which Lebel was labelled a confused ‘windbag’ and Jouffroy a clumsy journalist and hypocrite, while both were accused of exploiting the ideas and connections of Surrealism and tricking others into joining the Anti-Procès venture.79 The main point was the Surrealists’ insistence on the role that ethics continued to play in all of their activities in spite and even because of the freedom it gave the metaphorical drift of the unconscious – the analogical image it cast up displayed ‘a vital tension straining toward health, pleasure, tranquillity, thankfulness, respect for customs,’ Breton had intoned in ‘Ascendant Sign’ published in 194880 – as opposed to the liquidation of ‘moral judgement’ announced by Lebel and Jouffroy at Anti-Procès.81 The art of those who showed at the event could not be untethered from morality, then, according to the Surrealists; the aesthetic value of a work was tied to its ethical stake. Such was the position put forward a few months after Tir de barrage in France observateur, which was harassed by threats of censorship and confiscation, by way of a critical sally against Anti-procès by the art critic Charles Estienne, a close friend of the Surrealists’ and another signatory of the Declaration of the 121. Calling out Jouffroy over ‘this sinister “liberty of indifference”’ sung at Anti-procès, which was precisely the quality Jouffroy would vaunt in Rauschenberg’s work, Estienne evoked the ‘Algiers Putsch’ of

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13 May 1958 and the names of Alleg, Boupacha and the French-Algerian mathematics teacher Maurice Audin (after whom Lebel would title a work the following year), tortured and murdered by the French army in the same building that had held his friend Alleg, declaring that ‘[t]he Alleg Affair is without doubt the Dreyfus Affair of our time’ and this was not the moment to stay silent about moral responsibility.82 Lebel responded in the same magazine a few weeks later, claiming Estienne was flatly contradicting his own rejection of ‘all political and moral responsibility’ made in Front unique in 1956, adding that moral judgement was almost always either negative or ineffective and strictly for those who ‘no longer care about freedom except to refuse it (to themselves and to others),’ serving as ‘justification for collective inactivity, for the wait and see of those who have forgotten to change the world.’83 A few more weeks passed before Jouffroy’s own rejoinder to Estienne in France observateur equally refuted Surrealism, pointing out the resistance to torture and state execution at the Paris Anti-procès, especially in the work of Matta that was placed at the centre of the exhibition and in the play performed for the occasion, which was meant to demonstrate that the withdrawal of judgement was itself an act of subversion and that moral judgement was irrelevant and mattered only to oppressive regimes and ‘café revolutionaries.’84 Jouffroy’s comments were undermined by the scope of the work shown and the clearly polemical intent of some of it, as well as by the position set out by the organizers of Anti-Procès (more so later on by the brandishing of the Declaration of the 121 at the subsequent endeavour in Milan); they obscured the very nature of the event as one big moral statement ‘following a purely ethical criterion’ as Lebel recalled it, drawn from the Surrealist pasts of both.85 More pointedly, as I have argued in this chapter, the performance in Milan of Bed, surely among Rauschenberg’s key improvisatory works yet available to its audience as an indictment of the worst excesses of modern colonialism, was true to the marriage of aesthetics and ethics that the Surrealists led by Benayoun and Pierre would infer from Rauschenberg’s work generally and which they saw as evidence of the insight-as-foresight of a seer, prompting Pierre’s tribute to Bed as a revelatory synthesis of ‘the street, its inhabitants and the very climate of our time.’86 Lebel’s decision to show a few years later in 1964 at Patrick Waldberg’s ‘unofficial’ Surrealism exhibition Le Surréalisme: sources-histoire-affinités at the galerie Charpentier, which the Surrealists protested against due to its pronounced historical slant (with its concomitant implication of the lesser importance of contemporary Surrealism) and tried to compensate for with their own L’Écart absolu in 1965, showed how far he had travelled from the movement by then. Jouffroy, on the other hand, would express a steadfast confidence in Surrealism well into the 1970s alongside an admiration for Rauschenberg, in spite of the Surrealists’ campaigns against him. As shown in Tir de Barrage, they thought he displayed a muddled set of values and a profuse inconsistency in his art criticism. I examine his writings on Rauschenberg in the light of his dual loyalties in my next chapter.

­6

The Constantin Guys of the atomic era: Reading Alain Jouffroy, Talisman and Barge

By the time of his second, two-part solo show held at the galerie Ileana Sonnabend in 1963, the approval for Robert Rauschenberg earlier declared by Surrealists, Nouveaux Réalistes and a few critics like Michel Ragon and Françoise Choay had become widespread in Paris, and the exhibition was something of a coronation in advance of his coup the following year at the thirty-second Venice Biennale.1 Both Charlene (1954) and Monogram (1955–9) were displayed to great acclaim at Sonnabend’s gallery, yet as Hiroko Ikegami has demonstrated, this success was largely critical as opposed to institutional or commercial, since nothing by Rauschenberg had entered public or private collections in Paris up to that year.2 By the middle of the decade Sonnabend’s favourite artist was receiving strong backing from avant-garde writers as well as positive press, not only from art critics in Paris, but also from journalists who were sympathetic towards the avant-garde. Foremost among these was the ex-Surrealist Alain Jouffroy who fit all of these categories at one time or another as a poet, novelist, critic and essayist. Jouffroy was a key presence in my two previous chapters, but he warrants special attention because he conversed with a mainly French audience through his criticism and curatorial projects, pioneering Rauschenberg’s early reception in France across several essays from mid-1962 that were informed by his understanding of and sympathy towards historical Surrealism and were read by contemporary Surrealists. This potentially awkward dual loyalty was exacerbated by an allegiance to certain varieties of recent art, itself partly stirred and perhaps even furthered by his discovery of Rauschenberg’s work, which he conveyed in a way that deliberately conflicted with the idea of Surrealism as an ongoing project after the Second World War, setting Jouffroy at odds with the Surrealists and, in turn, determining their criticism of him to a large extent. To explore this, I trace the trajectory of his writings on Rauschenberg in this chapter from 1962 to 1964, culminating in his fascination with the silkscreened epic Barge (1962–3), which he discussed extensively in his criticism as though it were the pictorial manifesto of the post-abstraction, post-Surrealist révolution du regard that he believed had been heralded by Rauschenberg and Matta, and which triggered the eulogistic poem also titled Barge.

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Alain Jouffroy, Surrealism and Rauschenberg Jouffroy aspired to poetry from an early age and had joined the Surrealists soon after encountering André Breton by chance at a hotel while on holiday in Huelgoat in Brittany in August 1946, just a few weeks after Breton’s return to France from the United States after the Second World War. By his own account, Jouffroy had only recently come across the work of Pablo Picasso, but his first encounter in Breton’s Paris apartment with The Armoire of Proteus (1931), one of a series of fantastic landscapes of the early thirties by Yves Tanguy that suggest flowing rivers of lava, forced a realization that painting could call up ‘an image of the unknown’ and made him reconsider the epistemological bases of both art and poetry: Until that moment, I believed that only poetry was capable of exploring what remains inaccessible in man: on the contrary, Yves Tanguy persuaded me of the exploratory function of painting, and of the fundamental relation which therefore links it to poetry. Since then, every painting, every sculpture has appeared to me as a poem in space. Poetry encompassing the most extreme forms of expression, identifying with it each time it reaches a remarkable degree of intensity – painting is only a particular case of its language . . . .3

This conviction that the shared aim of art and poetry was to chart ‘la géographie de la vie intérieure’ prepared Jouffroy well for his immersion in Surrealism, far in advance of his exposure to the work of Rauschenberg who as a sceptic about an art of expression, depth and the subconscious presents on paper a less convenient test case for the idea.4 The year after encountering Breton, Jouffroy began attending group meetings at the Place blanche, publishing his first writings in 1948 in the second issue of the new Surrealist review NÉON (five issues, 1948–9).5 However, his defence of the painters Matta and Victor Brauner (who had himself opposed the expulsion of Matta from the group) led swiftly to Jouffroy’s own exclusion from the Surrealist movement in November 1948, tagged onto notice of Brauner’s in NÉON with the names of four others.6 After becoming an editor at Gallimard and art writer for various high-profile art magazines and journals, Jouffroy mended relations with Breton in 1954 and later in the decade joined the Surrealists in print again in their main review of the second half of the 1950s, Le Surréalisme, même (five issues, 1956–9).7 The expulsions of Matta and Brauner in 1948 were annulled in 1959 in the catalogue of the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) (the healing process was advanced by Jouffroy’s monograph on Brauner that year – Breton received a dedicated copy), but a second break with Jouffroy took place at the end of 1960 following his involvement with recently ejected ex-Surrealist Jean-Jacques Lebel in the manifestations held under the banner of Anti-procès, which were attacked by the Surrealists as I detailed earlier.8 After a second reconciliation with Breton in 1965, Jouffroy was close enough to Surrealism’s figurehead to accompany him on a trip by car back to Finistère in Brittany in April or May 1966 (Figure 6.1) and visit him at his house in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie later that year in the last days of Breton’s life.9 Jouffroy continued his espousal of Surrealism for many

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­Figure  6.1 Alain Jouffroy, photograph of André Breton in Brittany including Jouffroy’s

reflection (1966). Association Atelier André Breton. © Alain Jouffroy. Photo Association Atelier André Breton.

years after, notably in the pages of the periodical Opus International from 1967, but his past behaviour, maladroit judgement and inconsistency to the point of contradiction, not to mention his ridiculous attempt to create a posthumous reconciliation between Breton and the still-breathing Louis Aragon, led to distrust or mockery on the part of Breton’s friends.10 Jouffroy first heard Rauschenberg’s name from the lips of Marcel Duchamp in his earliest encounter with the older artist whom he visited to interview for the Surrealistfriendly Arts in 1954 after the first of his reconciliations with Breton; he would have been strongly affected by the unusually candid approval that Duchamp showed the ‘interesting and intelligent young artist’ from the United States.11 At the Paris Biennale in 1959 with Lebel, Jouffroy was taken aback by his first viewing of the relatively conventional, easelsized Combine Talisman (1958) (see Colour Plate 13), recounting on three occasions the jolt it had given them there, twice in the early 1960s then again in the 1970s (the Combine was reproduced in the Biennale catalogue).12 Jouffroy thought Talisman shared attributes of the new art he had been surveying as an art critic, yet in his recollection it was apparently set apart from the kind of ‘poetic’ aims that he had attributed to Tanguy and the Surrealists (though he does not acknowledge this difference specifically): In observing what was happening around me in Paris and in some European cities, I was struck first of all by the attitude of detachment adopted by certain artists with respect to their work and also from the need for expression, which is supposed to

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correspond with it. The aesthetic problems posed by most abstract painters had lost their currency [actualitè] and their virulence. Life had brought us to heel: the everyday, the events of the streets, newspapers, political events, faits divers. It was in front of a tableau by Rauschenberg, The Talisman [sic], exhibited at the first Paris Biennale in October 1959, that I suddenly became aware of this reversal. The atmosphere of danger, peculiar to our time and to our way of life, seemed to me miraculously captured, and I remember staying long minutes, in the company of my friend Jean-Jacques Lebel, in front of this tableau. It made a sign to us – a sign of strange complicity – from across the ocean. The least decipherable daily experience was encapsulated in a flash, in the manner of Basho’s haikus.13

The Duchampian air of detachment detected by Jouffroy might well have been new to recent art, but the elements of the everyday that he listed as characteristic of it must have been familiar, not so much from Surrealist art as Surrealist poetry and autobiographical writing. Jouffroy’s acquaintance with Surrealism would guide his subsequent attempts to sum up the ‘atmosphere’ of Rauschenberg’s work. In fact, it was already there in his comparison of Talisman (a title that Breton had esteemed earlier that decade) with Basho’s haikus, one of which had been quoted by Breton to conclude ‘Ascendant Sign’ (1948), the essay credited in my second and third chapters with rebooting Surrealist metaphor, read by Jouffroy as a fresh-faced Surrealist, no doubt, when it appeared on the front cover of the first issue of NÉON.14 Jouffroy’s next viewings of Rauschenberg’s work were complicated by the curatorial mediation of Surrealism. A few weeks after the Paris Biennale he saw Bed (1955) at EROS, flanked by Surrealist works old and new but holding its own; then towards the end of 1960 on his first visit to New York in the company of fluent English speaker Lebel (whose work Jouffroy had been promoting since the previous year) he would probably have seen it again, concluding Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain (1960–1).15 On that winter trip, Jouffroy met Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, probably at their downtown studios on Front Street (from where Rauschenberg would move the following year to new premises on the northern fringe of Greenwich Village at 809 Broadway), courtesy of an introduction from Duchamp, when the possible inclusion of Bed at Anti-procès 3 presumably came up for discussion.16 He also met Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Nicolas Calas, new acquaintances who drew his attention more earnestly towards Pop art, too.17 From that point, Jouffroy became Rauschenberg’s main French advocate while maintaining an allegiance towards the fundamental aims of Surrealism, if not quite a loyalty to the Surrealist group itself.18 This can be verified initially by the aesthetic and poetic attachments conveyed by both the subject matter and sentiments of his ardent writings and activities of 1961–4, one of his periods of estrangement from Breton and the Surrealists. In the same year as Anti-Procès 3, Jouffroy had briefly characterized the urban immediacy of Rauschenberg’s art – its materialization and distillation of the accumulative scan – as ‘poetry in action,’ which corresponds with Lebel’s notion of poésie directe and with his own first impression when he compared Talisman to a haiku.19

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But it was only in the year after that he wrote his first and now barely remembered essay on Rauschenberg. Meant as an introduction to the artist for a Mexican audience, it attempted to give a historical context and rationale for Rauschenberg’s rupture with the abstraction of the New York School through comparison with the one performed earlier in Europe by Dada and Surrealism from Cubism.20 But Jouffroy also made a conceptual comparison between so-called Action Painting and a tradition of ‘gestural automatism,’ extending from André Masson to Hans Hartung in Europe, which had been supported by Thomas B. Hess in the pages of Art News, but was thought by Jouffroy irrelevant to Rauschenberg.21 In this first essay on the artist, Jouffroy divulged that Duchamp had recently observed a similarity in attitude between Rauschenberg and his younger self of around 1910–13.22 This remark had taken place in what was then a still-unpublished interview of 8 December 1961 given by Duchamp to Jouffroy in New York, but there was more to it than that. Duchamp had already responded warmly earlier in the interview to Jouffroy’s enquiry about the respect Rauschenberg and Johns had shown him, calling them ‘remarkably intelligent . . . it’s a pleasure to see them and to speak with them, to have an exchange with them.’23 When asked a final question about which of the new generation of artists shared a common outlook with those of the earlier period, Duchamp returned to Rauschenberg: I already told you: Rauschenberg is one of them . . . and [Jean] Tinguely . . . But there are not so many. Already I feel reduced in my admiration. Obviously, the spirit of Surrealism manifests itself today in numerous isolated cases, which are sadly lost in the current rush. Even in painting, the individual has lost his rights.24

­ uchamp’s enthusiasm for current art at the close of 1961, a year after Surrealist D Intrusion, seems not to have lasted the duration of its own enunciation; furthermore, it was directed at Rauschenberg and Tinguely not so much as prompted by Jouffroy, for their reaffirmation of the spirit of early Dada, but for that of Surrealism. Yet in his article the following year, Jouffroy argued that Rauschenberg’s work stood apart from all of the previous US and European avant-gardes and even stated to his Mexican readers that ‘his work can be related to European Dada only superficially.’25 At the most, it was ‘an unexpected development,’ of Kurt Schwitters’s work, ‘on other foundations, by other methods and towards other ends.’26 But like Schwitters, Jouffroy maintained, writing only a few weeks after the end of the fourth Schwitters solo show in ten years at the Sidney Janis Gallery, Rauschenberg dealt a blow to the ‘impotent idealism’ of abstraction by the integration of real things into his work.27 At the time of writing, Jouffroy was about to begin or might already have been in the process of curating the exhibition Collages et objets held at the galerie du Cercle in Paris from 24  October till 17 November 1962, co-organized this time with JeanJacques’s father Robert Lebel who was artistic director of the gallery.28 It was there that Rauschenberg’s Bed made its second appearance in France (like its journey to Antiprocès 3 in Milan, this goes unrecorded in the main Rauschenberg chronologies and

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exhibition histories) in a show directly inspired by and intended to enter into dialogue with The Art of Assemblage of exactly one year earlier at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jouffroy had made his second trip to New York in November 1961 with Jean-Jacques Lebel so he got the chance to view what he called in his catalogue essay for Collages et objets that ‘wonderful American enterprise . . . which tried for the first time to place a monumental ensemble of objects, collages and assemblages in a historical perspective.’29 Like The Art of Assemblage, at which they would have reacquainted themselves with the highly charged Talisman, the inevitably more modest event at the galerie du Cercle was meant to exploit the critical demise and artistic contestation of abstract expressionism, to petition for a historical continuity in collage and related variations on the object from Cubism to Nouveau Réalisme. Forty-six entries in the catalogue of Collages et objets record work shown by Arman, Jean Arp, Enrico Baj, Hans Bellmer, Brauner, Joseph Cornell, Dine, Duchamp, Max Ernst, Raymond Hains, Johns (whose Good Time Charley of 1961 was reproduced, true to an emerging pattern, next to Bed in the catalogue), Masson, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Meret Oppenheim, Francis Picabia, Picasso, Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Martial Raysse, Mimmo Rotella, Daniel Spoerri, Schwitters, Dorothea Tanning and several others. The historical scope at Collages et objets and non-appearance of Pop art contrasted with The New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery, which showed some of the same artists concurrently and was also inspired by The Art of Assemblage (but excluded Rauschenberg due to what Janis called his ‘poetic or expressionist’ techniques).30 The presence in Collages et objets of work by artists with strong historical links with Surrealism, such as Bellmer, Brauner, Ernst and Tanning, demonstrated both an acknowledgement and diminishment of the movement. Whether by design or due to limitations placed on loans, the Surrealist object, which had held a place of some prominence in The Art of Assemblage, received measly attention in the show. There was a single undated box by Cornell on display, one minor object each by Bellmer and Oppenheim, Ray’s picture-object How to Write a Poem (1923) and his much later Smoking Device (1958), while Brauner’s painting-with-attachments Forces de concentration de Monsieur K. (1934) overstretched the theme a little. The ‘collage’ part of Collages et objets was equally ungenerous to historical Surrealism: two 1929 collages by Miró were shown, two recent ones by Arp and the longdeparted Masson’s Hatching VI (1958), a pastel with sand and feathers. As quite a small-scale event, it comprised no more than two works by any single artist so, perhaps unavoidably, the crucial role assigned the object by Surrealism in the 1930s and extensively theorized in the movement was missing. In any case, Jouffroy’s intention was not to privilege particular movements but to propose an even and uninterrupted exploration of materials by the avant-garde from Cubism, Duchamp and Picabia to the contemporary work of Rauschenberg, Dine and Lebel (whose work was mentioned in Jouffroy’s essay but was absent from the exhibition catalogue and show).31 Less surprisingly, given the fraught relationship of late between the Surrealists and Jouffroy, no members of the current Surrealist movement were represented in Collages et objets.

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In the catalogue, Jouffroy took the relationship between art and reality as his main theme, employing the word réalité eight times over seven brief pages across various shades of meaning, to credit Cubist collage and Duchamp’s readymades with introducing ‘brute reality,’ ‘everyday reality,’ ‘fragments of reality,’ even ‘reality itself ’ into the space of art.32 In turn, the artistic revolution once constituted by collage, revived partly by assemblage and the Combine over the preceding ten years, placed ‘reality in a new light’ so that across a history of modern art that privileged Cubism, readymades and the recent arrival of Nouveau Réalisme: ‘there is nothing less than a slow and irreversible invasion of reality by art, the reconquest of a domain lost by seekers of new forms, like a will to reinvest a world that was shrinking.’33 Writing six months after the end of hostilities with Algeria, Jouffroy naturally extended the notion of a new perception of reality caused by the revolution in art to an interpretation of recent art as social critique: We can consider all of this junk culture, all this new realism, as a criticism of the civilization of the object: the politico-erotic collages of a Boris Lurie or a JeanJacques Lebel express openly what ‘junk culture’ suggests in riddles. They claim that man is alienated by his surroundings, and they desperately attempt, by an insult aimed at these surroundings, to accomplish the miracle of disalienation. Alternatively, a Rauschenberg, a Johns, a Dine, a Claes Oldenburg, present objects and their power unadorned, without ever resorting to speech or explicit protest. They reconstitute the world randomly. At the same time, the entire industrial and mechanical reality, previously doomed to eternal calumny by aesthetes, now risks being taken as an example of beauty and natural poetry, a model so inimitable that it is sometimes deemed preferable to the work of art, and is enthroned without ceremonial clothing in the realm of pure contemplation.34

­In arguing this, Jouffroy was reasoning similarly to José Pierre in Combat-Art a year earlier that the new art manifested the coarse incursion of the real into art. Unlike Pierre, though (and Pierre Restany), he viewed Nouveau Réalisme as an art of protest against modern materialism in Europe and the United States, but US Neo-Dada as politically innocent. This aesthetic divide along geographical lines inferred by Jouffroy at Collages et objets was not recognized by Surrealists in spite of their reservations about US capitalism, foreign policy and culture. Jouffroy took this position on Rauschenberg in the article ‘Rauschenberg ou le déclic mental,’ his first truly important piece on the artist, written also in 1962, around the same time as Collages et objets, for the art and architecture magazine Aujourd’hui. An extract from it would be reproduced in the catalogue for the two-part galerie Ileana Sonnabend exhibition in 1963. Jouffroy’s portrayal revoked the mediation of historical Surrealism in the path taken by Rauschenberg and Johns while curtailing the ‘influence’ of Duchamp on the two artists; in the same way, Jouffroy confined the significance of the work of Ernst and Masson for Jackson Pollock to ‘a matter of meetings, affinities and of links that a rationalist, deterministic analysis would not know how to explain.’35 He insisted that even more radically than the art of the Cubists, Duchamp and Schwitters,

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Rauschenberg’s ‘annexes immediate reality to art,’ breaking beyond the usual frame of the work and exceeding the aesthetic categories with which even those avant-garde pioneers had complied, to become an unhindered channel to life outside of art.36 Jouffroy did not follow Pierre into a paradigmatic Surrealist reading of Rauschenberg as a sort of visionary whose work was implicitly (metaphorically) ethical, yet he found it typically hard to throw off his earlier Surrealism in his commentary on the artist. Although he saw the objects in the Combines as ‘apparently deprived of any symbolic meaning,’37 he called Rauschenberg’s optic: ‘the poetic vision of a great painter,’ as though he were a descendent of Miró.38

Une révolution du regard: Rauschenberg and Surrealism, 1963–4 The tenacious presence of Surrealism, harder and harder to ignore in the 1960s, was now approached head on by Jouffroy in the second part of ‘Pour une révolution du regard.’ Written in three individual, dated sections from May 1960 up to 1964, the lengthy essay crystallized his interpretation of art in Europe and the United States since 1958–9 and took Rauschenberg as perhaps its emblematic figure. In the part dated ‘1963,’ Jouffroy insisted the ‘revolution of seeing’ that he wrote of ‘must be produced in the conscience of the beholder,’ drawing upon the new, celebrated precedence that Duchamp had recently given the audience of art.39 In doing so, Jouffroy’s loosely drawn argument situating the meanings of the new art of detachment in the imagination of its observers veered rather close to the Surrealists. They were concurrently also lauding Duchamp’s insight, so Jouffroy set out to define an alternative subject to the Surrealist one inclined towards metaphor: ­What happens in me, when I see a Combine painting by Robert Rauschenberg or a Télémagnetique sculpture by Takis, is a new opening to the imaginary, where the whole of reality is disrobed under a new light. It is no longer a question of surreality, but of a reinvention of reality in the imaginary: the artists I am talking about here should be considered no more as realists than Surrealists. They are not and nor do they want to be either realists or Surrealists; they improvise their thought beyond this contradiction, in the instant of a truth lived and thought. They all share the wish to change within our mind our vision of the real, and for this all of them address themselves more to our ‘grey matter’ than to our ‘retina’: for them as for Alain Robbe-Grillet: ‘the discovery of reality will continue only if we abandon outworn forms.’ The revolution of seeing [révolution du regard] is a mental revolution that subverts our interpretation of the work of art. The dialogue that artists propose to us today is between two consciences, between two half consciences that it establishes. The painting has ceased to be a wall and becomes transparent again; its intentionality comes back to life. And this has happened, against all the odds, within the perspective pre-established fifty years beforehand by Marcel Duchamp whose influence since 1954 has continued to grow. . . . Like Duchamp, young

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artists in New York and Europe seek the creation of images that render them as independent of the real as of the imaginary, images that create a void around them, images that overthrow aesthetic or moral judgement, images that no more refuse the world than accept it, images that put an end to the antagonism between truth and error, images where man can be completely free from what he is and what he is not. The Bride of Marcel Duchamp remains our lighthouse, but its beam reaches further today than the history of modern art has taught us – to the horizon of the impossible, out there where, as Robert Rauschenberg told me, ‘you cannot do anything if you are outside of art and you cannot do anything if you are inside of art.’ Rauschenberg succeeds in this notable feat of opening a door wide onto the reality of today without closing that of art. It is as if he had signed a poet’s pact with something unutterable, there in the air, before us.40

The rhetoric is some way from the one of plotting an interior geography, inspired by Tanguy’s painting. Nevertheless, aside from its offsetting of dialectics in favour of a detachment recognizable in Duchamp’s statements and inferable from Rauschenberg’s work, Jouffroy’s under-theorized interpretation of the mental modification of outer reality in the art of the day does not depart far from Surrealism. Its claim to independence from Surrealism was not helped by its near-duplication of Breton’s definition of Surrealism as automatism, ‘exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern,’ in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), and its obvious use of Breton’s Baudelairean metaphor identifying Duchamp’s masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even or Large Glass (1915–23) as a ‘lighthouse’ or ‘beacon.’41 This remains the case in spite of its near twinning of Rauschenberg and Robbe-Grillet in the same year as the publication of For a New Novel, as prescient as Leonard B. Meyer’s pairing of the two that year in ‘The End of the Renaissance?’ But Jouffroy’s invocation of Duchamp and Surrealism hardly dug a trench between the artists and their predecessors in the way Meyer achieved. Jouffroy’s quotation from Robbe-Grillet’s ‘From Realism to Reality’ (1955 and 1963) could have served a Cagean and Rauschenbergian definition of the ‘real’ in the sense of the declared frankness of materials, but it was compromised beyond rescue by recourse to the Duchampian and Surrealist language of ‘depth’ (in the ‘imaginary,’ ‘mind’ and ‘grey matter’).42 The last was extracted from Jouffroy’s first encounter with Duchamp in 1954, referred to earlier in this chapter. Duchamp had disclosed in the interview his notion of ‘retinal painting’ in an on the spot diagnosis that seems quite carefully thought out all the same. Imagine how out of place this looked against the flat, abstract painting that was currently being critically acclaimed in New York, where Duchamp had lived since 1942: Since the advent of Impressionism, visual productions have stopped at the retina. Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, abstraction, it’s always retinal painting. Their physical preoccupations: the reactions of colors, etc., put in the background the

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reactions of the grey matter. This does not apply to all the protagonists of those movements. Some of them have bypassed the retina. The great merit of Surrealism is to have tried to get rid of a retinal content, of the ‘halt at the retina.’43

Although the interview took place in Paris and was for a French audience, the absence from Duchamp’s list of Dada at the moment of its art historical resurgence is striking – it had been three years since Robert Motherwell’s Dada Painters and Poets and Duchamp was speaking in the year after both Dada, 1916–1923 at the Sidney Janis Gallery and the Rauschenberg/Twombly event at the Stable Gallery. Equally notable is the esteem bestowed on Surrealism (in the same decade it passed Michel Foucault by and just about everyone else in France and the United States) as a special case due to its rejection of the mere visual habits that, in Duchamp’s analysis, had blighted most modern painting. What is more, it is likely that this argument about ‘retinal art’ had been worked out while Duchamp consorted with Surrealists in New York during the Second World War; more specifically, there is incontestable evidence that it was generated through dialogue with Breton, who then acclaimed and even adopted Duchamp’s idea immediately after the publication of the interview with Jouffroy.44 Whether he meant to or not, then, Jouffroy was constructing a direct, historical and conceptual bridge to Surrealism over the top of abstract art – dominant in New York when Duchamp aired his thoughts about ‘retinal content’ in Paris – by borrowing Duchamp’s somewhat sparse theoretical apparatus to endorse the accomplishments of Rauschenberg and his contemporaries. Jouffroy added to his appraisal of Rauschenberg in an admiring essay that appeared in L’Oeil in May 1964, the month before the Venice Biennale opened, where the artist was initially lauded for his curiosity about art beyond US shores.45 Noting the importance of Schwitters’s collages for the early Combine Charlene, Jouffroy announced the magnitude of Schwitters’s work generally for Rauschenberg, partly through mention of the shows at the Sidney Janis Gallery, also affirming for his European readers the legacy of Duchamp; these were artistic relationships that Jouffroy had now been pondering hesitantly and cautiously at some length.46 But it was the social aspect of Rauschenberg’s work that he wanted to explore and this nudged his comparative reading more in the direction of Surrealism, aware of the debate on the artist taking place in the movement and the strengthening profile of Surrealism in Europe and the United States. To that end, Jouffroy returned to the quotation from Rauschenberg’s 1961 Arts interview with André Parinaud that Pierre had liked, about being an artist and therefore opposing, which had made his work seem appropriate to the polemical (yet reputedly anti-judgemental) Anti-procès project, wondering what Rauschenberg, like his eminent European predecessors, opposed – in his case in the United States.47 The answer to this entailed an extension to Jouffroy’s core reading of Rauschenberg as the bringer of a revolution of seeing; not as a seer in the sense of the Surrealists, but as the great conduit relaying a world that was ultimately recreated by a dual subjectivity belonging to both artist and audience. But Rauschenberg was only able to achieve this because he captured that world uncritically – or let us say without any intended

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political or social commentary – by an attention to and arrangement of the particular that conveyed a whole. In this sense, Jouffroy showed himself an early sponsor of the ‘American Adam’ interpretation of Rauschenberg; yet, for him, Rauschenberg was not so much a ‘Whitmanesque flâneur’ or even ‘post-MacLuhan flâneur’ as that persistent construal has since been epitomized.48 No, Jouffroy characterized Rauschenberg more in the way of nineteenth-century modernism, as nothing less than ‘the Constantin Guys of the atomic era.’49 What did he mean to refer to in the art; say, in Talisman? Certainly ‘modernity’ in the stark magazine snapshot by Richard Meek of the heads and upper bodies of rapt baseball player (of the Philadelphia Phillies, possibly Harry Anderson) and umpire to the lower centre left of the tableau clipped from Sports Illustrated of 4 August 1958 (and announcing its modernity all the more to European eyes due to its mingling with the ‘old’ media of oil and canvas);50 or, as Charles Baudelaire put it: the eternal in the transitory, in the emblematic seizing of that moment by the media, mounted in a work that seems set on condensing lived experience as so few echoes and flashes – sport, a flower, a clipping of a modern urban city that is barely visible at top left, brushstrokes acting indexically as ‘speed’ or ‘movement’ as in comics; or closer to the vocabulary of Jouffroy and the Surrealists: the extraction from fashion, gesture (the hand signal at lower centre right, again recalling the fleeting signals of pitcher, coach, umpire) and facial expression of ‘whatever element it may contain of poetry within history.’51 In this, Jouffroy was obviously thinking of Rauschenberg as another ‘man of the world,’ a dweller in New York, the most modern of modern cities, and beyond (through exposure to television); and – reading Baudelaire’s essay selectively here – he might have had in mind, with some justification, Rauschenberg’s curiosity as a ‘passionate spectator’ of the anxious post-war, Cold War world.52 Finally, Jouffroy’s remark evokes Baudelaire’s timeless metaphor of the artist-flâneur as ‘a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness . . . reproducing the multiplicity of life and flickering grace of all the elements of life,’ an homage partly relevant to Talisman, and an image that resonates particularly with the startlingbecause-ordinary glass jar hanging in the recess of the Combine that surely gave the work its title, transmuted into an alembic, set metaphorically to perform the very task of (alchemical) extraction or distillation that facilitates transmutation, wringing poetry from the ordinary mess of history.53 However, Talisman is relatively spare and Baudelaire’s image of the artist-flâneur as kaleidoscope is perhaps more relevant to heavily worked, copiously detailed Combines and silkscreens like Charlene, Untitled (c. 1954–5/1958) and Barge. What is more, Jouffroy’s reasoning leading up to the memorable phrase was neither clear nor sound: Rauschenberg seems true to the spirit of the great American writers, all of whom, in one manner or another, were known to show their personal opposition to the civilization of which they were part; true in particular to the spirit of the Beat Generation, that of Allen Ginsberg, author of ‘Howl’ [1956] and ‘America’ [1956]. [In Rauschenberg’s work] the industrial society of the United States

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was found brilliantly illuminated for the first time, as on a scene where the object-symbols of the ‘American Way of Life,’ the morality of optimism and the obligatory smile, all at once took on their tragic meaning in the eyes of art lovers. In this way, an American avant-garde painter gave a brilliant, essential lesson in poetry.54

It is not apparent how the strident polemicism of poets and writers like Ginsberg and the Beats, whom Jouffroy had met with Lebel in Paris in 1959, could be viewed in the same way as the reportage of the discreet Guys (a claim made to sound particularly tendentious by Rauschenberg’s blunt rejection of any conscious connection with those writers in the Arts interview three years earlier).55 All the same, Jouffroy went on to contend that the particular content of Rauschenberg’s work might well have been the industrial and urban landscape of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s and, specifically, downtown Manhattan where he lived at three different addresses between 1953 and 1961 in sometimes rudimentary premises during a period of vast urban renewal;56 but, like Pierre, Jouffroy had gone some way to believe that in their assumption of disinterest in or perhaps indifference towards predetermined social comment, Rauschenberg’s Combines such as the much-debated Pilgrim (1960) exceeded their local, temporal and geographical coordinates to comment on industrialization itself: ‘his poetics go beyond the stifling frame from which they have sprung,’ he wrote, ‘and what struck me personally in New York when I saw Rauschenberg’s work in its visual context was the offensive power of all industrial societies whose implacable challenge to the individual is, thus, reproduced for us [by Rauschenberg’s work].’57 The early oeuvre, wrote Jouffroy, presumably referring to the Combines, ‘is particularly representative of the globalization of every form of expression,’ as putatively aimed at by Anti-procès and Phases, pressing the case by way of an axiom that owed the larger part of its coinage to Breton: ‘[t]he art of tomorrow will be planetary or will not be.’58 Here, the artist as flâneur and ‘man of the world’ reached its most literal verbalization. Jouffroy now aligned this poetics partially with Surrealist automatism (deemed historically irrelevant to Rauschenberg in the text written for the Mexican audience two years earlier),59 ‘and even the oneirism of the Surrealists,’ viewing the latter as the factor in his work that placed Rauschenberg at odds with Pop art.60 Like the Surrealist Jean-François Revel (signatory of the Declaration of the 121 and contributor to Le 14 Juillet), Jouffroy also observed a legacy of the Surrealist object in Rauschenberg’s floor-based work.61 Unlike Revel, though, who lumped Rauschenberg with Pop art a few months later after the Biennale (also in L’Oeil), attempting to show through direct comparison of Odalisk (1955–8, Figure 6.2) and Miró’s Object (1936, Figure 6.3) that his work was already old hat (mainly because of the presence of a bird on top of each),62 Jouffroy observed Rauschenberg’s ‘rupture’ with Surrealism as ‘offset by a strong inclination to consider the object as a sum of indecipherable meanings.’63 Presumably calling upon proverbial speculations in Surrealism such as the one by Breton in Mad Love (1937) about the found ‘statuette, in raw rubber, of some strange young person listening . . . a being who particularly touches me insofar as I know neither

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Figure 6.2  Robert Rauschenberg,

Odalisk (1955/8). Oil, watercolor, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, photographs, printed reproductions, miniature blueprint, newspaper, metal, glass, dried grass and steel wool with pillow, wood post, electric lights and rooster on wood structure mounted on four casters, 210.8 × 64.1 × 63.8 cm. Museum Ludwig, Cologne. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Figure 6.3  Joan Miró, Object (1936). Stuffed parrot on wood perch, stuffed silk stocking with velvet garter and doll’s paper shoe suspended in hollow wood frame, derby hat, hanging cork ball, celluloid fish and engraved map, 81 × 30.1 × 26 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Matisse, 1965. © Successió Miró/ADAGP, Paris and DACS London 2022. Successió Miró Archive.

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Figure 6.4  André Breton, ‘statuette . . . in raw rubber,’ Mad Love (1937). © Man Ray 2015 Trust/ DACS, London 2022.

its origin nor its ends’ (Figure 6.4),64 Jouffroy believed that works such as Empire II (1961, Figure 6.5) participated in ‘this Surrealism of the stray object: its function and destination seem definitively lost.’65 These constructions departed most radically from abstract painting not because paint was absent ‘but because poetry, and poetry alone, is present,’ flaunting ‘most clearly the poetic genius of Rauschenberg.’66 Jouffroy seemed to think that this was due to an indeterminism that was at one with the ‘mysteriously accusatory character of the oeuvre,’ a quality that he recalled first experiencing with Lebel before Talisman at the Paris Biennale, seeming to denounce US-style capitalism and the alienation of the individual while at the same time accepting them.67 But it was surely a freedom gained from their uprootedness that gave such objects their poetic, analogical frisson. Nor did Jouffroy’s interpretation of Rauschenberg have the political intent of that of Robert Benayoun and Pierre. For the ex-Surrealist, Pilgrim simply did not have the potential specificity of a critique of art world poseurs that it held for the Surrealists; rather, it was ‘[t]urned towards the totality of the world of today’ and ‘presents itself in this way as a tribute to that totality, and not as a criticism.’68 Even so, Jouffroy would be consistent in his understanding of Rauschenberg’s art in the 1960s and beyond as the most reliable record of the modern individual’s plight, stranded in the great metropolis, dwarfed by the mass media in a world swamped with information where, as he would argue in his 1973 essay on the artist, ‘individual desire is sidetracked by the larger organization of society.’69 But Jouffroy’s Rauschenberg did not come with an

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Figure 6.5  Robert Rauschenberg, Empire II (1961). Ventilation duct, roller skate, paper, wire

and electric light on wood mounted on three metal wheels, 153.7 × 147 × 73 cm. National Trust for Historic Preservation and The Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

intention to judge the cacophony of civilization; he merely shows us it in the detached, Duchampian manner of the current crop of artists he had observed from the late 1950s. This interpretation of the artist’s means of working is close to that remarked upon by Rauschenberg himself in the year after Jouffroy’s article in L’Oeil when he asserted in interview that he felt the impulse behind his art was ‘never a protest of what was going on’ and yet, all the same, the end product was an illustration of contemporaneity by an artist with an ethical view, who acknowledged ‘a stance in questions like race issues and atrocities of all sorts.’70 Jouffroy’s carefully timed intervention in L’Oeil in May 1964 had given a boost to Rauschenberg’s chances of success at the Venice Biennale, but that lay entirely in the superficial publicity value of his article and not at all in its actual interpretation of the artist. Jouffroy had understood Rauschenberg’s work as a curtain pulled away from the vastness of the industrialization of the modern world and in spite of the proclaimed purpose of Anti-procès to repudiate ‘moral judgements’ he and Lebel had jointly situated Bed in Milan to enunciate the very worst that a colonial nation could offer,

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while the Surrealists had admitted it to EROS as an antenna tuned to the frequency of the sex and death drives of an audience exposed to scandal and censorship, both sexual and political, often inseparable as in the truly sordid case of Djamila Boupacha. However, once Alan R. Solomon was installed as the commissioner of the United States pavilion in Venice, his ‘depoliticizing tendency’ happily acquiesced to the demand by the United States Information Agency that ‘“nothing obscene or political”’ be shown by US artists at the Biennale, as he recalled it, and Bed was hung consequently untainted by such extra-artistic themes, serving merely the promotion of US culture.71 The Venice Biennale officials had requested the inclusion of Rauschenberg and Johns, and their work was duly shown with that of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland in the exhibition Four Germinal Painters (there was also a second show titled Four Younger Artists featuring John Chamberlain, Dine, Oldenburg and Frank Stella), but evidently Solomon’s interpretive massaging of Rauschenberg’s work was required to further the artist and his country’s interests, well beyond Jouffroy’s efforts.72 Accordingly, Solomon used the same ultra-conservative ‘post-Dada’ argument as Restany had been plying on behalf of the Nouveau Réalistes, rendering Rauschenberg’s art ‘positive’ and ‘constructive,’ apolitical through its ambiguity (not ethical through its spontaneity as the Surrealists would have had it), pitched at an audience’s unconscious by an artist apparently without one: ­ auschenberg keeps the attention of the beholder by offering constantly vacillating R alternative meanings, so that we can never arrive at a precise and resolved meaning for the painting. . . . He has no interest in social comment or satire, or in politics; he uses his previously inappropriate materials not out of a desire to shock, but out of sheer delight, out of an optimistic belief that richness and heightened meaning can be found anywhere in the world, even in refuse found in the street. . . . Unlike other users of objects, he divorces them completely from sentiment and nostalgia. If they are worn, or faded, or corrupted, their patina does not call up their past for him. . . . When all the elements remain indeterminate in this fashion, our perception is obscured and psychologically we are held in abeyance, the result is a kind of freefloating mental state, in which a multiplicity of associations can begin to operate on an almost unconscious level.73

This was a strained and familiar, not to mention inaccurate and unfeasible (regarding patina) translation of ‘the artist’s ingenious management of ambiguity,’ as Laurie J. Monahan has put it, establishing a ‘new sensibility’ in the viewer according to Monahan who reads it through Susan Sontag’s contemporary writings.74 It was a standpoint on the artist that Solomon was repeating from his essay in the catalogue for Rauschenberg’s retrospective at the Jewish Museum the year before and it would be manifestly out of date very soon when Rauschenberg turned with a vengeance towards political themes that would last for half a decade. But as historians have pointed out, it should have been instantly questionable. Ikegami calls out Solomon for ‘[w]illfully disregarding the potential socio-political content of the artist’s work,’75 while Monahan directs our attention towards the readably

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critical insinuations of Canyon (1959), displayed in all its scraggy glory at the Biennale and reproduced in the catalogue for the US pavilion, justifiably expressing puzzlement that ‘the French critics made no reference to the military and political connotations of the work,’ observing the glut of images distributed across Rauschenberg’s surfaces but focusing their attention on the glut rather than the images and ‘leaving only form as the focus for critique.’76 If the Surrealists themselves had long examined the ethico-political content of Canyon and other works up to and beyond the Biennale, as set out in my third chapter, Jouffroy was only a partial exception to this rule, not exactly making direct reference to specific social issues, but referring instead in one of his earliest assessments on Rauschenberg’s art to the powerful psycho-social field of inference set up by the Combines: ‘they re-envisage the terrifying palisades of the early morning, the suburbs, the tragic anarchy of the edgelands, the dereliction of man engulfed by the city.’77

Barge, memory of a world Jouffroy’s passionate fascination with Rauschenberg and Surrealism culminated in his poetry over the period 1963–4. In ‘Pour une révolution du regard,’ he had already expressed a particular admiration for the huge 202.9 × 980.4 cm silkscreen painting Barge (see Colour Plate 14). Hard to reproduce effectively, the work makes for a daunting viewing experience. This is partly due to the raucous pile up of images separated and smudged by dripped, smeared paint and the additional distraction caused by the prominent, atypical black and white design, but it is mainly, of course, because of its sheer scale. Looming over the average viewer, most of Barge disappears into the distance as a tall, hard, narrow horizontal when observed from either end. It does indeed mimic the long, slim shape of the vessels that Rauschenberg could view routinely on the East River, even though the picture stands at half the typical dimensions of a US barge (its height is exactly the width of a British narrowboat, incidentally, but its width half the length). In spite of the downwardly dripped paint divulging that it was upright and right way up when worked on, or at least when paint was applied, the comparison tilts the mind towards the horizontal register, as Leo Steinberg would have noted, and to sites of storage and conveyance. Its massive surface, nearly as high and twice as wide as Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–1), requires that the viewer back away from Barge to take in the whole, come in close to pick up on the familiar, replicated, blending and clashing icons of Rauchenbergian modernity and also read across, physically, still near to, actually walking along its span, journeying from the relatively uneventful stretch of canvas at far left to face the din of the modern world beginning a quarter of the way in, preserved in large transferred images – military truck, US football game, another reproduction of the Rokeby Venus (1647–51), paraphernalia of the space programme, freeways, buildings and other structures designating bureaucracy, industry and, through them, mass population and anonymity – the Baudelairean ‘multiplicity of life,’ indeed, gushing forth without restraint through the grisaille to engulf us bodily.

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Its revisitation of previously established imagery, its colour, size and shape conjure up earlier, defining works of twentieth-century art. There is the smaller and slightly less radical horizontal Tu m’ (1918) by Duchamp, commissioned by his friend Katherine Dreier, reluctantly agreed to and later disliked by Duchamp as a mere summary of the ideas in his work and notes up to then. Also, Picasso’s Guernica (1937), much taller but not as wide as Barge, its black and white similarly toned towards the media (amplified by Rauschenberg in Barge to suggest not just the rectangle of newspaper page and film screen, but also the bustle, chatter and noise of multiple televisions or television stations), yet pointing unambiguously back, in its totality and title, to a specific event, whereas the clutter and tumult of heaped up, overlapping, tilting imagery and loose, run paint of Barge defy any unitary, one-for-one historical cause or reading (the pun on ‘barge,’ as rough or forceful movement, comes in well here, encapsulating the urban fray that the work musters).78 Finally, through its itinerant lens and demand that the viewer physically traverse its entire plane in duration, gradually to take in visually an imagery that is always slipping away, Barge echoes the most radical horizontal of all, Rauschenberg’s own comparatively serene, local and eventless Automobile Tire Print (1953). When Jouffroy wrote on Barge in the 1963 part of ‘Pour une révolution du regard,’ not long after the colossal work was completed, he did so in terms borrowed from the range of often-conflicting interpretive mediators: Duchamp, Cage, Surrealism: No judgment in Barge, no moral attitude and therefore neither optimism nor pessimism, but a welcome to all that the present veils and reveals to us, as if it were for the artist to capture the watermark of events, their secret texture, their continual appearance-disappearance, in the free play of a roaming history, which is as much its own as ours. So the instant, captured as in a huge net, is transformed into a timeless substance where the past and future interpenetrate and vanish one in the other. . . . one can also discover here, like the musician John Cage, ‘an entertainment in which to celebrate unfixity,’ that is to say, the contemplative seizure of everything that, in reality, flees us, disrobed by and large of our analyses and our reasonings. . . . It is as though Rauschenberg wanted . . . to confront us deeply with what we ‘see’ every day and that we do not know exactly how to go beyond: to make seen, clairvoyant – in any case more affectionate than haste allows – our daily perception of the world.79

In this reading of Barge, the révolution du regard as pioneered by Rauschenberg is presented partly as a coalition of the Duchampian suspension of judgement, as had marked the Anti-procès venture, and the closely related Cagean detached gaze. But these are somewhat ill-matched with partial renderings of at least two mainstays of Surrealist theory: dialectics in the form here of the ‘interpenetration’ of past and future in Barge, and second sight in that of Rauschenberg’s hypersensitive vision, the latter turned by Jouffroy back towards Cage’s very unSurrealist, Zen-inspired idea of ‘waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.’80 Such pronouncements only justified the

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Surrealists’ attribution of clumsiness and inconsistency to Jouffroy’s writing, and their complaints about him helping himself to ideas that had been nurtured in Surrealism. In 1963, the year Jouffroy performed this extended commentary on Barge in ‘Pour une révolution du regard,’ his poem inspired by Rauschenberg’s mural-size silkscreen painting appeared in the international art journal Quadrum, published in Brussels. Sharing the same title as Barge, which was flamboyantly reproduced in a double fold out section with the poem running on either side (on the back of the image, so to speak), it incorporated italicized quotations by the artist from a conversation with Jouffroy, as though cued by Cage’s essay on Rauschenberg two years before.81 The ten brief parts of the poem trade in the same themes, metaphors and even method as his critical texts, of temporality, a panoramic vision, a dialectical imagery and Barge as a ‘watermark’ or filigrane, but under the suggestion and allusiveness allowed by poetry the silkscreen yields its imagery truer to the viewing experience without sacrificing its complexity and density.82 Jouffroy’s poem stands as an analogy for the painting while reflecting on the operation of analogy itself: its opening lines and those of its fourth part set up a refrain on ‘comme’ or ‘like’ recalling Breton’s veneration of ‘the most exhilarating word at our command’ in ‘Ascendant Sign.’83 Along with its evocation of the dream state, this contradicts Cagean literalism, carrying Jouffroy’s reading of Barge through the two subjectivities of the artist who collects the imagery and the beholder who processes it in a shared ‘memory of the world’ or registration of ‘the geography of the inner life’ that Jouffroy had seen as the aspiration of both art and poetry.84 The poem reveals that he read the black and white Barge as redolent of a nocturne, summoning an imagery of passage at night by rail, river, road and pavement – ‘the train goes the boat goes the truck goes the passer-by goes the viewer goes the bomb goes’ – distilled for the modern regardeur and suitable, once again, to Rauschenberg’s part of Lower Manhattan near the docks and piers of the East River, yet suggestive of a wider world.85 Jouffroy’s imagery in ‘Barge’ evoked less the city walker of modernity, or Sunday traveller on the Seine, from Baudelaire, Guys, Édouard Manet and the Impressionists to Surrealism, than the travel, transportation, global networks and myriad, mysterious channels of supply in a threatened contemporary world, to which the poet-critic would draw attention again in his 1964 article on Rauschenberg. Jouffroy published his poetic tribute to Barge not long before his composition of an equally eulogistic poem on Breton and Surrealism, based on that first meeting in Huelgoat and titled L’antichambre de la nature (1966). Written from May to October 1964, it was absolutely contemporaneous with the publication of his most important writing on Rauschenberg and the events in Venice.86 Part of it was pure nostalgia, recollecting some detail of his first impressions of and conversations with Breton whose words are set in italics like the quotations by Rauschenberg that embellish Barge. But alongside its factual passages, Jouffroy’s poem is permeated with Surrealist images and drenched in Surrealism’s historical, thematic and bibliographic imaginary. Furthermore, it closes with a suite of unanswerable questions about the events and conversations surrounding that chance meeting, linked to the ethnographer, writer and Paul Gauguin specialist Victor Segalen who had spent his last days in the very same Grand Hôtel d’Angleterre in May 1919. The conclusion of the poem displays

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clearly enough Jouffroy’s serious, persevering consideration of ‘objective chance’ as a natural law – as Breton had put it in Mad Love: ‘natural necessity may agree sometimes with human necessity in such an extraordinary and exciting way that the two determinations are indiscernible,’87 consequently ‘Surrealism is the Antechamber of Nature’ – and Jouffroy’s continuing devotion to Surrealism as a means of fathoming the world by poetic analogy.88 An unresolved tension rather than a dialectical movement between antitheses extends across the narrative realism and Gothic portentousnous of L’antichambre de la nature, just as a conflict lies between the clear deference in that poem to Surrealism as a means of comprehending the world and the resistance shown to it by Jouffroy’s fascination with Rauschenberg’s art in Barge. These dual loyalties are confirmed in Jouffroy’s affiliation, at the hub of a new kind of realism, of Rauschenberg with Matta who had rejoined the Surrealists in 1959.89 Read together, the two poems demonstrate that it was a poetics formed within Surrealism that underlay his admiration for Rauschenberg’s work, though as argued with reference to Jouffroy’s writings on Barge, it was inflected by its receptivity to Duchamp’s deceptively offhand, penetrating utterances and sometimes distorted by its obligation to the accounts of Rauschenberg’s art given by Cage, as well as by the artist himself, giving it marked differences to the more poetico-political collective front on Rauschenberg formed by Benayoun and Pierre that was made public in the pages of La Brèche over the same period.

Rauschenberg, Pope: André Breton’s judgement ‘Is Rauschenberg Surrealist? Realist?’90 No, answered Jouffroy to his own question in ‘Pour une révolution du regard’ in 1963, the artist was of a generation that was engaged in a ‘revision of all the aesthetic and philosophical concepts’ that it had inherited.91 Like Tinguely, Takis, Arman, Johns, Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, he insisted, ‘Rauschenberg is situated beyond Surrealism, beyond realism,’92 mastering his own artistic path and withstanding the cultural magnitude of the movement, even if Jouffroy’s metaphor portraying the situation was a less convincing or convinced one: So great has Surrealism been, so omnipresent are its exploits in the development of artistic creativity, and especially in painting, it has become, nonetheless, the background before which emerges in the foreground today the silhouette of those who participate in the invention of a new art. Robert Rauschenberg, who agreed to send works to an exhibition organized by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, but also to Anti-procès where Surrealism was not the common denominator, does not in truth belong to any group, not even to Pop art to which today he lends his enthusiasm and his intelligence. Such has to be the singularity of the painter or the poet that he never fits into any morality, any politics of group, party or state.93

This obvious jab at Surrealism, continuing the rhetoric of Anti-procès while acknowledging the overwhelming presence of the movement, was rounded out with a claim that current

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artistic activities were indeed concerned with the same urban quotidian as the Surrealists, but they ‘do not tend to impose a surreal vision’ because they were wholly concerned with things and events that ‘take precedence over the cult of the marvelous,’ which is to say on (material) effects not (occult) causes.94 With the same aim of preserving the everyday explored by the Surrealists, but as a set of possibilities free of theory or ideology, Jouffroy even stripped the central theoretical monuments of the movement, Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926) and Breton’s Nadja (1928), of their crucial magical traces and declared them icons of the new ‘realism’ to be exploited by artists. Under this limitation, the huge poster for Mazda light bulbs and the shop sign ‘BOIS • CHARBONS’ in photographs in Nadja (Figure 6.6), used to illustrate Breton’s jittery absorption in a still-unfathomable causality, were relieved by Jouffroy of their de Chirican portents and handed back to artists as the new reality; as raw materials that recall the art audience to the Cagean literalism of things, enshrined in the composer’s phrase that was included with Jouffroy’s article extract in the catalogue of Rauschenberg’s solo show at Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery early that year, which had no doubt inspired Jouffroy’s eulogy to the Rauschenbergian quotidienne: ‘[b]eauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.’95 ‘Surrealism and realism, in their entirety, are sphinxes,’ concluded Jouffroy.96 Breton would hardly have overlooked such remarks and, unlike René Magritte, was well tuned

Figure  6.6 André Breton, ‘The luminous Mazda sign on the boulevards,’ Nadja (1928). © Gallimard © Mme Denise Boiffard.

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into the most recent developments in art. In any case, the controversy in both France and the United States surrounding the award to Rauschenberg of the prestigious Grand Prix to Best Foreign Artist at the Venice Biennale in June 1964 – coinciding precisely with Benayoun’s latest adulatory remarks in La Brèche – was pervasive, muchdiscussed among Surrealists and is now a well-rehearsed episode in the history of postwar art.97 What is far less widely known is that Breton himself expressed his admiration for Rauschenberg, too, just a few months after Jouffroy and Benayoun, conferred in spite of the recent success in Venice, which mirrored the one of Ernst in 1954 that had earned that artist his expulsion from the Surrealist group.98 Breton did not expound at any length at all on Rauschenberg in relation to Surrealism, but his daily exchanges with younger Surrealists encouraged the very favourable view of the artist that can be glimpsed here and there in his statements from late 1964. To these informal conversations must be added Breton’s avowedly sustained attention to the art criticism of Jouffroy. In an interview published in Le Nouvel observateur in December 1964, Breton was asked if he thought beatniks, Pop art, the Nouveau Roman, Happenings and Serialism in music constituted an extension of Surrealism in the 1960s. ‘By definition,’ he answered, ‘Surrealism should not be enlisted against any new expression of revolt, whatever form it takes,’99 before rejecting Pop art’s subversive credentials while discerning a poetics in Neo-Dada and the Nouveau Roman: By its very poetic constituents, Surrealism recoils from everything that would call upon rubbish and remnants in the plastic work . . . The ‘Happening,’ the offspring of Hellzapoppin’ [1941], seems to me to come into contact with one of the worst pitfalls: that of sexual promiscuity. Moreover, I have already made sufficient statement of my lack of appetite when confronted by works of fiction for anyone to expect from me, on the ‘Nouveau Roman,’ a fully formed judgement. That said, nothing will prevent me from taking an interest in what is signed by Rauschenberg or [Hervé] Télémaque, nor by Jouffroy in spite of our deep disagreements, nor still further Robbe-Grillet, [Philippe] Sollers or [Michel] Butor.100

If Happenings were rejected outright by Breton, seemingly in the form they had taken in Europe under the steerage of Lebel, then so, too, from the Surrealist canon, were works of art that incorporate ‘rubbish,’ a term (déchet or déchets) and concept that had been explored by Benayoun in his conversation with Pierre and in the title of the two Surrealists’ conversation in La Brèche to rally positive opinion on Rauschenberg.101 Breton sounds cautious in this evaluation of the artist, but that was about to change. While preparing the final, expanded edition of Surrealism and Painting in 1965 where Canyon would be reproduced, he was among those who responded to a questionnaire sent out by Arts to ‘a hundred personalities of the arts and letters,’ asking them to nominate who they thought were the ten best artists since the war still under fifty years of age.102 In spite of the commotion that had followed Rauschenberg’s triumph at the Biennale the previous year with its perceived threat of US cultural imperialism and the decline of the École de Paris, which is exactly how it had been splashed across the back page of Arts by Pierre Cabanne, in panic mode about the ‘pope’ Rauschenberg (the

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gibe usually directed at Breton) ‘surrounded by his great priests, Johns, Oldenburg, Dine and Stella,’103 Rauschenberg topped the writers’ otherwise parochial list, followed by eight over-familiar French artists (though Tinguely was born in Switzerland) and one Austrian.104 By contrast, Breton’s list was self-consciously international, containing no two artists from the same country, only one French artist and one from the United States, namely Robert Rauschenberg, the only one of Breton’s chosen artists who featured in the final Arts top ten since 1945.105 Of Breton’s varied selection, Rauschenberg was one of four he had not written about in the texts collected in the definitive version of Surrealism and Painting and the only one with whom he would never have any contact. Rauschenberg was also one of only two of the artists shortlisted by Breton for Arts (with Jean Degottex) who did not feature in either the Surrealists’ exhibition L’Écart absolu (1965) or its catalogue. This had nothing to do with Rauschenberg’s accomplishment at the Venice Biennale the previous year. It was fully understood by 1965 that his path lay outside of Surrealism and therefore that he was not bound by the behavioural code of the movement, which is why the same conduct demanded of Ernst over the Biennale prize was not expected of him. In stating publically his high regard for the artist, Breton seems to have been responding to the stir created within and close to the Surrealist group by its exposure to Rauschenberg’s work since EROS and the writings on it since that I have discussed so far in this book. Breton edited La Brèche and certainly compared notes with friends such as Benayoun and Pierre, for instance, on Pop and Happenings. One example can be found in Benayoun’s 1964 article in La Brèche on Pop and Happenings where a strong case is made for the superiority of Rauschenberg, quoting for justification as an epigraph the remarks by Dore Ashton on the disobedient operation of metaphor in readymades and Pop art, already quoted from in my first chapter: ‘The artist who believes that he can maintain the “original status” of an object deludes himself. The character of the human imagination is expansive and allegorical. You cannot “think” an object for more than an instant without the mind’s shifting. . . . Not an overcoat, not a bottle dryer, not a Coca-Cola bottle can resist the onslaught of the imagination. Metaphor is as natural to the imagination as saliva to the tongue.’106

Benayoun’s is an abbreviated, part-translation of Ashton’s intervention, also known to Pierre and given equal priority by Breton when, acknowledging Benayoun’s article, he requoted it in the same year in a different context, writing on Magritte, soon to be published in Surrealism and Painting.107 It fully met the demand made upon metaphor by Surrealism over its long history. The Surrealists’ use of Ashton’s quotation was also meant to confirm the difference between their understanding of the content of Rauschenberg’s Combines as ‘objects’ and that of the choisisme of the Nouveau Roman and Tel Quel that conceived them as ‘things’ in that decade, as well as marking the gulf that the Surrealists saw between

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Rauschenberg’s work and most Pop art. But as is evident in the remarks made by Breton to Le Nouvel observateur in 1964, the Nouveau Roman was by no means categorically rebuffed by him in spite of Robbe-Grillet’s loud and clear rejection of metaphor in ‘Nature, Humanism, Tragedy’ a few years earlier in 1958. In fact, Robbe-Grillet would later reveal that in 1955, behind the uproar led by conservative critics that followed the award of the Prix des Critiques to The Voyeur (1955), he had even received ‘warm encouragement’ from Breton and he confessed to harbouring Surrealist tendencies himself at certain points, while Butor was the Nouveau Romancier closest to Breton, a friend of Surrealists and reader of their work.108 In my next chapter, I show that in spite of its theoretical commitment to metaphor, Surrealism is usually present in and even central to debate about the choisiste Rauschenberg that was taken up in 1960s theory in the orbit of the Nouveau Roman.

­7

Choisiste: ‘Things’ in French and US art criticism in the 1960s

As recalled by Michel Foucault and theorized in the 1960s by Leonard B. Meyer, Annette Michelson, Barbara Rose, Irving Sandler and Susan Sontag, the new postwar sensibility entailed an attitude towards form or, more closely, ‘things’. It was emblematized in the theatre of Samuel Beckett where characters ‘refuse even more stubbornly any other signification than the most banal, the most immediate one’, as Alain Robbe-Grillet put it in his early essay on Waiting for Godot (1953).1 The choisiste susceptibility is embryonic in Jean-Paul Sartre’s early fiction and Francis Ponge’s poetry of the 1940s, which Bill Brown places close to the origins of the modern theory of the thing.2 Brown introduces an extensive body of writing – poetry, fiction, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory – in his historiography of the theory of the thing in the twentieth century. As he makes clear, the thing is treated differently within as well as across these fields of study, but his contrast between things and objects is a crucial one: As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture – above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things. We look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls. . . . The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.3

Following Michael Riffaterre and Jacques Derrida, Brown situates Sartre and Ponge among those writers after the Second World War aiming to affirm the defiance of referentiality by things, and he allows Surrealism a say in the long history of the theory of the thing, in spite of the inferential imperative of the Surrealist gaze.4 However, Robbe-Grillet accused both Sartre and Ponge of denying the ‘opaque presence’ of things in the furtherance of humanism and metaphor in his 1958 essay ‘Nature, Humanism, Tragedy,’ and as I noted in my first chapter, it was an accusation that anticipated, shaped and captured the mood of the 1960s, finding an echo in the tendency in art criticism that sought to keep Surrealism buried where Clement Greenberg had left it in the 1940s.5

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The postwar, increasingly ‘post-Surrealist’ convergence of Robert Rauschenberg’s and Robbe-Grillet’s choisiste attitude towards urban flotsam and jetsam was swiftly discerned by the Nouveau Romancier’s first US advocate, Bruce Morrissette, who seems to have told the author of The Erasers (1953) early on about another erasure of that year, Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953).6 Morrissette’s intuition of a link between Rauschenberg and Robbe-Grillet predated the text in the cultural periodical Tel Quel (ninety-four issues, 1960–82) by its main art critic Marcelin Pleynet that cast a similarly conceived bridge between the artist and the novelist, long before the two divulged a mutual admiration and began their cooperation on the project of the thirtysix lithographs that make up Traces suspectes en surface (1972–8);7 it was even longer before Brown found continuity across the poetry of Frank O’Hara, ‘Rauschenberg’s interruption of abstract expressionism, and the choisisme of the decade’s Nouveau Roman,’ by which he meant the decade of the fifties not the sixties.8 This is a dissenting interpretation of Rauschenberg to the one that French Surrealists were cooking up and, as so often, it was made effortlessly available courtesy of the artist’s friendly ‘literalist’ critics – Brown’s ‘glimpse of things’ recalls the ‘vernacular glance’ of Brian O’Doherty – not to mention the artist himself. In one of the highlights of the interview with André Parinaud in Arts in 1961, alluded to in my previous chapters, Rauschenberg had been asked if his work was ‘une tentative poétique’ and had shot back ‘[c]’est une actualité,’ adding, when asked for clarification of the term: ‘[m]y works have the same value as reality.’9 The message on this occasion was that his art was barely art at all, never mind poetry. It was Rauschenberg in literalist as opposed to associationist mode, offering the possibility of a competing version of his work to the one debated by Surrealists more adjusted to Ado Kyrou’s curt rebuttal of 1953: ‘[w]e are not waiting for Godot.10 Yet, as I will demonstrate in this contextually dense chapter, which engages a similar multi-disciplinarity demanded by Brown’s study of ‘things’, one of the peculiar features of that line of reasoning as it played out in Paris and New York in the early 1960s was that, in one way or another, Surrealism was equally indispensable to it.

Things and Surrealist objects: Françoise Choay An early rendering in French of Rauschenberg’s art deemed choisiste by its assumed fraternization with Surrealism can be found in the considered appreciation of October 1961 by the then art critic Françoise Choay. It must have found favour with the artist and his dealer in Paris because an extract from it would appear in the catalogue of Rauschenberg’s two-part breakthrough exhibition at the galerie Ileana Sonnabend in 1963 in the company of the fragments of text from Michel Ragon’s article, Parinaud’s Arts interview and John Cage’s Metro essay all of the same year. Choay called Rauschenberg the ‘chief protagonist’ of the new category ‘Neo-Dada’, but wondered what such a label signified.11 She noted that in the critical discussion that had circulated since the first showings of Rauschenberg’s work in France, which she had seen at the Paris Biennale in 1959 and the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) of 1959–60, then again at the galerie Daniel Cordier in the year

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she was writing, it ‘was assimilated not only to Dada, but to Surrealism and finally to recent Parisian neo-realism [sic]’.12 She went on to recall unsurprising reiterations of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades in the Combines seen at Daniel Cordier. Alongside these, Choay believed, were perhaps less expected (or less stated since) suggestions of the constructions of Joan Miró, but also frankly surprising echoes of the Surrealist object Never by Oscar Domínguez (1936)  – displayed prominently at the great International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris in 1938, as Choay said, and made widely known since by installation views of that event (Figure  7.1) – and even the early collages of Yves Tanguy that included telephone wire and paper birds.13 Choosing a significant term from the Surrealist lexicon that had graced the pages of Arts five years earlier, Choay went on to contend that Rauschenberg differed from his ‘junk art’ and Nouveau Réaliste contemporaries ‘from whom he adopts neither the miserabilism nor the polemical intent’.14 But he also differed from his European predecessors because he was neither a Duchampian nihilist nor a Surrealist ‘painterpoet’ like Miró. According to Choay, his intention was to bring the city into his art through its stubborn ‘things’ and this constituted a realism that she contrasted with the process of ‘abstraction’ or withdrawal from the world – the loss of worldly

Figure 7.1  Denise Bellon, photograph showing Oscar Domínguez’s Never (1937) at International Exhibition of Surrealism, Paris (1938). Art Institute of Chicago. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. © akg-images/Denise Bellon.

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signification  – that she thought Duchamp’s readymades underwent. To strengthen this contrast between Rauschenberg, on the one hand, and Dada/Surrealism on the other, she quoted Duchamp’s own opinion (published in his collected writings Marchand du sel in 1958, but first made in 1957 in the interview with Jean Schuster in Le Surréalisme, même) that Dada pointed the way to an ‘oneirism’ leading in turn to Surrealism.15 Expanding on Rauschenberg’s divergence from the Surrealists’ evocation of dream, Choay went on to argue that the artist’s receptivity to the real world was contrary to Surrealism’s aspiration as it had been conveyed in André Breton’s early essay ‘Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality’ (1924); that is, in Breton’s words, to ‘help ruin those concrete and hateful trophies’ and ‘greatly discredit those “reasonable” creatures and things’.16 This remained the case, Choay insisted, in spite of the routine use of discarded materials for Surrealist objects, the minute and concrete rendering of the strange in the art of Salvador Dalí and the obvious and unremitting conversation with items of daily use in that of René Magritte, whose work, as is now well known, was greatly admired by both Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns who had just started collecting it at the time.17 It was in the stubborn, non-referential or non-allusive, thingly quality of Rauschenberg’s work, then, that its differences with Surrealism lay for Choay: The Surrealist aesthetic could be defined by the famous phrase of [the Comte de] Lautréamont: ‘As beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.’ That is to say, it lies in the role that the comical and the strange take on as generators of associations, disclosers of symbolism. The object introduces a mental, subjective world – precisely that which holds no interest for Rauschenberg.18

This abjuration of association, symbolism, subjectivity and depth served to dissociate Rauschenberg’s work not only from the art and poetry of the Surrealists, but also from the work of the Nouveaux Réalistes, according to Choay. Although she conceded that Nouveau Réalisme frequently fashioned its art directly from the real world, in the sense of the stuff of everyday life, Choay argued that it was, nevertheless, a real that had stepped away from its original, ‘innocent’, functional identity because it had been ‘worked, chosen, ironised’.19 This was the reason that she felt able to compare Nouveau Réalisme to Surrealism and, in particular, Arman’s ‘symbolism’ to Max Ernst’s. Even so, she made a distinction between Nouveau Réalisme and Surrealism, one that she might not have intended, by emphasizing the ‘miserabilism’ she perceived in the work of Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely – precisely the property rejected by the Surrealists and the one that Choay thought had set out the distance between Rauschenberg and both his predecessors and contemporaries, even those labelled ‘Neo-Dada’.20 The recent, strong connection that had been made between Rauschenberg’s art and Nouveau Réalisme, noted by Choay, had been sealed partly by the efforts of Pierre Restany who had included work by Rauschenberg alongside that of other US artists with the art of the Nouveaux Réalistes in the June 1961 exhibition Le Nouveau

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Réalisme à Paris et à New York at the same galerie Rive Droite that had introduced Johns to a French audience in 1959. Yet Restany continued to harbour reservations about Rauschenberg and the other US artists on display (Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Johns and Richard Stankiewicz), claiming in a manner entirely contrary to Choay that: ‘more susceptible . . . to the surrealising temptation, those already called the American “Neo-Dadas” are in the midst of recreating a modern fetishism of the object’.21 This way of understanding Neo-Dada generally and Rauschenberg specifically in conjunction with Surrealism would carry on in some quarters in France for a little while longer yet.

‘Things’ in 1963: Tel Quel, Rauschenberg, Surrealism From 1962, most critical and curatorial opinion on Rauschenberg’s work in France would aim to distance it from Surrealism as the movement became a historically inconvenient, even imposing presence again in both France and the United States. The mounting expressions of respect for Rauschenberg’s growing oeuvre and more confident contestation of its historical lineage came at the same time that Pop art was beginning its climb to critical acceptance and commercial success, not in spite of its origin in the United States but because of it. Marcelin Pleynet’s review in Tel Quel of Rauschenberg’s 1963 exhibition at Sonnabend’s gallery was one of eight in total in France, all of which were positive. It makes for a particularly interesting case study because it also happens to reflect in miniature a critical stage that Tel Quel had reached in its theoretical and ideological relationship with Surrealism, as it journeyed towards an intellectual position indebted to Foucault and Roland Barthes that was sympathetic towards US formalism in art criticism and Cagean literalism in the wider culture. Rejecting ‘Neo-Dada’ as a ‘senile’ label, Pleynet viewed Rauschenberg as ‘an isolated case’ and his relation with NeoDada as ‘a dialogue of the deaf ’.22 He went on to propose what now seems to us, at first sight, a confusing reading of Rauschenberg’s Combines, which was, nevertheless, integral to the general trend to imagine Rauschenberg’s work through juxtaposition with Surrealism as exemplified by Choay and Restany. Pleynet situated the Combines neither alongside the art of Rauschenberg’s contemporaries in the United States and France nor in the wake of the earlier Dadaist avant-garde practices of Ernst, Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, where they had often been located by US critics in the preceding three years or so, but, initially at least, close to Surrealism: one finds integrated into the painting, then, the most everyday and diverse objects (Coca-Cola bottles, ties, a chair, a ladder, etc.), the object having the triple function to make dream, to kill the dream and to inaugurate a bare universe, everywhere both occupied and uninhabited. The lessons of Surrealism have been well understood here, and they still bear fruit: ‘Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all,’ from which phrase Rauschenberg could create: ‘The world will be convulsive or will not be at all.’ Didn’t Cage say, for his part, ‘Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.’23

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It is not clear, but I understand Pleynet to mean here that Rauschenberg had the aptitude to take Breton’s widely quoted assertion from Nadja (1928) and generalize its relevance beyond mere beauty to all the things of the world, no matter what their appearance or condition.24 It was established in my last chapter that Alain Jouffroy took Pleynet’s idea on in the same year, and he would borrow the same axiom from Breton in the following one, recasting it in a comparable language, not to characterize the universal, ‘thingly’, material content of Rauschenberg’s art, as here, but its universalizing, ‘poetic’ expression; so it was again that commentary on the artist bifurcated along literalist and allusive lines, even when (and perhaps because) it drew for support on the same source in Surrealism.25 For Pleynet, Breton’s ambition to seek beauty in the everyday had been furthered by Rauschenberg and Cage who had each grasped that even the most downtrodden, denigrated and pitiful things could find a place in art.26 He was asserting that beauty was no longer rare, unconsciously sought and strange as it had been theorized by the Surrealists in the found object or trouvaille in the 1930s, it was now commonplace, looked for and understated, rudely incorporated by Rauschenberg into his Combines in a manner recalling the post-apocalyptic, last-man-on-earth narratives of contemporary science fiction, where only the abandoned, unkempt traces of human activity remain. Pleynet’s formulation of the threefold function of Rauschenberg’s unassuming materials – ‘to make dream, to kill the dream and to inaugurate a bare universe’  – accommodates the contradictions already evident by 1963 in the writing on Rauschenberg’s art, as well as the inconsistencies in the artist’s stated attitude towards his own work, frequently given ingenuously in interview, as we have seen, in a language that was sufficiently inexact to appeal to frankly competing factions. Pleynet meant to refer to the accessibility of the discarded items chosen by Surrealists under the poetic rubric of the ‘image’ for their objects and collages or collage-like works, both visual and written. For this, he probably had in mind the key statement on metaphor made by Breton in ‘Surrealist Situation of the Object’ (1935), quoted in my first chapter, which was making the rounds of Tel Quel at the time, cited contemporaneously by Philippe Sollers, the editor of the review.27 The erratic version of Rauschenberg that emerged in Pleynet’s text, hesitantly transitioning from the ‘beauty’ of the Surrealist image that transports us outside of commonplace reality to the hard surfaces of Cagean fact-not-symbol upon which that reality is irreducibly recorded, is illustrative of the direction being taken at the time by Tel Quel. The review is usually thought of as excoriating Bretonian Surrealism and replacing it with the ‘dissident Surrealism’ of Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud, but up to 1963 that was not at all the case. Sollers stated clearly enough in interview in Le Figaro littéraire in 1962 ‘[i]t is without doubt Surrealism that has affected me the most,’28 and he entertained cordial relations at first with Breton, even requesting his participation in Tel Quel in letters written from 1960 to mid-1963.29 Sollers copublished the transcript of a reverent radio broadcast on the ‘genius of Breton’ with Jean Thibaudeau in the same issue that carried Pleynet’s text on Rauschenberg.30 He also demonstrated his tolerance of contemporary Surrealism in this period by contributing in the following year a Bataillean response to an enquiry into eroticism in the Paris group’s journal of the 1960s, La Brèche: Action surréaliste.31

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At the time that Pleynet wrote on Rauschenberg, another close bond, between the review and the Nouveau Roman, was stated by Foucault who had Robbe-Grillet down in Critique in November 1963 as one of the ‘fathers’ of Tel Quel, along with Bataille and Ponge.32 Danielle Marx-Scouras adds to these the novelist Julien Gracq, calling him and Ponge ‘Surrealists’ even though Gracq was a critic of the Nouveau Roman and his involvement with Surrealism fell short of whole-hearted due to his reserve over the movement’s political activity and collective statements, and Ponge’s stint with the Surrealists had ended a full thirty years before the launch of Tel Quel.33 Pleynet and Sollers were writing in the year that Tel Quel would begin in earnest to cut its intellectual ties with both Surrealism and the Nouveau Roman, an operation that would be gradual, increasingly aggressive and culminate in the polemics of 1970–1 against Surrealism, a direct outcome of May ‘68. The volte-face on both probably began at the Cerisy colloquium ‘Une littérature nouvelle?’ staged by Tel Quel in September 1963, six months after Pleynet hesitated over a ‘Surrealist Rauschenberg’.34 In the conversation he led at the colloquium that would be published in Tel Quel the following year as ‘Débat sur le roman’, Foucault extemporized, equally hesitantly, on the significance of Bataille to Tel Quel as a means of bypassing Surrealism: There seems to me to be something like a kinship, or isomorphism, between what is currently going on at Tel Quel and what the Surrealists were doing. The question, then, is: what is the difference between them? . . . It seems to me – although I am not certain about this – that the Surrealists had situated these experiences [dreams, madness, folly, repetition, doubling, the disruption of time, return] in a space that could be called psychological. . . . They recognised there a kind of unconscious, collective or otherwise. I think that this is definitely not something that we see with Sollers or in the Tel Quel group; it seems to me that Sollers does not situate the experiences he spoke of yesterday in the realm of the psyche [psyché], but rather in the realm of thought [pensée] . . . . In this sense, I believe that people like Sollers are continuing a project that has often been interrupted or disrupted, a project that can be traced back to Bataille and [Maurice] Blanchot. Why else would Bataille have been such an important figure for the Tel Quel group, if he had not uncovered within the psychological dimensions of Surrealism what he called ‘limit,’ ‘transgression,’ ‘laughter’ or ‘madness,’ and which he relocated within the realm of thought? I would say that this raises the following question: what does it mean to think – what is this extraordinary experience known as thought? Literature is currently rediscovering this question, which is close to but distinct from the one raised recently by the work of [Raymond] Roussel and Robbe-Grillet: what does it mean to see and to speak?35

Foucault saw this resituation of Surrealist themes from the unconscious to thought or psychoanalysis to philosophy (or poetry to fiction, or the everyday to literature, or the subject to the object) as a collective feature also characteristic of the Tel Quel attitude towards language, which took a linguistic not psychological turn.36 Notice the similar ‘factist’ block placed on allusive drift across the twinned terms, as I set them

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out here, that would be echoed in New York in 1967 by the Rose/Sandler enquiry into a ‘sensibility of the sixties’ and similarly recollected by Sandler.37 A few weeks after Foucault made his comments at Cerisy, Philippe Audoin launched a frontal attack on the Nouveau Roman on behalf of Surrealism in La Brèche in October 1963, the year of the publication of Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel. Audoin attempted to refute the ‘secular dualities’ (between viewing subject and observed object, empiricism and idealism) that he believed were upheld in the tapering, monotonous descriptions of the Nouveau Roman, leading to what he termed ‘an alarming regression towards a disenchanted nominalism’.38 Following a lead given recently by Gracq, who was close to Surrealism and had indicated ‘under the name of the Nouveau Roman, those curious novels in zinc’, in which humanity is severed from the ‘eternal requirements of correspondence and of meaning’,39 Audoin’s complaint about the ‘thingly’ qualities of Robbe-Grillet’s first novel The Erasers, Michel Butor’s Passage de Milan (1954) and Beckett’s Molloy (1951) centred familiarly on the resistance to poetic allusion they share; on a ‘myopic gaze’ tuned towards ‘“thingified”’ (‘“chosifiés”’) things or beings, where the thing signified failed to survive the sign.40 In arguing against calling a spade a spade – that is, arguing for language (and art) as fundamentally metaphorical at the level of the signifier – Audoin contrasted the ‘literalism’ of the Nouveau Roman with Duchamp’s Bottlerack (1914), slightly misquoting Duchamp’s already illustrious idea recently imparted to the Surrealists and taken by them to mean that all art (including Rauschenberg’s) is always allusive: ‘“it is the beholder that makes the picture.”’41 Perplexingly, Duchamp’s phrase would be used in 1968 by Robbe-Grillet to make precisely the opposite argument and characterize the crucial role of the audience to an art that was non-referential and therefore post-humanist: ‘[m]etaphors are always humanistic. So that to reject metaphor is in the last analysis to fight against this completely dépassé humanism, this transcendent humanism, if you will.’42 As we saw, the view had been put more expansively by Robbe-Grillet in ‘Nature, Humanism, Tragedy’, yet it was precisely the postwar assault on metaphor in ‘degree zero’ writing, formatively lauded under that rubric in 1953 by Robbe-Grillet’s first advocate Barthes (though he was unaware at the time of either Bataille or Robbe-Grillet), that Audoin, Breton, José Pierre and the other Surrealists believed could be combated historically by recourse to the example of Duchamp’s readymades, and that they felt Rauschenberg’s Combines stood apart from.43 In this year of intense debate in Paris over the connotative scope of language and images, an adjustment within Pleynet’s Tel Quel text is evident from the poeticoSurrealist Rauschenberg to the Cagean version of the artist as ‘factist’ not symbolist. This was the Rauschenberg who fully arrived in the 1963 catalogue of the double Sonnabend exhibition wreathed in French translations of passages from Cage’s 1961 essay on the artist, abbreviated to a series of epigrams and closing with a French rendering of the axiom that had concluded the English-language version of the text: ‘[p]as d’idées mais des faits’.44 Indeed, a brief article by Cage on dance would feature in Tel Quel a little over a year after Pleynet’s review of that event, in the issue that directly followed the one carrying Foucault’s ‘Débat sur le roman’, which had bolstered the confidence of the journal and encouraged the greater autonomy from Surrealism that

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would soon harden into a polemic and critique of metaphor that was very much of its time.45 It would culminate in Julia Kristeva’s discussion of Artaud as a case study in an examination of the ‘subject in process’, where the one-time Surrealist was seen to represent the denial of metaphor through his exposure to the pre-Symbolic (premetaphorical) drives in his art and life.46 Kristeva viewed metaphor as nothing less than the path towards identification with the Law of the Father, the very authoritarian, social and Symbolic logic the Surrealists purported to be in revolt against and which was, therefore, not destroyed but strengthened by their efforts at insurrection through a poetic view of the world. An intimation of that position where priority is placed on the signifier is given in Pleynet’s reading of Rauschenberg in Tel Quel. The dream-like, manifest content of the things that are included in a Combine have behind them no latent content, Pleynet argued; this was truer still of the most recent, silkscreened work hung at Sonnabend’s gallery where ‘the figuration of the object no longer has recourse to the presence of the object but its image’.47 In the emerging language of French structuralist and semiotic theory, pioneered by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Barthes in the fifties and brought to a larger audience by Tel Quel from the early sixties, it is really a world of symbols or signifiers without signification. The work of Rauschenberg and Robbe-Grillet, goes the argument, is less that of objects carrying their conceptual, metaphorical or analogical reference in tow, as it was with Surrealism (associated historical relationships with matter, or feelings, experiences and so on), than a world of things to be viewed in their feral, unadorned thingliness. To wield the metaphor: in his earliest writing on art, Breton had conceded his inability ‘to envisage a picture as being other than a window’, while for Brown and the postwar intellectual discourse he summarized, Rauschenberg’s work, like things, could ‘hardly function as a window’.48

­Rauschenberg, semiotician: Nicolas Calas on ‘things’ and metaphors As I showed in my second chapter, the Greek poet, critic and essayist Nicolas Calas supported the work of Rauschenberg and Johns in his criticism as early as 1959 in quite similar terms, though his subsequent writings on Rauschenberg in the 1960s shifted in the direction of Surrealism, which reflected not only his own intellectual trajectory but the fortunes of the movement in the United States and France. Like Jouffroy, Calas had maintained a close though disputatious relationship with Breton and Surrealism in the period covered by this book, yet his main writing on Rauschenberg’s Combines situated them theoretically through dialogue with and difference from the metaphorical dimension of Surrealist art in a manner close to Pleynet. Calas was led from ‘Freudo-Marxism’ to Trotskyism to Surrealism in the mid1930s after a few years of finely argued consideration of the essential relationship between culture, society and revolution. He left Athens permanently in 1937, first

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heading for Paris then settling in New York early in 1940 alongside other European émigrés, participating in Surrealist activities across that period until 1942, then again from 1944 till 1947 before eventually becoming an art critic and art consultant in the United States.49 After a fallow period in his writings in the 1950s and a waning of his support for political and social causes, he took up a post as a lecturer in art history at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey in 1963. From the early 1960s, he turned again towards Surrealism, rejuvenated by the rise of the New Left, to the extent that Robert Benayoun described him as ‘our very good friend’ in the letter of February 1963 sent on behalf of the Paris Surrealist group to Franklin Rosemont in Chicago.50 It is not currently known when he first met Rauschenberg and Johns, but as I noted in my second chapter, his earliest references in print to both artists took place in close proximity with the meeting of January 1959 that he arranged between them and Duchamp.51 Calas was a significant interpretive intermediary between Rauschenberg and the artist’s audience. He gave his fullest treatment to the oeuvre in 1964, to mark the controversial award of the Grand Prix to Best Foreign Artist at the Venice Biennale that year. It took place in ‘Robert Rauschenberg’, an article of two parts, the first dated ‘1961’ but previously unpublished except for a section on Bed (1955) filched from the 1959 Art News article ‘ContiNuance’, the second written in 1964, probably dated like this to mark the shift in Rauschenberg’s art itself from Combines to silkscreen paintings. The text appeared in the US poetry quarterly Kulchur with somewhat rudimentary black-and-white reproductions of eight Combines, transfer drawings and silkscreen paintings, including the much-lauded Canyon (1959) and Winter Pool (1959), under a cover featuring a cropped Persimmon (1964), to be fêted from 1980 as one of the chief means by which the reign of modernism in the visual arts was concluded.52 The focus of Kulchur on poetry was not made clear when the article was republished unaltered in Art in the Age of Risk in 1968, but it is important because it probably encouraged Calas’s presentation of Rauschenberg as a painter who was a poet, one who became a ‘poet who explored differences’ and who shared the ‘poet’s function . . . to spread doubt and create illusions’.53 Accordingly, Arthur Rimbaud’s durable proverb ‘Je est un autre’ was quoted by Calas, but not to seek common cause between Rauschenberg and Surrealism, where Rimbaud was held in the highest regard, which is how Pierre would refer to the poet at the end of the decade.54 Rather, Calas employed the famous quotation in support of a not-irrelevant but customarily amorphous, at once circuitous and over-abbreviated, incursion into classical and modern science, where Rauschenberg’s art was presumed to be consequential of the ‘schismatic quality that distinguishes modern art from the art which is an imitation of nature’, and the fragmentation and splitting it stages descend from the ‘non-Euclidean revolution started when the Impressionists interpreted colours instead of copying them’,55 taken up by Rauschenberg and said clumsily by Calas to be illustrative of an artist who ‘lives in the era of relativity’.56 Calas was consistent across his two-considerations-in-one of 1961 and 1964 on Rauschenberg’s art in relating it to, yet separating it from Surrealism. This takes place

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along lines close to those of his earlier, briefer interpretation of the artist’s work in 1959, to the point that he recycled some of the ‘poetic’ language of ‘tattooing’ and ‘vivisecting’ (along with the three paragraphs I quote below on Plato’s bed, the symbol and Monogram of 1955–9), meant to allude to Rauschenberg’s colour and dripped, thickly streaked and splashy use of paint in works such as Bed as they collude with a vernacular imagery to retrieve the violent, sexual body that had been lost for the most part in abstract expressionism.57 But in the pages of Kulchur, Calas also recapitulated and extended his reading of an imagery made available in Combines, understanding it as quite distinct from Surrealism’s in its relation with the real: Unlike Surrealist objects that, however weird, always form a whole, RR’s Combines give the impression of growing up distorted. RR distorts patterns, tattoos reality, vivisects hallucinations. What has happened to the three beds of Plato, the ideal, or God’s bed; the real, or craftsman’s bed; the illusory, or painter’s bed? Rauschenberg gives the empiricist’s answer: ‘A bed is a bed is a bed.’ His bed is like a real bed, accidentally isolated from a line of ready-made beds, and like the painter’s bed, for it has been defaced by an artist . . . . As accident is the devil’s true name, in the world of art and accidents we need not fear the ghosts of Freudian castles, and can again reappraise the symbol . . . . In Monogram the goat and tire are locked in a monogram. We think of an animal jumping through a hoop, of a sacrifice reinterpreted in terms of motor accidents, of the crowning of garlands, of Argonauts of the world of painting in quest of exotic masks. But these are bad habits of the mind. This goat and the defaced cock of Odalisk [1955/1958] are objects whose symbolic identity has been rejected; they are to be treated as sphinxes, not as photographs of the unconscious. In Canyon the stuffed eagle with a box for springboard spreads its powerful wings over its victim: the feathers of our dreams suffocated in a pillow. . . . In Canyon, an infant, his arm outstretched, summoning, is lost in the artist’s personal mythology . . . . The heron of Inlet [1959], the eagle of Canyon, the rooster of Odalisk, the goat, are we to see these as private totems?58

These remarks, purportedly from 1961 but running across 1959–61, quite pointedly contest those made by Pierre and Benayoun in their conversation of 1962 in La Brèche where, as argued in my third chapter, a case was made for a poetico-political version of Rauschenberg in ‘Alchimie de l’objet, cabotinage du déchet’. By the time Calas published in 1964, the Surrealists’ article must have been known to him due to his continuing comradeship with the Paris group and his knowledge of debates in La Brèche, and he would have been aware that it was the same Combines that held their attention: Bed, Canyon and Odalisk, due to their potential allusions to sleep and dream.59

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If Calas was attentive to the emerging version of Rauschenberg in Surrealism, he remained unaffected by, and even opposed to it, designating the artist’s imagery in the ‘1964’ part of the Kulchur text, nine years before O’Doherty’s classic reading, as ‘a vernacular one. This differentiates it from Surrealist imagery’, he continued, ‘[which is] primarily symbolic’.60 It was a fleeting, depthless imagery that Rauschenberg captured, specific and not generic, of media, mass consumption and spectacle rather than of still-life, domesticity and the quotidian, appropriate to an image-saturated society. ‘The imagery, so public in subject matter, does not tempt one to account for it psychoanalytically,’61 he averred, and Rauschenberg quite consciously closed down the path that led to a Surrealist poetics when, in the spare and orderly oil and silkscreen ink Quote (1964), ‘he covers with brushstrokes part of an image (that of Kennedy) and blocks a prospective metaphor.’62

Rauschenberg, positivist: the Nouveau Roman and Ludwig Wittgenstein By the time he augmented his study of Rauschenberg towards these conclusions in Kulchur in 1964, Calas was aware of Cage’s essay on the artist, which he quoted from in the article.63 The way this served his understanding of the real in Rauschenberg was clearly inflected further by an emerging interest in the Nouveau Roman. Again, Surrealism cued his interpretation. He noted the often-made link with the collages of Schwitters, but wrote, nevertheless, of Rauschenberg’s ability ‘to dramatize the relation between form and content, thereby giving a Surrealist touch to his collages’, by which he presumably meant to indicate the incongruity between material and object to be found in images and works such as Breton’s ‘soluble fish’, and Meret Oppenheim’s Object (Breakfast in Fur) (1936) and Wolfgang Paalen’s Articulated Cloud (1938), mentioned in my earlier chapter, each one rendered useless through the very materials by which it is constituted.64 ‘But while the Surrealist compositions are riddles posed for the detectives of the soul,’ Calas continued, ‘RR’s are dramas for diviners.’65 The wording is jarring as usual, even inappropriate and misleading, but the dissimilarity he wanted to spell out seems to be between a Surrealist tendency towards psychoanalytic diagnosis and a current novelistic and theoretical leaning towards indeterminacy, typical of the Nouveau Roman. This is brought out more where Calas stated in Kulchur that a ‘detailed narrative is touched on in Rauschenberg’s Hymnal [1955]’ (Figure 7.2),66 also referring to that Combine as ‘a detective story, or rather those elements of one which do not reveal what actually took place in the room with the omitted telephone’.67 The interpretation was motivated by the suggestive iconography in Hymnal of (actual) Manhattan telephone directory positioned as though it were a religious icon or relic (like the glass jar in Talisman of 1958), violent street crime (in a photograph) and police mug shots, but was surely fostered by the indeterminism of the Nouveau Roman, which has long been viewed as a parody of the detective story through plots permanently,

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Figure  7.2  Robert Rauschenberg, Hymnal (1955). Oil, paper, fabric, printed paper, printed reproductions and wood on fabric with telephone directory, metal bolt and string, 162.6 × 125.7 × 18.4 cm. Private collection. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

definitively suspended in uncertainty, a relationship indicated by Robbe-Grillet himself in his earliest theoretical writings, published around the time Hymnal was made and republished the year before Calas’s essay.68 The following year in ‘Why Not Pop Art?’ Calas would critically cite the comparison made between Cage’s music, Rauschenberg’s art and Robbe-Grillet’s fiction in the widely read article by Meyer ‘The End of the Renaissance?’ published, again, the year before his own on Rauschenberg and mercilessly scrutinized by the composer Barney Childs in the very same issue of Kulchur that Calas’s appeared in.69 Calas would make further reference to the Nouveau Roman and Robbe-Grillet in another article in Kulchur in 1965, this time, rather bewilderingly, as concerned with ‘objective situations’ that follow on from Surrealist ‘objective chance’.70 Then in 1966, in the article ‘A Perspective’, published in the special number of Artforum on Surrealism at the time of Breton’s death and confirming the resumption of Calas’s fidelity to the movement, a lengthier, admiring consideration of Robbe-Grillet compared the structure of his novels to ‘the structured space of analytical Cubism’, while doubting the veracity of the ‘objectivism’ claimed for them by some.71 Calas was also an early supporter of Pop art to which, not unusually for the time, he appended Rauschenberg. The ‘new realism’ he saw in Pop, along with what he termed the ‘superobjectivity’ of Robbe-Grillet’s novels, gave evidence of a larger school

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of literature and painting that, he declared in ‘Why Not Pop Art?’, opposed ‘literal mindedness’ and ‘factual observation’ to ‘psychological insight’, while he credited Rauschenberg himself, rather grandly or perhaps bathetically, with ‘the endorsement of the thesis of literal meaning’.72 Calas’s renewal of interest in, and proposal of new goals for Surrealism over the same years in the mid-1960s, alongside his insistence that its relevance depended on a full engagement with contemporary society, philosophy and culture and not a reliance on the politics, themes, writers and art of the past, left him with an uphill task in arguing for its consequence in the postwar philosophical culture that had bred Rauschenberg, Cage, Robbe-Grillet and Pop.73 He might well have believed that ‘Pop art is the complementary opposite of Surrealism,’ in the lessening of the gap between art and life that both achieved, yet his recital of the differences in ‘And Now the Sphinx,’ the essay of 1966 that compared them, was stark, telling and ruinous to his own theory of their compatibility in the conflict it announced: Surrealism is deeply involved in moral issues, while Pop art is not. Surrealism is passionate and romantic, while Pop art is cool and pragmatic. Surrealism developed in the intellectual climate of dialectical interpretations of both society and the psyche. Pop art grew in an age of logical positivism and empiricism. Surrealism relies on symbolism. Pop art on literalness.74

Calas’s association of the emotional detachment advocated by Cage and Allan Kaprow with the vogue since the 1950s in the United States for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writing (its critique of expression and emphasis on the strict relationship between a word and its use) was accurate in a narrow sense about the 1960s, even if the ‘age of logical positivism’ might just as easily be set in the 1930s, when certain Surrealists and their friends were surprisingly open to the writings of Rudolph Carnap and the Vienna Circle.75 In any case, it served up in a roundabout way his contrast between Rauschenberg’s guileless acceptance of the Grand Prix in Venice, on the one hand, as a ‘dissociation of conduct from any moral consideration’,76 and Surrealist non-conformism on the other, for which Calas took as his example the gesture of the poet and sculptor Jean-Pierre Duprey who in 1959 had protested against French militarism in Algeria by urinating on the ‘eternal flame’ at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe.77 For an essay supposedly aiming at some kind of ‘complementary’ status between an expanded definition of Pop art and Surrealism, it produced a powerful contrast. Calas could hardly have chosen two better examples to announce the chasm between the conformism of current art and the absolute non-conformism of Surrealism. Calas only dramatized further the gulf between artists like Rauschenberg and Johns, on the one hand, who drew on Wittgenstein or were motivated by a related rhetoric of positivism, empiricism, literalism, anti-expressionism or choisisme, and Surrealism on the other, with its steadfast confidence in the unconscious and poetic analogy, by attempting to bridge it in ‘Surrealist Perspective’ through the contention that ‘[m]odern aesthetics should be based on the philosophical principles formulated by Wittgenstein’.78 Elsewhere, around the same time, Calas claimed more pointedly with reference

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to the Philosophical Investigations (1953) that Surrealism itself was a ‘realisation of Wittgenstein’s contention that ethics and aesthetics are one and the same’, insisting that ‘many of Wittgenstein’s iconic paradoxes could be elaborated by artists interested in updating Surrealism’.79 He even managed to contradict himself in Artforum on this when he averred in ‘A Perspective’ that it was ‘[n]ot clarity but ambiguity [that] rules art, and Surrealism is the triumph of ambiguity’, whereas ‘[f]or Wittgenstein the goal of philosophy is the peace which can be achieved through complete clarity’.80 At the time that Calas was writing, Wittgenstein was still barely known to Surrealists in Paris. The publication of the Philosophical Investigations was met with complete silence in France until 1956 and would only become available in French alongside the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) in 1961 (the Blue and Brown Books had to wait till 1965).81 The translation of the two important texts was undertaken by Pierre Klossowski, who had been close to Surrealism from the mid-1930s and corresponded with Breton until at least 1960, which cautions against a too pre-emptive dismissal of shared concerns with Wittgenstein. However, Calas seems to have temporarily forgotten Breton’s scene-setter for the new movement in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) attacking ‘the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France . . . which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays’.82 As well as weakening any chance of a relationship between Rauschenberg and Surrealism with Wittgenstein as intermediary, it at least blurs the portrayal of the ‘intellectual climate’ that Calas thought Surrealism developed in and probably contradicts his simplified account of how ideas form at all, as does Greenberg’s view given in 1950 of the period 1920–5 as ‘the high age of positivism’.83 Calas was obviously swayed by the vogue for Wittgenstein among critics and artists in New York to which I referred at points in my introduction and with more emphasis in my first chapter, which was another episode of the same ‘sensibility of the sixties’ that had been induced or confirmed by the writings of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet and Cage. Although it has usually been seen to herald a new terrain for culture and art in that decade after abstract expressionism and in the twilight of the dominance of Greenberg’s formalist modernism, there was plenty of common ground. What Caroline Jones calls ‘Greenberg’s repetitive, vernacular invocation of positivism’ since the mid1940s began in a defence of modernism against Surrealism, while Nancy Jachec noted the relevance (not to mention the authority) lent by logical empiricism and logical positivism to Greenberg’s usage.84 In the mid-1960s, Michael Fried was among the detractors of Surrealism and Minimalist art, not to mention Rauschenberg’s, who drew on both Greenberg and Wittgenstein without contradiction, and I referred earlier to citations of Wittgenstein by Rosalind Krauss and Rose in that decade while they were still formalists.85 Fried, Krauss, Anton Ehrenzweig and Richard Wollheim seem to have been the main art critics and historians to engage with Wittgenstein in the 1960s and 1970s, while Artforum editor Philip Leider recalled that ‘Wittgenstein was very important to me’ in the mid-1960s.86 Surrealism might have returned in that decade and been considered an alternative if lesser commented ‘sensibility’, but it would be judged not on its own terms in the United States; rather, modernist formalism continued to act as a significant intermediary with

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a long history going back to Greenberg and beyond, connected in various ways to the emerging preoccupation with the signifier in Tel Quel, the choisisme of the Nouveau Roman and Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’, as I have argued here, even in the writings of sympathizers like Calas.87 No wonder some proximity was discovered between Surrealism and Rauschenberg by the writers I have been referring to in this chapter, even after the artist had been decisively detached from historical Surrealism, but it was proximity made safe by allowing Rauschenberg to be the choisiste he had always claimed to be, in spite of the many lapses in his rhetoric and the countless available inferences in his art that I have been recording.

Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage and the ‘Surrealist sensibility’ Rauschenberg’s Bed and Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts (1955) would be displayed one final time adjacent to Surrealist work in the period covered by this book, at William Rubin’s massive and controversial exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 27  March till 9  June 1968 before moving on to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art then the Art Institute of Chicago. Rubin had been studying Surrealism seriously and publishing on it since the late 1950s as its reputation improved in the United States, up to the point that ‘[b]y the mid-1960s’, in the words of Scott Rothkopf, ‘a surfeit of New York group exhibitions explored Surrealist themes – in particular its psychosexual preoccupations – in the work of younger artists’.88 Rothkopf points to Recent Work by Arman, Dine, Fahlström, Marisol, Oldenburg, Segal held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in May 1965, Beyond Realism showing Richard Artschwager, Claes Oldenburg again, Marjorie Strider, Lucas Samaras, Paul Thek, Mike Todd and Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali at the Pace Gallery over the same month, Gene Swenson’s alternative to modernist formalism The Other Tradition at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art from 27 January to 7 March 1966 and Lucy Lippard’s Eccentric Abstraction at the Fischbach Gallery, New York from 20 September through October 1966, along with a string of publications on the movement and monographic exhibitions great and small devoted to Surrealist artists ‘whose sensibilities’, argues Rothkopf rather broadly, ‘would have been most relevant to the time’, such as Dalí, Ernst, Magritte, Miró, Kurt Seligmann and Tanguy.89 The special issue of Artforum devoted to Surrealism that arrived in September 1966 remains an art historical curiosity. It is at once canonical and disposable, since the magazine had reached a position of pre-eminence yet the contributions to this one were truly dire, all condescending except Calas’s and all undecided about whether Surrealism was coming or going.90 Rubin’s three brief articles provided a mild exception; although his admission that Surrealist paintings are ‘always metaphoric’ immediately gave way to a standard formalist analysis about their ‘plastic structure’ and primacy of materials, at least Rubin was able to show evidence of some research and reflection, and these writings reappeared in the book Dada and Surrealist Art (1969), which was one of the outcomes of the research that went into Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage.91

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The setting of the exhibition was far from partial in the way the staging was when undertaken for their own shows by Surrealists, who would have balked at Surrealism being ranked equally within a standard art historical continuum of what came before and ‘after’. The compartmentalizing, sequential logic of that historical model decreed that Rauschenberg and Johns belonged not among the Surrealists, but, uncontroversially, in the latter, ‘heritage’ part of the show, as a bridge at the most between Surrealism and what came next. Accordingly, Bed was displayed next to Ed Kienholz’s wobbly, wheeled construction Ida Franger (1960) and close to Niki de Saint Phalle’s Ghea (1964) concocted with papier-mâché and toys (Figure  7.3); and Target with Plaster Casts (shown in installation views with five of the nine compartments open, including the one containing the painted penis) was situated between Tinguely’s Méta-Matic No. 12 (1959) and Arman’s wall-bound boxed collection of threads Fortune Smiles on the Daring Ones (1962), overlooking Oldenburg’s recent Fagends, Medium Scale (1967) (Figure 7.4). The catalogue of Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage continued the task of confirming distance between Surrealism and Rauschenberg/Johns in a different way. It linked them explicitly to Dada, largely through formal means by reproducing Bed next to photographs of Schwitters’s Merzbau (1923–37) and Spoerri’s Marcel Duchamp’s Dinner (1964), while Target with Plaster Casts appeared alongside Francis Picabia’s mainly watercolour black and white Optophone (c. 1922) and was associated with the

Figure 7.3  Photograph of Bed with Ed Kienholz, Ida Franger (1960) and Niki de Saint Phalle

Ghea (1964) at Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1968. Photograph James Mathews. Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. © Niki de Saint Phalle Charitable Art Foundation/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko ARS, NY and DACS, London. 2022. © Estate of Ed Kienholz. © 2022, digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

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Figure 7.4  James Mathews, photograph of Target with Plaster Casts with Jean Tinguely, Méta-

Matic No. 12 (1959), Arman, Fortune Smiles on the Daring Ones (1962) and Claes Oldenburg, Fagends, Medium Scale (1967). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY.

optical experiments of Duchamp, not with his more erotic, Surrealist-related work.92 To further the case for Surrealism’s obsolescence and therefore the validity of his historicizing exhibition, Rubin asserted that at EROS, Breton had been ‘reduced to including Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts, an excellent but not particularly Surrealist work, in order to create a sense of up-to-dateness’.93 Rubin thereby disregarded the value of the twenty-five or so works by young contemporary Surrealist artists across the world that had been on display at EROS on the basis of a paradox: if they had all been up-to-date in the sense of the sequentializing tendency of art history, as Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s were deemed to be (perceived as Neo-Dada), they would, of course, not have been Surrealist, which was reckoned by historians such as Rubin to have expired well before that event. As James Boaden has testified about some of the later interpretations of the work of Johns: ‘[t]oday it would be difficult to see Target with Plaster Casts as “not particularly Surrealist,”’ as though the later decline of the formalist paradigm has enabled art historians access to a new, renewed or belated vision of the object once glimpsed by Duchamp and the Surrealists.94 At first, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage did not have a smooth ride. It attracted a boisterous crowd of protesting critics, hippies, Surrealists and Surrealist sympathizers on its preview night of 25 March, angrily demonstrating against what they viewed as the depoliticization, commercialization, institutionalization and premature historicization of Dada and Surrealism, and in doing so enthusiastically making up for what they

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viewed as the washed out, formalist, apolitical charade taking place inside.95 The throng included John Ashbery and former Surrealists like Calas, early supporters of Rauschenberg who were, nevertheless, ‘devoted to and even shaped by the [Surrealist] movement,’ as Max Kozloff put it in his report on the rumpus for The Nation.96 The critics’ objections to the exhibition were shown to be entirely justified by Leider’s review in the still politics-free Artforum, which laid emphasis on the word of the hour: ‘the Surrealist sensibility is beyond rehabilitation, as silly, quaint and as hapless before the actual facts of the times as, say, a pre-Raphaelite sensibility. To rehabilitate Surrealism today means to make a case for it as art, and this Mr. Rubin has proven himself superbly equipped to attempt.’97 Apparently oblivious himself to ‘the actual facts of the times’, Leider was presumably equally ignorant of or uninterested in the sacrifices made by Surrealists since the 1940s through their opposition to the colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria or, more likely, was uninformed of postwar Surrealist groups at all, never mind contemporary ones currently taking to the streets of Paris and Chicago. Kozloff begged to differ, identifying ‘the untidy pervasiveness of Surrealism as a sensibility’ in much art that had been left out of an already massive show and demonstrating it with a motley selection that included that of Öyvind Fahlström and Pierre Alechinsky (seemingly unaware that their work had indeed accompanied the Surrealists’ at Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain of 1960–1 and L’Écart absolu of 1965 respectively), ‘the later work of the abstract expressionists’ (did he mean the early work?) and that of Robert Morris, most critics’ idea of the prototype of the ‘literalist’ sensibility of the sixties and as anti-Surrealist in his outlook as Frank Stella and Donald Judd, Cage and Rauschenberg, Greenberg and Fried.98 Cultivating what Kozloff would soon call, in a renowned essay, the ‘flattened ethical landscape’ of the United States from the late 1950s in which ‘younger artists tended to adopt a morally neutral stand’ propagated by the ‘fascinated passivity’ of Rauschenberg and Johns, none in that litany with the possible exception of Rauschenberg across 1965–70 gave a jot about an art that had a political and poetic dimension, long debated by the Surrealists and their friends; nor could those central concerns of Surrealism be identified in either the issue of Artforum devoted to it or Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage.99 The pursuit of such features in Rauschenberg’s work would be taken up one more time at greater length than before at the end of the 1960s by José Pierre in the text I have referred to a few times up to now, titled ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’ (1969). This was the moment that the Surrealists’ confidence in the artist’s relevance to their own aims reached both its most dexterous theorization and its terminal point, triggered by Rauschenberg’s month-long retrospective that ran from 10 October 1968 at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris – the same location where his three Combines had been largely ignored at the first Paris Biennale in 1959 – while Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage stopped off in Chicago. Pierre would go into far greater detail than before about what had attracted him to Rauschenberg’s work and where he felt the artist had now gone astray. As a final chapter, I weigh up his mixed findings in the context of Surrealist activities of the late 1960s and the political and personal crises that traversed the Paris group during that period.

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Surrealist in irony: Reading José Pierre and Trophy III (for Jean Tinguely)

In 1936, André Breton had written ‘The Dalí “Case,”’ which proposed ‘a lyrical state based upon a pure intuition’ on the part of Salvador Dalí, an artist who had been placed under suspicion by Breton and other Surrealists off and on since about January 1934 for his perceived departure from the ethical code that was meant to bind the members of the group.1 Through his poetic ‘condition’, argued Breton, the pleasure principle (humour) was able to triumph over the reality principle, and the ‘external object’ in Dalí’s painting ‘becomes endowed with a symbolic life which takes precedence over all other forms of life’.2 At the end of the 1960s, José Pierre took a cue from Breton’s essay – specifically, what Surrealists had regarded contemporaneously as unreliable conduct and historically as wanton behaviour on the part of Dalí – to return to the themes and theory of the ‘real’ and the symbolic, historically gauged in Surrealism and further evident contentiously in the debate on Robert Rauschenberg in France, as I have detailed up to this point. This took place in the major article of 1969, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’, where Pierre echoed Breton on Dalí by petitioning for the role of intuition in the service of lyricism in certain of Rauschenberg’s works, diagnosed not through a psychoanalytical framework, however, but the philosophical one of ‘positivism’. Initially in this final chapter, I pick up certain threads from my introduction to this book and my preceding chapter to explore Pierre’s assertion about a particular philosophical proclivity within recent art history to explain Rauschenberg’s loss of vitality. To the Surrealist, this inclination was evident from the period that Rauschenberg’s work turned in a direction endorsed by Pierre around 1953, through its supposed demise around 1961–2 and up to the mid-1960s. In a theoretical digression, I test Pierre’s disobedient Surrealist Rauschenberg against Leo Steinberg’s paradigmatic ‘post-Modernist’ version of the artist given at the same time. But I return ultimately to the situation of Surrealism at the moment of Pierre’s article because only an understanding of that can explain the Surrealist’s hesitancy and finally his loss of confidence in what he perceived to be the decline in Rauschenberg’s work from the early 1960s and its further diminishment due to the artist’s infatuation with technology later in the decade.

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Rauschenberg, seer Aiming to reassess the past relationship between Surrealism and Rauschenberg’s work and consider its current orientation, partly through the words of the artist himself and that of his ‘sycophants’, as Pierre put it, the article ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’ anticipates early on, in both content and tone, the philosophical complaint it ultimately makes.3 It claims that Rauschenberg’s art and that of many US artists since the mid-1950s had been inspired by an Anglophone ‘logical positivism’ or ‘scientific empiricism’ in the tradition of John Locke, George ‘Bishop’ Berkeley and David Hume, naming Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein as its most recent representatives in philosophy.4 By this, Pierre presumably meant to refer mainly to the publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in 1953 (republished in 1958, 1966 and 1968) and perhaps The Brown and Blue Books (1958, republished in 1960), as well as contemporary art historical writing by Barbara Rose and others, recording the interest taken in the philosopher by artists associated with Neo-Dada, Minimalist and conceptual art. By linking Rauschenberg’s art with what he perceived to be a recently emerged and damaging devotion to positivism among artists that was evident in the larger US culture, Pierre aimed to demonstrate not only how connotation occurred in Rauschenberg’s art and where it could be associated with Surrealism, but also how, elsewhere, after an early golden period, it did not connect with Surrealism. In this sense, Pierre was replicating not the historical argument against Dalí’s artistic ‘failure’, as understood from the later 1930s by Breton and the Surrealists, but Giorgio de Chirico’s after the canonical 1909–19 metaphysical period they had venerated.5 Like others, Pierre believed that John Cage’s peculiar ‘mock positivism’ had helped put paid to the rhetoric of subjectivism that surrounded Action Painting.6 This broke the thread between New York abstraction and Rauschenberg’s art, and consequently had ramifications for the Surrealists’ claim on the latter: If we recall that ‘Action Painting,’ while rejecting its aims (‘to discover the true functioning of thought’) had taken from Surrealism its means, namely automatism, the turn [in the critical assessment of current art] is significant . . . it meant . . . to regress from a certain lyrical generosity towards a dubious avarice; in short, from Surrealism to Dada. This is the background against which Robert Rauschenberg makes his appearance . . . .7

He argued, then, that from 1953 – the year of the Erased de Kooning Drawing – until about 1962, Rauschenberg’s choices were guided ‘essentially by a brilliant intuition of the future of American painting (or, what amounts to the same, a wager on this future)’.8 According to Pierre, this designation of the ‘visionary’ futurity of Rauschenberg’s enterprise should supersede any consideration of its art historical indebtedness, whether to Cubism, Dada or even Surrealism. As is clear from the language of intuition and anticipation, the task Pierre had evidently set himself was that of reducing the debt that Rauschenberg was usually believed to owe Kurt Schwitters and increase not the artist’s indebtedness to Surrealism,

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but his affinity with the movement. Although Pierre thought the two artists shared a perceptible indifference to the aestheticization of ‘the everyday object, or even of scrap [déchet]’, he also believed there were major dissimilarities between Rauschenberg’s work and that of Schwitters.9 Chief among these were their respective attitudes towards the things they incorporated into their work. Whereas Schwitters seemed to accumulate excessively and overvalue the debris he found in the street to the point of ‘stinginess’ (hence the avarice dubitative Pierre attributed to Dada), Rauschenberg’s work displayed a ‘learned discrimination’, a phrase that echoes Robert Benayoun’s in the conversation held with Pierre in La Brèche: Action surréaliste back in 1962: ‘a very strict spirit of investigation seems to guide his assemblages’.10 As earlier in the decade, an important, ethical aspect of artistic practice was discerned by Pierre: Schwitters’s collages betrayed the conduct of a ‘userer’, whereas Rauschenberg’s Combines conveyed the generosity of a ‘grand seigneur’ who, because of that office, ‘adheres less to what he does, makes a smaller commitment to it’.11 Pierre went on to discuss spatial and formal differences between the two artists: a ‘confined, introverted, claustrophiliac’ art of ‘obsessive obliques’ for Schwitters; airy, open spaces and a rigid construction dominated by verticals and horizontals in Rauschenberg.12 But what he really wanted to assess was the US artist’s attitude towards materials, how that played out in the act of making and where it met the Surrealist demand for an ethical, aesthetico-poetic and specifically symbolico-metaphorical art. No formal analysis could do justice to the ‘creative dynamic’ of Rauschenberg’s art,13 Pierre insisted, quoting Alan R. Solomon in support of this view, from the catalogue of the artist’s retrospective of 31 March–8 May 1963 at the Jewish Museum in New York: ‘Rauschenberg’s work proceeds intuitively, from the setting side by side of elements which in turn suggest the next step. He makes no preliminary drawings, and seldom starts a picture with a clear image of its final form,’ which John Cage confirms in his own manner [Pierre adds] by writing: ‘We are in the glory of not knowing what we’re doing.’14

Pierre was prepared to go to these lengths to haul Rauschenberg into the orbit of Surrealism, quoting the orthodoxy of Solomon and Cage, of all people, while turning their ‘literalist’ statements towards ‘poetic’ ends and therefore uniting Rauschenberg and the Surrealists within what Jean Baudrillard would call the following year the ‘traditional mythology of artistic creation’.15 He confirmed the Surrealist credentials of the earlier work unequivocally: ‘[w]e can conclude from this that it is an automatic process, Surrealist in character, which gives birth to the Combine paintings.’16 By endorsing Solomon’s portrayal of Rauschenberg’s practice as an ‘intuitive’ one as an assurance of its Surrealist traits, Pierre reached a quite different conclusion as to how the work that it begot should consequently be understood. Here is the passage from Solomon’s essay in the Jewish Museum catalogue that Pierre quoted critically: There are no secret messages in Rauschenberg, no programme of social or political discontent transmitted in code, no hidden rhetorical commentary on the larger

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meaning of Life or Art, no private symbolism available only to the initiate. The enigmatic confrontations which he poses for us seem to demand explanation, and they force us to examine them more closely, to search for the key, to look. Their real meaning is contained in this simple fact, since the more we look, the more we are faced with complexities of meaning.17

­ eading into this ‘fascist’ passage, Solomon had acknowledged the ‘highly associative L potential’ of Rauschenberg’s objects, which ‘at first glance seem to be the result of an anecdotal intention’, ascribing particular status along these lines to the Surrealists’ favourite Canyon (1959), which adorned the cover of the catalogue of Rauschenberg’s Jewish Museum retrospective.18 Further on, Solomon stated of the ‘objects’ in Rauschenberg’s Combines that although they cast doubt on their conventional function (in a manner echoed by Bill Brown’s later formulation of how ‘[w]e begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us’19), ‘[n]either should we consider them as symbols, in the sense that [Joan] Miró introduces such objects into his pictures. Rauschenberg’, Solomon continued, ‘presents these objects to us as interrogatory confrontations which demand the answer that they are simply themselves’.20 That increased the provocation for Pierre, no doubt; more so Solomon’s bungled declaration: ‘Rauschenberg is a kind of transcendental voyeur (in the truest sense of [Arthur] Rimbaud and all modern artists after him).’21 Solomon meant ‘voyant’ (seer), but it is a revealing parapraxis, as they all are. Breton had long identified eroticism with mediumism, notably in Mad Love (1937) where he detailed the clandestine roles of the sexual instinct and the death instinct in steering Alberto Giacometti and himself under the ‘ultramaterialist disguise’ of precognitive, problem-solving objects found at the flea market in 1934, ‘a disguise letting them try me out, measure their strength on me, blow by blow’.22 The Surrealists would have understood Rauschenberg’s creative route towards works like Bed (1955) in the same way. This is to say that Solomon imparted a Surrealist reading in spite of himself. Moreover, it is disclosed by the same unconscious activity that was the operative force in Surrealist art and Rauschenberg’s work, according to Pierre, in spite of Solomon’s larger claim to the opposite, which was obviously prompted by Cage’s rhetoric surrounding the overt, unsymbolic facture of Combines. As a steadfast Surrealist and one of the main advocates of the Surrealist version of Rauschenberg, Pierre had plenty of reasons to be irked by Solomon’s text. Firstly, it denies Rauschenberg’s endeavours either conscious or unconscious metaphoricity, a view that obviously and intentionally conflicted with the Surrealist reading of the artist in the 1960s (and has been the subject of more recent criticism in art history);23 secondly, Solomon’s mention of Rimbaud was made with no reference whatsoever to the movement that had done the most to take to heart and further with a wider audience the poet’s understanding of the artist and writer as seer; and, finally, his interpretation of Rauschenberg’s work seemed to fall short anyway of this construal of the creative act as made by Rimbaud and accepted as a principle by the Surrealists.24 Nevertheless, Solomon’s interpretation of the artist was in line with the one that had

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taken hold under the influence of Cage and not only was it endorsed by the artist himself in a manner that directly conflicted with Surrealism’s poetic attitude towards art and the world, it accommodated the turn taken by Rauschenberg’s work as it had been displayed in Paris a few weeks earlier at the 1963 exhibition at the galerie Ileana Sonnabend, which would mark the moment of the downturn of the oeuvre for Pierre.

­Success and failure of Rauschenberg If Pierre assessed Rauschenberg’s work on Surrealist grounds against the opinions of both Solomon and Cage, sometimes deducing and furthering that interpretation by strategic selection from their writings, he did so, as well, in the face of the attitudes struck by Rauschenberg himself. In fact, in one instance, the artist seemed to take aim overtly at Surrealism’s fundamental poetic programme, which I referred to in my third chapter as cued by Pierre Reverdy and quoted by Breton in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), where emphasis was laid on ‘a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities’, and the assertion made that ‘[t]he more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be – the greater its emotional power and poetic reality’.25 In 1964, the newly minted winner of the Grand Prix to Best Foreign Artist at the Venice Biennale published the appreciation I cited in my second chapter, written three years earlier and devoted to his friend Öyvind Fahlström whose work had been reproduced in Front unique in 1960 and shown at Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain of 1960–1. Composed a few months after the closure of that exhibition, Rauschenberg’s short text announced in its opening lines: ‘[t]he logical or illogical relationship between one thing and another is no longer a gratifying subject to the artist’.26 Pierre quoted this refutation of Surrealist aesthetico-poetics in ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’, but he also quoted the remainder of the sentence, which constitutes a repudiation of Surrealist ethics: ‘ . . . as the awareness grows that even in his most devastating or heroic moment he is part of the density of an uncensored continuum that neither begins with nor ends with any decision or action of his’.27 At least in this avowal, then, Rauschenberg seemed to be rejecting both halves of precisely the Surrealist undertaking that Benayoun and Pierre had praised him for assuming earlier in the decade. Was this not ‘an admission of helplessness’, asked Pierre, ‘an acquiescence on the part of the artist who definitively renounces acting on the world as it is and confines himself to the brilliant and vain role of a manufacturer of images?’28 It was here, by contrast with Solomon’s casual and disjointed citation of Rimbaud, that Pierre saw the theoretical value of the French poet’s writings in the consideration of art and specifically in the development of a consistent theory of Rauschenberg’s Combines that would be true to Surrealism, evoking what he called the ‘Rimbaudian formula: “It is necessary to change life.’”29 Frequently quoted by Surrealists since Breton had used it alongside Marx’s ‘[t]ransform the world’ in June 1935 at the height of Surrealism’s revolutionary ambitions and a time of political crisis in France, and implied in the remarks of Alain Jouffroy in the catalogue of Anti-procès 3 in Milan, Rimbaud’s slogan

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must have seemed to Pierre a possible antidote to the world as it was in 1969: namely, stalemate in Vietnam, the failure of May ’68 and, even closer to home, the malaise that the latter disappointment had brought about among the Surrealists, which had led the Paris group to the verge of breaking up.30 This was a world with a ‘meaning’, wrote Pierre, and therefore ‘the work that refuses to assume a signification, even a very vague one, is a manner of giving up the armaments of the mind,’ at which point art loses half of its dialectic and ‘[w]e are then in the aesthetic and nowhere else.’31 But Pierre had a larger complaint to make in ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’ that had been brought to a head by the major retrospective of 10  October to 10  November 1968, Robert Rauschenberg: Oeuvres de 1949 à 1968, held at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris in partnership with the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. It was only the third major monographic exhibition given to a contemporary US artist at that museum after shows dedicated to Jackson Pollock in 1959 and Mark Rothko in 1962–3, and it had confirmed Rauschenberg as a modern classic in France, serving to rehabilitate Pop art (of which he continued to be seen as the ‘principal champion’, ‘pioneer’ and ‘master’, preceding the retrospectives devoted to Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns up to 1978) after the journalistic fracas that had followed the Venice Biennale in 1964.32 Pierre held that the ‘charm’ and even ‘refinement’ of the Combines on display, which showed up well in the reproductions that accompanied his article in L’Oeil, had not entirely obscured their ‘explosive strength’.33 This was especially the case for Bed, he argued, recalling the disquieting emotion felt by the Surrealists on its arrival during the preparation of the EROS exhibition ten years earlier, while imagining a current audience’s response to that now canonical work: a vertical, somnambulistic bed, all sticky with pictorial excrement. I doubt that if in seeing it again now, I would be more sensitive to the exquisite quality of the color than to the provocative aggressiveness of the object. For in this particular case, the subversive intention is in no doubt, any more than its effectiveness, making everyone [present at the preparation of EROS] feel questioned, even about their sleep and love life, affected right to the very heart of their private life.34

The scene echoes the disquieting prospect of an earlier generation of Surrealists unnerved by Giacometti’s violent and ambiguously erotic Suspended Ball (1930). In fact, given the waywardness that Pierre was on course to attribute to Rauschenberg’s work in the 1960s, he might even have meant to evoke Giacometti’s subsequent disaffiliation from Surrealism (a photograph of the pairing of Giacometti’s Invisible Object of 1934 with Bed at EROS was one of only three in colour that were reproduced at the head of Pierre’s article). If the dialectical nature of Bed – of privacy and invasiveness, geniality and violence – held a seditious charge that had continued to impress Pierre, this had been achieved only partially in other works by Rauschenberg, which he admired nonetheless. The Erased de Kooning Drawing was far more aggressive, he thought, than the ‘gallant sally’ of the moustache of Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) from which it is usually said

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to have gained its Dada pedigree; the comparably hostile telegram This Is a Portrait of Iris Clert If I Say So (1961), an exemplary artefact of Pop matter-of-factness for Nicolas Calas by comparison with Surrealist symbolism (but elsewhere, apparently, bizarrely credited by him to Breton), equally revealed to Pierre a surly iconoclasm.35 For Pierre at the close of the 1960s, these works seemed hard to assimilate to a definition of the Combine and although the belligerence that they convey has long been regarded by art historians as historically allied with Dada insolence, Pierre thought they belonged to a more expansive history of the object, which had been theorized largely by Surrealism and included Combines. Whatever facets of Rauschenberg’s work that reflected Surrealist concerns had disappeared after the epoch of Combines, in Pierre’s reckoning. The artist’s adoption in 1962 of screen-printing after Warhol led to an evaluative dead end that was both aesthetic and ethical. In the barely amusing juxtapositions of Rauschenberg’s silkscreens, as in the floating objects in a pool that constituted Fahlström’s object The Little General (Pinball Machine) (1967), the image, the game and chance itself failed to lead beyond themselves. Rauschenberg had veered off into a positivist art, Pierre believed, that ended at Hume’s assertion in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748): ‘[t]o form monsters, and join incongruous shapes and appearances, costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects’.36 The images might be imaginary, but without a dialectic they remain whimsical because they fail to signify: ‘all things are equal if the mind does not take them seriously; we are in a game whose playfulness weakens, up to the point that it disappears,’37 stated Pierre, continuing, ‘chance itself is neutralized since it is stripped from the outset of any importance, any potential signification, any way to escape chance.’38 The tautology was only superficial: Surrealism had long exchanged Dada chance for elective or ‘objective’ chance; that is, chance managed by an unconscious intention attuned to nature, or, as Breton had put it in Mad Love: ‘the encounter of an external causality and an internal finality’.39 Rauschenberg had strayed from the earlier creative procedure of the Combine paintings, which was of a ‘Surrealist character’, to become the ‘prisoner of a philosophical conception’, according to Pierre, one that ‘separates him from his true genius’.40 To renounce the ‘intuitive’ working relation with materials that held up to about 1962, which had allowed Pierre to define Rauschenberg’s practice as an ‘automatic’ one, was to lose contact with chance as that category was theorized by the Surrealists and, as we saw in my third chapter, to forgo the ‘lyric behaviour’ that assured the manifestation of poetic analogy in life, poetry and art.41 This goal of the Surrealists had been fully evident in Rauschenberg’s earlier ‘spectacular offensive’,42 contended Pierre: that of 1961, during which the inventor of ‘Combine paintings’ surrendered himself most vehemently to lyricism. Such lyricism is asserted in the maximum distance taken from the canvas and its two dimensions, consequently escaping the disciplined perpendicularity [of painting] and refusing colour, but only to indulge the solutions of delirium, irrationality and provocation.43

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Pierre’s observation of Rauschenberg’s challenge to the register of painting, made in works that were placed on the floor or even upright on or against the wall, has a familiar ring. It was made during the very period that Steinberg was formulating his concept of the ‘flatbed picture plane’, which would privilege the work since 1950 of Jean Dubuffet and especially Rauschenberg, as persistently ‘referring back to the horizontals on which we walk and sit, work and sleep’ in the creation of ‘the characteristic picture plane of the 1960s’, to attempt to define initially the postmodern in painting as it transgressed critical formalism and critical and painterly modernism.44 In my second chapter, I showed the proximity between Surrealism and Steinberg in the reception of the work of Rauschenberg and Johns in the late 1950s and early 1960s; here I will perform a more detailed reading of the symbolic slant of the ‘flatbed picture plane’ to give greater attention to where the Surrealist reading of Rauschenberg departs from Steinberg’s.

Pierre, Leo Steinberg and Trophy III (for Jean Tinguely) This orientation is borne out in what Pierre indicated as the disappointingly few works of 1961 present at Rauschenberg’s 1968 retrospective in Paris. Among these, he singled out Trophy III (for Jean Tinguely) [see Colour Plate 15], complete with tied ‘curtain’ actualizing the ‘window onto the world’ traditionally offered illusionistically by painting, teasing the viewer into an expectation of the conventional vertical optical register while destabilizing it through the addition of metal bed springs fixed to the upper portion of a found wooden frame (itself the size of a long double bed), which forces a second reading of the cloth as displaced bed sheet, features that serve to rotate the work (conceptually) onto the horizontal plane.45 On display, Trophy III stands on the floor like a sculpture, but against the wall like a painting, in a manner that exceeds the customarily modernist truth-to-materials argument, rehearsed by Clement Greenberg again in a distilled format in the year before the fabrication of the work.46 By way of its low, narrow plinth and supplement of oil paint, Trophy III is implicated in the initial conditions for a ‘post-Modernist painting’ as set out by Steinberg in ‘Other Criteria’ where he refers to the new picture planes after modernism, the ‘change within painting that changed the relationship between artist and image, image and viewer’, by contrast with the ‘purity’ achieved by ‘self-definition’ – the idea that painting is painting and not sculpture or anything else – (long) sought by Greenberg.47 For Steinberg, the flatbed was ‘part of a shakeup which contaminates all purified categories’,48 carried by the ‘psychic address of the image, its special mode of imaginative confrontation . . . the shift from nature to culture’.49 Steinberg showed no hesitation whatsoever when he characterized Rauschenberg’s venture courageously as a ‘symbolic programme’ and the artist’s flatbed surfaces as, at times, ‘the outward symbol of the mind as a running transformer of the external world’.50 To seal the general metaphor of culture, of urban excess and noise, ‘stimulus’ and ‘impediment’, as central to Rauschenberg’s work,51 Steinberg piled up analogues

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of production, communication, reception, storage, disposal and even of surfaces of representation for the flatbed picture plane, which: makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards – any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed – whether coherently or in confusion. The pictures of the last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes.52

Rauschenberg’s picture plane is billboard, dashboard, projection screen, ‘palimpsest, cancelled plate, printer’s proof, trial blank, chart, map, aerial view . . . dump, reservoir, switching centre . . . bedrock as hard and tolerant as a workbench, disordered desk, unswept floor . . . wall of a room’, as well as ironing board: the ‘consistent horizontality is called upon’, Steinberg asserts, ‘to maintain a symbolic continuum of litter, workbench, and data-ingested mind’.53 Steinberg’s essay was both critical art historiography and art criticism, yet the former had the effect of depleting the latter. That is to say that its specialist, specifically art historical slant, as a polemic against Greenbergian ‘flatness’ and ‘opticality’ as explanation for the development of modern art, led it to overemphasize the conceptual aspect of Rauschenberg’s work, its ‘psychic address’, or at least to place a restriction on that as it is experienced by its audience, ‘as the artist’s pictorial surface tilts into the space of the viewer’s imagination’, as ‘noise’ over vision, ‘“making”’ over ‘seeing’.54 Symbolism certainly returned to both art history and the commentary on Rauschenberg’s art in Steinberg’s way of understanding it, of a ‘depth’ in art analogous with the mind of the artist that is available to the imagination of its viewer, of a surface ‘abundant with concrete references freely associated as in an internal monologue’.55 But it is a symbolism caught up in and limited by the polemical, art historical purposes to which it was being put; namely, as a means to contend the failings of Greenberg’s theory of modernism for both the art it claimed to justify historically and that it could not, by way of an argument restricted by Steinberg to the symbolic allusiveness, the ‘angulation’ of picture planes.56 It entails a line of reasoning that drains the potential of analogy by placing it in the service of only a very confined understanding of the ‘psychic address’ of Rauschenberg’s work.57 A viewing of the ‘content’ in a work by Rauschenberg might very well conjure the urban space, its culture, expansiveness, unruliness and waste (as it did for Jouffroy), and a Rauschenberg surface could be conceived, as it was for Steinberg in ‘Other Criteria’, as ‘a symbol of the mind’, or as ‘symbolic allusion’ to actual surfaces out in the world or as an ‘analogue of operational processes’.58 However, these theoretical reveries denoting a kind of poetics of art history are surely only carefully selected units of the inordinately larger, unruly tendency of the human mind towards associative looking. This is especially the case if we are to agree with Dore Ashton and the Surrealists that ‘[m]etaphor is as natural to the imagination as saliva to the tongue’.59 The glide of

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the imagination towards deliberation of a comparative kind, in allusion, association, connotation, symbol, analogy, metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, equation and so on, breaks the frame, let us say, of the comparatively narrow, relatively ‘rationalist’ art historical analysis served up by Steinberg. In its elusiveness, Rauschenberg’s work undercuts methodological imperatives more than most, and allows the individual unconscious free to seek its own, frequently irrational narrative. This inferential drift is available in Trophy III, one of Pierre’s favourites among Rauschenberg’s sculptures. Like Bed, which Steinberg regarded as the artist’s ‘profoundest symbolic gesture’ as far as his adjustment of the ‘angle of imaginative confrontation’ was concerned, Trophy III has sufficient scope to draw an extraordinarily rich imaginative response from an audience open to such an outcome, but only once prepared to work away from the flatbed interpretation partly implied in Pierre’s reading and emphatically conferred by Steinberg’s text.60 The wealth of potential allusion in Trophy III is evident not just in the connivance of privacy and invasiveness that Pierre saw played out in Bed (the bed as ‘theatrical window’, as he put it), but also in the suggestiveness furthered elliptically by the inclusion of the hanging toilet chain against the front of the left side of the frame and the metal ladder pushed up against the inside edge of the right side, both of which, along with the hanging cloth, surely suggest gravity, verticality and therefore a dialectical interplay of registers rather than a flatbed.61 Such occasional, discarded, reused articles, especially when distressed or weathered to function as ‘humanitarian reportage’ as Rauschenberg put it in the interview with Rose, operate unreliably like partial, mute witnesses to a domestic episode or perhaps a mere life, in the manner of a dream in which the often complex and intangible states (spatial, temporal, emotional and other) given by a narrative, rather than its actual detail, are evoked.62 The obvious correspondences that exist between Trophy III and both bed and window are multiple: it is a parody of Alberti’s window, for instance (yielding a third reading of the cloth, as torn canvas); or a window onto a crime scene (where the cloth continues its journey of replication, into discarded clothing, knotted gag and mop-up rag), complete with signifier of entry and escape, as seen or photographed directly from a facing window; or, perhaps, wielding the flatbed very rewardingly, a view as captured from the aerial perspective of a police crime scene photographer using Alphonse Bertillon’s system of inspection of the murder scene from above by way of a camera fixed to a tripod with lens facing downwards, a reading that colludes with the still persistent one of Bed as the scene of an axe murder and liaises with one early critic’s speculation after viewing Rauschenberg’s solo show at Leo Castelli’s Gallery in 1958 that it ‘recalls a police photo of the murder bed after the corpse has been removed.’63 But the potential of Trophy III is set free by a reading through analogy and metaphor, loosened from the flatbed enquiry into planarity and returned to the ‘worldspace’ of painting that had been left behind in Steinberg’s telling, in a previous epoch in the history of art extending from the Old Masters up to abstract expressionism, of the ‘picture plane in correspondence with the erect human posture’.64 That is mainly because Trophy III is the same size as a door and both the step-like appearance of its single, standing foot as it is joined by the lower horizontal bar of the frame and the

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handle-like rectangular form fixed to the frame higher than halfway up on the left carry through that identification unavoidably.65 It is the combination of the optical experience, physical scale (a subject left barely touched by Steinberg in the context of Rauschenberg’s work) and imaginative lure of Trophy III, incited by limitless narratives, memories and fantasies of door, gate, archway and portal as point of entry, embarkation, exit or escape, that give the work a visionary, lyrical state close to Surrealism. The viewer is drawn through the delicate, indirect balance of allusion and abbreviation of Trophy III into associative acts of looking, dosed in narratives of myth, folklore and fairytale, for example, exacerbated through cognitive yet only partly conscious, constrained or compelled processes and activities such as recollection, fantasy and dream. Rauschenberg might well have said in 1965 that he altered his pictures to steer clear of too readable ‘superficial subconscious relationships’ and ‘clichés of association’, while warning against ‘dealing symbolically’ with materials, but the remarkable equivocation such modification left behind only allow the audience greater freedom of imaginative licence.66 At least in that interview, he seems to have understood his own work in a manner close to Françoise Choay’s interpretation of it made four years earlier as an ‘urban realism’, opposed to the Surrealist object that ‘introduces a mental, subjective world – precisely that which holds no interest for Rauschenberg’.67 Yet as we saw in Benayoun and Pierre’s remarks on The Art of Assemblage (1961), about Rauschenberg ‘transcending the “assemblage” of scrap parts by a lyric dimension’, a Surrealist poetics driven by analogical thinking perceives, precisely, the artist as a seer plumbing a depth beneath the ‘real’.68 In this way, there is an obvious overlap between, on the one hand, the multiple analogues and symbolic content of the flatbed marked by Steinberg as antithetical to modernist formalism but also contrary to ‘thingly’ interpretations of Rauschenberg, and, on the other, the burden placed on privacy and the free rein given the imagination, as recognized by Surrealists like Pierre in such works as Bed and Trophy III. Some common ground is there, too, in the group of other works said by Pierre to be among the too-few-from-1961 highlights at the 1968 Paris retrospective: Aen Floga, Coexistence, Empire I and Empire II. The last with its ridiculously phallic, revolving ventilation duct, participating in ‘this Surrealism of the stray object’ in Jouffroy’s words five years earlier in L’Oeil, was viewed by Pierre socio-politically at the Musée d’art moderne as one of a pair, if we are to go on his description of the bathetically titled objects as ‘incredible tramp trolleys, unstable equilibria of scrap and old planks’.69 None of these, to my imagination, suggests emphatically a determined angularity towards the horizontal – least of all the two wall-based constructions on canvas where a verticality implied by the Mondrian colours of Aen Floga (Figure  8.1) and run paint of Coexistence (Figure 8.2) is met dialectically by the suspended objects in each connoting horizontality – except in the way sculpture always has in the floor-based Empire I and II and in the loosest sense that all are made, like Schwitters’s collages, from discarded objects picked up from the city street.70 Nevertheless, all make available a compelling, urban symbolism of the rejected, the scavenged, the orphaned and the homeless, while their awkward, arbitrary assembly even throws open a disquieting prospect onto the mind functioning according to a private, asocial logic, within a

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­Figure 8.1  Robert Rauschenberg, Aen Floga

(1961). Oil on canvas with wood, metal and wire, 185.4 × 127 × 34.9 cm. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/ VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Figure 8.2  Robert Rauschenberg, Coexistence (1961). Oil, fabric, metal, wood and other found

materials on canvas, 169.55 × 126.68 × 36.2 cm. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Gift of The Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Photo: Katherine Wetzel © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

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peculiar economy of waste and preservation. Finally on the overlap with Steinberg, it is notable, too, that the core argument regarding the flatbed picture plane in ‘Other Criteria’ refers to early works and Combines by Rauschenberg already heralded by Surrealists over the preceding decade as furtherance of a Surrealist methodology and poetics in the visual arts, such as the Erased de Kooning Drawing, Canyon, Pilgrim (1960) and, of course, Bed.71

Rauschenberg, zombie ‘What happened in Rauschenberg’s mind at this decisive turning point of 1961–1962 from where he went on to renounce his wildest solicitations?’72 Pierre’s question prepared the way for an explanation for the disappearance of the Surrealist Rauschenberg at the galerie Ileana Sonnabend in 1963. This was due to a transformation Pierre believed was encouraged by Cage’s version of positivism and saw the artist undergo two years of ‘re-education’ to emerge ‘purged . . . of the last accents of Romanticism’ and ‘finally rid of his old mania to communicate his deep trances to the work’, operating mechanically in the service of a ‘conformist philosophy’, on an art from which had faded ‘the last vague impulses of revolt’.73 As the language and sarcastic tone suggest, Pierre saw the vehicle of Rauschenberg’s diminishment in a resetting of creative priorities brought on by a recent enthusiasm for technology, of which the artist was both dupe and hawker: At the conclusion of so many painstaking efforts, the Zombie-Rauschenberg is all prepared to meet the great expectations that have been piled upon him. These consist in nothing less than the aim to cast the greatest discredit possible on any subjectivity, and at the same time to demonstrate (by corollary) that technology is able to replace effectively the individual imagination.74

Rauschenberg’s co-creation late in 1966 of EAT or Experiments in Art and Technology with Billy Klüver, the electrical engineer and long-time collaborator with artists who had been, till recently, employee at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, was seen by Pierre as evidence of artistic collusion with technocrats and the State. Like the other Surrealists, Pierre held the bureaucrats comprising the technocracy in deep suspicion, viewing them as having no other aim than ‘to put the creative imagination at the service of economic, political and social conformism’.75 This was a long-standing concern of the Surrealists that had constituted one of the founding grievances of the Manifesto of Surrealism, where Breton railed against the limits placed upon subjectivity from childhood on by the social utilitarianism entailed by capitalism under the banner of a ‘progress’ conceived solely as economic growth: ‘[t]his imagination’, Breton protested, ‘which knows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of an arbitrary utility’.76 Following the Marshall Plan and the increasing consumerism and accelerating technological developments that the expanding economy both brought with it and was nourished by in the 1950s and 1960s, the Surrealists reshaped their criticism to

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confront society’s growing reliance on and compliance before technology.77 This is most evident in the 1965 group show L’Écart absolu and its star exhibits that I discussed in Chapter  2: the Désordinateur or Miscomputer, mocking the malfunctioning of modern life in the forms, among others, of science, cars, leisure and sport, and The Consumer, performing the same task on domestic appliances. How ironic that the overstuffed neophyte was inspired by the signature work of the emerging technophile. The barrage was continued in ‘Let’s Get to the Point’ (1965), the statement that accompanied the event, in which ‘the false broad daylight of “progress”’ was ridiculed, along with the opinion voiced in one technophiliac review loathed by the Surrealists, that ‘the duty of writers and poets is to participate with all their being in the great gestation of laboratories and intellects.’78 The intensifying resistance of Surrealism in the mid-1960s in the face of the greater incursion of technology into modern life both public and private helps account for Pierre’s objection towards the retooled Rauschenberg who emerged around the same time. Pierre must have seen the article by Ashton early the previous year that took her friend Rauschenberg to task for his attitude towards technology because it appeared in Opus International where Jouffroy was on the editorial board, ensuring regular and usually sympathetic coverage of Surrealism. As I noted in my first chapter, the metaphorically inclined Ashton had been one of Rauschenberg’s first supporters in the early 1950s along with Frank O’Hara, and the collaboration on the Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (1958–60) remained one of the high points of her career, but she now displayed some disillusionment. In Opus International, she tracked the history of EAT since the Klüver/Rauschenberg collaboration 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering of October 1966, accepting that artists might use technology, but also taking an uncompromising stance against declarations in EAT’s publicity since 1967 that artists should go further and actually serve technology and society.79 Targeting the ‘eminently imaginative’ Klüver, Rauschenberg, Cage and Fahlström, Ashton questioned the backing of EAT by financial interests and political figures, such as Republican Senator Jacob Javits (whose belated disenchantment with the war in Vietnam corresponded with his public support for EAT), noting by contrast the resistance shown by some artists to corporations such as the Dow Chemical Company, by then the sole supplier of napalm to the US military.80 Ashton insisted that such collaboration only favoured the side with the money, which by its nature was corrupt, so it cheapened the art it paid for, shrewdly quoting from the Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret’s polemic ‘The Dishonour of the Poets’ (1945) as a corrective to those who served such promotional interests: ‘[t]he honour of these poets consists in ceasing to be poets to become agents of advertising.’81 Rauschenberg defended his attitude towards technology and the new work it had spawned in a November 1968 interview in La Quinzaine littéraire. It appeared during the run of his retrospective exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne and Pierre must have read it with its introductory commentary (perhaps by Raphael Sorin) calling attention, in customary terms that would have been recognizable if disappointing to the Surrealist, to the range of the artist’s work: ‘[f]rom previous canvases, strewn with lyrical scrap parts [déchets], to the recent industrially processed piece in plexiglass and aluminium.’82 Prompted by his interviewer, Rauschenberg felt compelled to respond to Ashton’s insistence that ‘the arts must never, never, never serve technology,’

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talking a good game as usual.83 However, his reasoning revealed him to be far from a revolutionary, more like a liberal drawn to the social function of charity, not that his previous utterances, including those in the widely read Arts interview with André Parinaud of 1961 with its celebrated avowal that ‘[t]o be a painter means to oppose,’ had revealed anything else:84 When Dore Ashton accuses me of serving the interests of the Bell Telephone Company, she forgets that she uses the telephone all the time. Those who like to protest do not realise that they cannot change the system they criticise because that system needs them; that it cannot function without their criticism. If they cease to participate, they may as well go and live in the woods, far from the world of technology that they reject. Everything can be changed by each one of us. We have to accept things as a continuum that can be changed and which will be when we have sufficient technical means, when each person will be informed of everything that is going on in the world. We are in the middle of politics and we must see that everything is political. The one who insults politicians is himself a politician. Artists need industrialists as much as industrialists need them. Our task is to show those who have money that they have a responsibility towards society. In the past, the artist bore the brunt of social miseries alone; now we can, if we obtain the means, realise gigantic manifestations [spectacles] that will delight entire cities.85

Although it chose to elide the downside of collusion between big business and the political interests that the artist was concurrently opposing in his ‘activist’ period, Rauschenberg’s thinking was unusually astute for an artist at the time. Its far-sightedness in anticipating what have become routine ‘partnerships’ between museums or individual artists and wealthy corporate patrons in the service of entertainment and/or commerce is confirmed in what is now EAT’s best-known alliance, which also gives some weight to Pierre and the Surrealists’ trepidation about artists and writers getting handy with technology and intimate with its state or corporate sponsors. This particular one-sided partnership was with Pepsi Cola in the construction of the Pepsi Pavilion for Expo ’70 in Osaka. Alongside the technical problems faced by any complex, large-scale project, the creation of the Pavilion was dogged from conception to completion by sensitivity over budget and running costs that was intensified by disagreement as to what extent the venture was a commercial or an artistic one. It was the first, of course, because the customer was Pepsi Cola, which finally cut ties with EAT, took over the running of the Pavilion and reverted to what it had hoped for all along: an uncritical, accessible and entertaining music venue created with the sole aim of promoting its product.86 Rauschenberg volunteered Solstice (1968, fig) [Figure  8.3], the recent work in plexiglass and aluminium referred to in La Quinzaine littéraire, as evidence of what could be achieved by artists through partnership with technology. This box-like installation was a few centimetres higher than Duchamp’s much-disputed epic The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even or Large Glass (1915–23, fig) [Figure 8.4], which had been lauded by Surrealists while it was still being worked on in the 1920s, characterized as a ‘beacon’ or ‘lighthouse’ for contemporary artists by Breton in the

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Figure 8.3  Robert Rauschenberg, Solstice (1968). Silkscreen ink on motorized Plexiglas doors

in metal frame mounted on platform with concealed electric lights and electronic components, 304.8 × 436.9 × 436.9 cm. The National Museum of Art, Osaka. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Figure  8.4  Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even or Large Glass

(1915–23). Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire and dust on two glass panels, 277.5 × 177.8 × 8.6 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives.

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1930s and Jouffroy in the 1960s and about to be situated historically at the origins of the flatbed imagination by Steinberg.87 The scale and materials of Solstice were obviously indebted to that game-changing work by Duchamp, who had died only a month before Rauschenberg’s interview went to press, as was its idea of a more or less available terrain. This terrain is imaginary-by-way-of-opticality for the audience of the Glass, but in Solstice it is given some physical credence by access through another Rauschenberg doorway, consisting of four sets of silkscreened sliding doors, opening to a little wider than the Glass, creating a surrounding environment so ‘the spectator passes to the other side of the mirror’, in the words of Rauschenberg.88 So much for his stated aspiration to avoid ‘clichés of association’. It was usually the Surrealists who were vulnerable to the recreation of fantastic narratives in art: Breton had once written of Pablo Picasso’s Man with a Clarinet (1911–12) as ‘tangible proof ’ of the mind’s tendency towards ‘a future continent’ accompanied by ‘an ever more beautiful Alice in Wonderland’.89 But Pierre saw Rauschenberg’s turn to technology not at all in poetic terms; rather, it was an outcome of the Cagean ‘levelling’ that represented an attack on poetry, which ‘has ceased to count when all associations of images, or words, are equal’.90 Pierre observed Rauschenberg’s Cagean and Humean banalization-byhomogenization of the image through benign forms of play as a decisive element in the Revolvers (1967, fig) [Figure 8.5]. Although the kaleidoscopic effect of five rotating,

Figure  8.5  Robert Rauschenberg, Revolvers (1967). Silkscreen ink on five rotating Plexiglas

discs in metal base with electric motors and control box, 137.2 × 134 × 61.6 cm. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

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silkscreened plexiglass discs two metres across, placed alongside each other so all can be looked through at once, is set off by human agency, it had the initial effect of amusement, Pierre believed, then only ‘impotence since the superpositions of images have no other end than to captivate the gaze to better deaden the mind’.91 Steinberg seemed to think that was the whole critical point of the allied work Soundings (1968) – a large screen made up of nine plexiglass panels eleven metres long in all, illuminated in various places depending on the noise made by its audience to reveal a multitude of differently positioned chairs – that is, to call attention to a socialized, passive spectator ‘reduced to the commodity of a switch’.92 However, Pierre reckoned Soundings was hampered by the same tendency as Revolvers towards mere entertainment (this is twenty years before Benjamin H. D. Buchloh reached a similar, more sweeping conclusion about the ‘new aesthetic of participation’ aspired to by Cage, Johns and Rauschenberg since 1955 and, after Buchloh, Branden W. Joseph, on the basis of the very same Revolvers and Soundings).93 He associated it with the ‘scientific marvellous’ of the nineteenth-century philosopher and historian Ernest Renan,94 a form of the marvellous already rejected by Pierre and his fellow Surrealists in ‘Let’s Get to the Point’.95 Pierre placed Soundings alongside the Revolvers as evidence of ‘how apprehensive Rauschenberg has become since relying on the unlimited resources of modern technology’,96 further suggesting either the futility of that resource or the artist’s lack of boldness in its use by alleging that the Revolvers were little more than ‘electrified Fahlström, and his machine to show the chairs only an “Accumulation” of Arman become electronic!’97 There is some irony, then, in Pierre’s admiration for Trophy III (for Jean Tinguely), given its dedication to the Swiss artist from whose work Rauschenberg gained such inspiration for these later motorized works, after they met in March 1960 while Tinguely was working with Klüver. Rauschenberg had since become, for Pierre, an ‘“artistic consultant” for industry’, motivated solely by the ‘analytical empiricism of the moment’.98 This did not prevent him from hoping the artist would return to the ‘delirium, irrationality and provocation’ that had earlier animated his work and ‘tear himself away from the spider webs of a conformist philosophy’ to ‘once again unleash in the morose hell of contemporary art his herds of crazy goats and his convoys of drunken wheelbarrows’.99 Earlier in 1969, in the month before the publication of ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’, Pierre had cast his low opinion of Cage as bad role model. In the course of being interviewed by Rauschenberg’s one-time interrogator Parinaud with Jean-Jacques Lévèque in La Galerie des arts alongside fellow Surrealist Jean-Claude Silbermann and fellow traveller Hervé Télémaque on the subject of the current situation of Surrealism and especially its painting, he submitted a list of contemporary artists under the heading ‘Qui est surréaliste’ inspired by the earlier lists of precursors compiled by Breton in the Manifesto and the 1934 Brussels lecture ‘What Is Surrealism?’100 Pierre’s roll call included some artists active in the Surrealist group alongside conceptual artists, Pop artists and even Nouveaux Réalistes, as well as those who had been associated with Neo-Dada, such as Johns, who was deemed Surrealist ‘in arithmetic’, and Rauschenberg, who according to Pierre was Surrealist ‘in irony (when he doesn’t listen to John Cage)’.101 Neither

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estimation was particularly easy to understand (or at least the part about irony was not), but nor was the rest of the list. Pierre had already entered into disagreement over recent art and its closeness or not to Surrealism with Édouard Jaguer with whom he had worked closely on Surrealist Intrusion. But Jaguer had come to view the galerie Ileana Sonnabend as the hub of Pop’s imperialist invasion of Europe and much later he told Jérôme Duwa that Pierre’s cordial articles on Pop in Combat-Art in the second half of 1963 were the cause of the rupture between the two over the meaning and importance of the new art from the United States.102 Now, in a manner reminiscent of Breton’s ‘Before, After’ postface to the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930), Pierre’s ‘Surrealist’ interpretation of Rauschenberg and some of the others in ‘Qui est surréaliste’ was lampooned in a ‘partial montage’ by Christian Bernard and Jean-Claude Wallior in Phases, the international art and culture review (presumably under the tutelage of Jaguer who edited Phases), by direct citation of Pierre’s text placed with quotations from the same artists selected to upend Pierre’s assessment of Surrealist traits in their work (Figure 8.6).103 Needless to say, the authors quoted against Pierre the remarks made by Rauschenberg in the interview in La Quinzaine littéraire that seemed to renounce dissent while espousing progress

Figure  8.6  Christian Bernard and Jean-Claude Wallior, ‘Ce qui est surréaliste (???),’ Phases, Second Series, no. 1, May 1969, 84.

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in the form of technology – ‘those who like to protest do not realise that they cannot change the system they criticise because that system needs them, that it cannot function without their criticism. If they cease to participate, they may as well go and live in the woods, far from the world of technology that they refuse’ – seemingly obliterating the illustrious remarks to Parinaud in 1961 about being a painter so opposing.104 Pierre’s attempts to harmonize various current areas of art with Surrealism were, no doubt, far too eclectic and too assertive on the whole; both the uninhibited diversity paraded in his inventory of seventy-five artists and the overconfidence implied in the question mark missing from his title were emphatically alluded to by the three question marks appended to the title of Bernard and Wallior’s riposte. The Surrealist’s ongoing transition to an art critic and historian is evident here, but so is the trauma facing the Surrealist group, damaged by a split in February 1969 and threatened with the loss of its coherence and carefully drawn boundaries, not so much following Breton’s death two-and-a-half years earlier than the malaise that came after the failure of May ’68. That political and social reversal, along with its repercussions for Surrealism, was brought up by Pierre in the interview part of the article in La Galerie des arts in the form of disenchantment with the younger generation.105 Jaguer also wrote of a crisis in revolutionary consciousness, but from a quite different perspective that is critical of the stance taken by Pierre and his friends in that interview, in a brief, apprehensive text displaying alarm at the potential, imminent demise of Surrealism, placed in the same number of Phases as the one by Bernard and Wallior, on the page facing it.106 Pierre’s art-historically and philosophically contextualized interpretation of Rauschenberg in ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’ is far more subtly modulated and extensively linked to a history of Surrealist art than his epigrammatic pronouncements on Hans Haacke, Claes Oldenburg, Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint-Phalle and most of the others in La Galerie des arts. His disappointed assessment of the artist’s trajectory as viewed from the end of the 1960s is finely poised, revealing contradictions at certain points in the Surrealist commentary on the artist, within Rauschenberg’s own project and also in the project of art history. Directed back critically towards the moment that Cage’s text of 1961 on Rauschenberg began its work of moulding the artist’s reception, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’ also seems to approve certain of its utterances. Furthermore, it was published at the time that Rauschenberg was emphatically engaged in his art and life with contemporary social and political issues, to which Pierre did not refer but must have recognized were undermined by the artist’s commitment to technology, which, in turn, seems to have created no conflict in Rauschenberg’s own mind with his activism. In addition to this, also unspoken and perhaps not even heeded by Pierre, the high years of Rauschenberg’s work are located in ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’ in 1953–62, almost exactly the period of the Algerian War of Independence. It is as though the Surrealist reading of an esoteric, ethical, aesthetico-poetic Rauschenberg was a figment of Pierre’s inference, entailing a suppression of both the political context in the United States to which the artist was then responding overtly and the one in France to which the author was responding covertly.

Concluding remarks: Reconsidering art history, Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism, 1952–80

It is an achievement of art history that the conception of Robert Rauschenberg as a ‘literalist,’ ‘factist’ artist or artist of ‘things’ (or as one restrained by a philosophy of positivism under the influence of John Cage, as José Pierre came to understand it) makes the erotic, poetic, dialectical, political Rauschenberg seem so recent to us now. Lengthily discussed by Pierre, especially, and in other ways by Robert Benayoun, André Breton, Nicolas Calas, Alain Jouffroy and Jean-Jacques Lebel, the ‘Surrealist Rauschenberg’ sounds like only a distant echo of later interpretations of the artist (such as the one by Jonathan Katz that I cited in my last chapter) that have since returned to those themes.1 The obvious correspondences between the Surrealists’ reactions to Rauschenberg’s work across the period of this book and those of the iconographers suggest a different model of art history to the one that has located that oeuvre as instrumental in a break between modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts, either as literalist in the early 1950s or as allegorical in the mid-1960s. I will close with a consideration of this as an alternative to ‘formalism’ understood in an expanded sense, which I believe will clarify not only the reasons behind the obscurity of the Surrealist version of Rauschenberg, but also the historical fate of Surrealism itself in art history.

Rauschenberg, ‘factism’ and formalism in the United States Pierre touched on this almost by accident in ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’ where he proposed an inclination towards a variety of positivism among artists in the United States since that period. In that text, he referred to Barbara Rose as a critic of the existential myths that surrounded the artists of abstract expressionism.2 That idea of the individual, selfexcavating artist is often said to have been the invention of the art critic (and contributor to the Surrealists’ wartime review VVV) Harold Rosenberg in ‘The American Action Painters’ (1952). The article was written close to the moment that Rauschenberg was experimenting with quite dissimilar models of both artistic practice and identity – in the collaborative (with Cage) Automobile Tire Print (1953) and (with Jasper Johns) the Neo-Dada Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953, which would be approved of by Surrealists) – and it constituted a distinct formulation of contemporary abstraction,

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utilizing a metaphor of the canvas as ‘an arena in which to act’ and, alternatively, of the artistic ‘act taking place in the four-sided arena.’3 That much was indeed allusive and some might say poetic. Pierre granted the close relationship long made between Surrealists like André Masson using automatism and abstract expressionists (William Rubin had used Rosenberg’s quotation ten years before Pierre to argue for the ‘prophetic character’ of Masson’s automatism).4 Rose was still just about a formalist in 1967 and had dismissed Rosenberg’s notion, as Pierre noted. It was soon to be dismissed again, and conclusively, as a set of factual propositions (though salvageable as rhetorical fanfares) by a sceptic of modernist criticism, Leo Steinberg, in the decisive essay ‘Other Criteria’ (1968, 1972).5 As detailed in the preceding chapters, Steinberg’s text birthed a ‘post-Modernist’ Rauschenberg at the same time as Pierre’s publication, yet turns out to have quite a bit in common with it and with the Surrealist grasp of the artist more generally.6 This was not noticed at the time or since. As Pierre testified, Surrealism’s devotion to metaphor meant that its reception of Rauschenberg was ignored and the movement itself seemed irrelevant to many alongside the cool aesthetic promoted by Susan Sontag, Rose, Irving Sandler and others at Artforum magazine from 1965, developing a discourse of ‘factism’ that was associated with Cage by Rose in ‘ABC Art’ (1965) and by just about every other critic and artist who pondered it, perpetuating the importance of Rauschenberg and Johns, and, after them, Pop and Minimalist art.7 The story goes, then, that the anti-allusive literalism that Rauschenberg traded in, which was shared by Johns according to the majority of critics, if not Steinberg, and received some of its most notorious and gnomic rhetoric from their friend Cage, triumphed over the metaphorical way of understanding art and the world that had defined Surrealism. It is a detail of a more familiar narrative in art history that tells of a departure, or the beginnings of one, taken not only from abstract expressionism but also from modernism by Rauschenberg, Johns and Cage from the early 1950s, by which they pointed towards or even arrived at a set of concerns that would be amplified by Pop and Minimalist art, which art historians and cultural critics have associated with postmodernism, even though those individuals did not describe or even understand their activities in precisely these terms. However, a summary along such lines of the chronicle of mainly US art of the 1950s and 1960s discloses a peculiarity in the art historical account, namely that the triumph of materials, surface and, let us say it: form, over representation, depth and, let us say it: content, sounds more like a continuation than a denial of the case for a modernist art, or certainly of modernist criticism in the writings of Clement Greenberg and less emphatically Rosenberg, for all the differences between those two critics. This assertion does not seem to fall in line with Rosenberg’s view of abstract art as just quoted, so it will help to expand on the conflict in both contemporaneous and retrospective accounts of how the artists who came to be called abstract expressionists understood their work. On the one hand, there is Rauschenberg’s tired-of-metaphor recollection of artists’ talk at The Club and the Cedar Street Tavern in the early 1950s, quoted from in my introduction to this book; on the other, there is Rosenberg’s probably less widely known account in ‘The American Action Painters,’ or certainly less

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quoted than the ‘arena’ passages, made in precisely that era citing the self-consciously naïve ‘jargon’ of American abstract painters, ‘still involved in the metaphysics of things: “My painting is not Art; it’s an Is.” “It’s not a picture of a thing; it’s the thing itself.” “It doesn’t reproduce Nature; it is Nature.” “The painter doesn’t think; he knows.” Etc. etc.’8 It was a non-arty, anti-representational, avowedly anti-ideological and supposedly unpretentious pose delivering a painter’s idiom that is strikingly like a foretaste of the literalist, objectivist one equally freeing art from politics in the post-war, postMcCarthyite, post-ideological era that immediately commenced in the remarks of Rauschenberg and pronouncements of Cage, as well as the statements of US artists working with different means in the 1960s to achieve an ‘insistent materiality,’ ‘inert thingness’ and ‘troublesome facticity’.9 In a recent challenge to the now-proverbial idea of the ‘founding enmity’ between Cage and abstract expressionism that brought us postmodernism or the ‘neo-avantgarde,’ Valerie Hellstein focuses on the discussions at The Club from when it opened late in 1949, particularly those about Zen Buddhism and how they contributed to a rhetoric of literalness and directness, precisely that conjured by Club attendee Rosenberg whose claim that American abstract painting had ‘broken down every distinction between art and life’ and whose evocation of the ‘cosmic I’ of Walt Whitman in ‘The American Action Painters’ connects as strongly with Cage as it does with the critical noise surrounding Rauschenberg.10 As much as them, Hellstein argues, abstract expressionists ‘wanted to cultivate a sense of awareness of the here and now.’11 The same scepticism about an alleged Cagean or Rauschenbergian epistemological break in the visual arts in the early 1950s should be applied to the one that has been said to separate abstract art as it was conceived by Greenberg, on the one hand, from the art of the 1960s that succeeded it in the United States, on the other. In an essay first published in 1986, Thierry de Duve gave credit mainly to Frank Stella for, yes, a ‘new sensibility’ springing forth from the two exhibitions, Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York of 16 December 1959 to 14 February 1960, where work by Rauschenberg and Johns featured, and Stella’s solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery from 27 September till 15 October 1960, which together also increased the momentum of the formalist reading of abstract expressionism over Rosenberg’s existentialist one; at the same time, de Duve added: ‘Greenberg’s Art and Culture became a bestseller among artists as soon as it came out in 1961.’12 Carl Andre’s writing on Stella reads as ‘utterly Greenbergian’ to de Duve whose more prolonged mission was to explain Greenberg’s disinterest in the ‘excessive literalness’ of Stella’s black paintings – even though they ‘so conveniently illustrated Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting”’ of 1960, as well as inspiring a generation of Minimalist artists who went on to ‘[b]attl[e] Greenberg on his own turf . . . push[ing] their paintings into the third dimension’ and ‘pursu[ing] the modernist tradition even beyond the literal monochrome where it actually meets its end’ – in spite of Greenberg’s attraction to the comparable work of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.13 The unyielding, no-nonsense positivism that Greenberg’s essays delivered in Art and Culture is recognizable elsewhere in the attitudinizing art and writing of Donald Judd and Robert Morris. Both were antagonistic towards Greenberg but in their own

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criticism were ‘formalists essentially’ in the words of Sandler who said of the opposed Minimalists and formalists generally: ‘their methodology was essentially the same. Literalism is not the other side at all.’14 Mel Bochner also spoke later on of Judd as ‘still writing formal criticism of art’ in the 1960s.15 It could even be added that the writings of such artists in that decade were an amplification of modernist criticism against modernist art, given that the emphasis placed by Greenberg on materials at the expense of ‘ideas’ was resisted by many of the artists that Greenberg himself admired, such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.16 Greenberg displayed as little partiality for Rauschenberg’s work as he did for Stella’s or Minimalist art, but the reductive language of forthrightness that supported that newer work elsewhere was not fundamentally at odds with the larger modernist discourse excusing abstract art, which was indeed used by Greenberg and his followers either to repudiate Surrealist art or to divert it from its original aims. The study of Surrealism in its later phase and the consideration of its quite dissimilar, poetic understanding of Rauschenberg to either the formalist one or its allegorical descendant (though there is some overlap, as I showed in my first chapter) points back to the rift within modern art history itself between content-led approaches to art and formalist ones. When emphasis is laid on these as two quite separate methodological attitudes towards modern art, the break presumed by mainly Anglophone art history to have occurred in the early 1950s and to have delivered postmodernism disappears under the continuity of two broad traditions or what some called ‘sensibilities.’17 If we now turn finally to entanglements of Rauschenberg with Surrealism in France subsequent to Pierre’s article, we encounter not only an anti-Surrealist version of cultural and art history close to what I am arguing is a single formalist-factist tradition, but also the means by which academics brought us one of the main versions of Surrealism we have today.

Rauschenberg, Surrealism and Tel Quel in France The year after Pierre assessed the artist’s trajectory in ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg’ against the backdrop of Cage’s ‘mock positivism,’ Jean Baudrillard demolished the objectivist rhetoric of Pop, Cage and Rauschenberg as ‘an ideology of Nature, of “Waking-Up” and authenticity reminiscent of the best moments of bourgeois spontaneity.’18 Baudrillard undertook this reading in The Consumer Society (1970) by tackling head on Leonard B. Meyer’s essentialist assumption made in ‘The End of the Renaissance?’ of a ‘revealed nature,’ without citing his source.19 His critical interpretation of the recent cultural paradigm is, at first sight, as confusing as the more favourable one of Rauschenberg that had been made by Marcelin Pleynet in Tel Quel around the same time as Meyer’s text. Here is the crux of Baudrillard’s grievance against Pop, its forerunners and apologists: This ‘radical empiricism,’ ‘uncompromising positivism,’ and ‘anti-teleologism’ sometimes assumes a dangerously initiatory air. . . . the Pop artists are not to be outdone by previous generations so far as ‘Inspiration’ is concerned. . . . One simply

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has to awaken or reveal that Nature. In John Cage, the musician who inspired Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, we read: ‘art should be an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order . . . but simply a way of waking up to the very life we are living, which is so excellent, once one gets one’s mind, one’s desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord.’ This assent to a revealed order – the universe of images and manufactured objects showing through ultimately as nature – leads to mystico-realist professions of faith: ‘A flag was just a flag, a number was simply a number’ (Jasper Johns) or (Cage again): ‘We must set about discovering a means to let sounds be themselves,’ which supposes an essence of the object, a level of absolute reality that is never that of the everyday environment and which, in relation to that environment, constitutes nothing short of a surreality [une surréalité]. [Tom] Wesselmann speaks in this way of the ‘super-reality’ [la ‘superréalité’] of an ordinary kitchen.20

Baudrillard used the same passages from Cage’s Silence (1961) as Meyer, reaching a comparable conclusion to Annette Michelson who the year before had perceived in the ‘epistemological firstness’ claimed by some for Morris via the usual quotations from Cage an Emersonian atemporality that she felt showed a nostalgia for modernism: ‘that version of “presentness” which Transcendentalism derives from its Romantic origins and bequeaths to its Surrealist descendants.’21 In fact, Baudrillard had no more extracted his points of reference directly from Meyer than from Cage, but actually from the unreliable book Pop as Art (1965) by Andy Warhol’s friend Mario Amaya, where Meyer’s text is used extensively to close the first chapter.22 In spite of his rejection of the rhetoric, Baudrillard reached similar conclusions to Meyer in his further contention that such ‘behaviourism’ on the part of Cage and the others was ‘accompanied by a vague Zen or Buddhist mysticism of the stripping away of the ego or superego to rediscover the “id” of the surrounding world. There is,’ he added, ‘also something distinctly American about this curious mixture!’23 Given my portrayal in this book of an increasing divergence of commentary on Rauschenberg in the 1960s, fuelled by writers on art influenced by a poetics of seeing promoted by the Surrealists, on the one hand, and those committed to more recent theoretical positions that privileged the putatively unadorned thing or signifier, on the other, Baudrillard’s likening to Surrealism of the avant-garde project that included Rauschenberg’s work might come as a surprise. The more positive evaluation of the two by Pleynet had appeared in the early Tel Quel; Pleynet continued to value Cage’s writings highly when reviewing Silence in the same year of Baudrillard’s diatribe, characterizing them similarly, all the same, as ‘a kind of empirio-mysticism,’ while Baudrillard used the theoretical resources that characterized the later Tel Quel following its full take up of Roland Barthes’s structuralist semiology and unambiguous rejection of Surrealism.24 This is demonstrated clearly enough in the notice Baudrillard gives of a ‘mysticorealism’ and his dismissal of the ‘mystical aporia’ of both the everyday and banal, which echo the jibes aimed at Surrealism in Tel Quel and those that would soon follow outside the review.25 Baudrillard’s judgement on Pop and the avant-garde language of matter-of-factness that prepared its advent and surrounded it, by Cage, Johns and

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Tom Wesselmann, but also Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and Warhol, was that it sabotaged its own attempt to desacrilize art through the subject matter of capitalist consumerism by reinstating ‘the whole sacred process of art’ through its commentary.26 Objects that possessed a symbolic role in art until the twentieth century, he wrote, ‘celebrated their parodic resurrection in Dada and Surrealism’ before ultimately being ‘reconciled again with their image in neo-figuration and Pop art,’27 except that this was only another form of symbolism once again mistaken for ‘the world as it is’ under the ‘traditional mythology of artistic creation.’28 The cultural dilution of historical Surrealism and the anachronism of the contemporary manifestation of the movement were insisted upon by Tel Quel and its readers in the 1970s as the review emerged from Maoism into its ‘American’ years. A classic example of such Tel Quel ideological orthodoxy appeared from the pen of Guy Scarpetta in the special issue on the United States in 1977. The article was attuned to changes in theatre and the shift towards theatricality generally in American art, partly in reaction to the defence of modernism by Michael Fried, acknowledging Surrealist residues in the art and culture of that country, but noting with approval their mitigation: we should . . . note a direct, free, immediate ‘treatment’ of something which, over here [in France], remains bound within a sclerotic ideological straitjacket. Surrealism, for example, seems to have developed into a practical sense of limitinscription and excess-gesture, which has nothing to do with the preciosity and mythological figuration which constitute its derisory posterity over here.29

For Scarpetta, the director Robert Wilson’s ‘“treatment” of Surrealism appears to involve both a characteristically “relaxed” attitude (no apparent fascination for Surrealist ideology) and an exploration of limits (notably in the treatment of perception) which Surrealist figuration ([René] Magritte, [Paul] Delvaux, [Salvador] Dalí) never seemed to attain.’30 As scholarly evidence of the ‘free manner’ guiding the mutation of Surrealism into problems to do with painting, Scarpetta tendered Rubin’s largely formalist, comparative writings on Masson and Jackson Pollock published in Art News way back in November 1959 – where, according to Rubin, the ‘passion’ of Masson ‘is presented through style rather than represented through subject,’ while Pollock is a ‘linear genius’ – and the thick tome Dada and Surrealist Art (1969) that had followed the US curator’s once-controversial exhibition, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (1968).31 Scarpatta’s source was, in fact, Pleynet who had footnoted Rubin’s ageing article in his own on Cy Twombly in Tel Quel the previous year to make a case for Surrealist automatism as a means to investigate the relations between painting and writing; that is to say, for precisely the reason that caused the controversy around Rubin’s exhibition: it represented the defanging of Surrealism in the United States by formalism, which served well the agenda of Tel Quel to restrict Surrealism to a style (rerouted, in this case, to serve an argument about écriture).32 However, Scarpetta also believed that in the period of about 1962–6: ‘in a more surreptitious, discreet way, and inspired by quite different cultural “influences” (Cage,

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[Merce] Cunningham), a different process was getting under way,’ discernable along the lines of ‘dissociation’ and ‘decompartmentalization.’33 Cage was crucial to it, but so was Marcel Duchamp (whose closeness to Surrealism had been temporarily forgotten by this time in art history and beyond), the Judson Dance Theatre and experimental dance and music more generally: the Happening which was developing at the same time in the margins of a certain impasse in painting; the role of the ‘literalist’ and neo-structuralist ideologies, etc. . . . basically this involved, for the participants, establishing a tabula rasa, returning to the minimal ‘cells’ whose combination had represented the traditional theatrical code. . . . the ‘theatre’ as such was rejected, and it was theatrical ‘techniques’ which were to be examined and appropriated. An echo of ‘minimal’ art (Judd, Morris, Stella) . . . even [Alain] Robbe-Grillet’s ‘literalism’ may be integrated into this broad movement.34

In his way, the literalist ‘sensibility of the sixties,’ called by Scarpetta a ‘formalism,’ made its belated entry into the pages of Tel Quel, told as though it were news and placed in direct juxtaposition with the rather old news of the ‘failure’ of Surrealism;35 or, at the very best, the replacement of the Surrealist subject with style or the reduction of its erotics to the mechanics of the Nouveau Roman in the hands of directors and playwrights such as Wilson and Richard Foreman.36 The insistence of Scarpetta and Tel Quel on a ‘naïve,’ back-to-basics focus on means that had exhausted and exceeded Surrealism was oblivious to Baudrillard’s bundling of Surrealism with the same ‘mystico-realism’ a few years earlier; but both were indebted to Barthes’s intricate sundering of ‘the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature,’ begun in Mythologies (1957), just as Tel Quel was indebted to Barthes for the primacy he placed on écriture.37 The importance of Barthes for the theoretical trajectory taken by Tel Quel is inestimable and can be judged partly from his twelve publications in the review from 1961 to 1980, spanning almost its entire run. The first of these, which was concurrent with the earliest manifestations of Pop in America, made a similar argument about Surrealism as Baudrillard would about Pop and Cage, figuring Surrealism as the ghost of theory past for which ‘the coincidence of reality and the human mind was possible immediately,’ as though automatism mistakenly offered a utopia that eased the purported split between mind and matter through its symbolizing function.38 It was evidence of what Barthes called elsewhere a ‘civilization of the soul’ that he refuted in his earliest and ongoing accounts of the ‘conflict between the purely optical world of objects and the world of human interiority,’ showcased in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet who ‘deliberately abolishes all past and all depth’ in a ‘refusal of psychoanalysis,’39 for whom the ‘indiscreet object remains there,’ is ‘never allusive’ and whose writing ‘is the exact opposite of poetic writing.’40 Consistent with this, in 1980 Barthes wrote on Pop art outside of Tel Quel in a manner wholly in accordance with the theoretical fidelity shown by the review. His conclusions were also aligned with what was, by then, the entrenched interpretation in art history

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of Rauschenberg’s work at the expense of the long-forgotten Surrealist account, even if Barthes overlooked the equally ingrained understanding of Rauschenberg’s oeuvre, established over the previous two decades, as distinct from Pop: A final feature which attaches Pop art to the experiments of Modernity: the banal conformity of representation to the thing represented. ‘I don’t want a canvas,’ Rauschenberg says, ‘to look like what it isn’t. I want it to look like what it is.’ The proposition is aggressive in that art has always regarded itself as an inevitable detour that must be taken in order to ‘render’ the truth of the thing. What Pop art wants is to desymbolise the object, to give it the obtuse and matte stubbornness of a fact (John Cage: ‘The object is fact, not a symbol’). To say that the object is asymbolic is to deny it possesses a profound or proximate space through which its appearance can propagate vibrations of meaning: Pop art’s object (this is a true revolution of language) is neither metaphoric nor metonymic; it presents itself cut off from its source and its surroundings . . . .41

Barthes’s wording recalls Rose’s verdict, quoted in my introduction, that so-called ‘ABC Art’ had ‘no wish to transcend the physical for either the metaphysical or the metaphoric.’42 However, it is more likely that Barthes had in mind the ‘asymbolic’ interpretation of Édouard Manet and early modernism, from Émile Zola and Stéphane Mallarmé to Tel Quel icon Georges Bataille.43 Bataille’s estimation of Manet’s Olympia (1863) was arrived at by contrast with Paul Valéry’s interpretation of the figure in the great painting not as a literal woman but as a metaphor for ‘woman,’ a representative of modern urban prostitution, and the contention was made in 1955, exactly contemporary with the rise of the Nouveau Roman and Barthes’s writing on Robbe-Grillet in the mid-1950s in a cultural moment later thought inspirational by Michel Foucault and characterised paradigmatically by Meyer via the self-evidentially there writings and art of Samuel Beckett, Cage and Rauschenberg. Insisting, on the contrary, that ‘the meaning of the picture is not in the text behind it but in the obliteration of that text’ and that Manet’s concern was ‘to reduce what he saw to the mute and utter simplicity of what was there,’ Bataille’s appraisal is echoed in Barthes’s supposition of ‘no signified, no intention, anywhere’ in Rauschenberg and Pop.44 It can be heard louder still in Barthes’s view that the ‘facticity’ of Pop paintings does not prevent signification: ‘in spite of themselves, they begin to signify again: they signify that they signify nothing.’45 Yet Barthes would not have been thinking critically of an outmoded taste for metaphor or analogy in Bretonian Surrealism when he averred as follows of Pop: by dint of being an image, the thing is stripped of any symbol. This is an audacious movement of mind (or of society): it is no longer the fact which is transformed into an image (which is, strictly speaking, the movement of metaphor, out of which humanity has made poetry for centuries), it is the image which becomes a fact.46

The reason that Barthes would not have made such a statement in dispute with Surrealism is that he did not even know about the Surrealists’ complex reception of

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Rauschenberg and Pop. It was a debate that took place fragmentarily and its pieces had long been swept away by art history anyway, sealed over by recourse to convenient quotation from Rauschenberg, and from Cage on Rauschenberg, about ‘facts’ and ‘things,’ even though, as I showed, the same or comparable quotation had sometimes been turned to their own purposes by Surrealists. By 1980, Surrealism as a theoretical project had been either eclipsed or transformed (depending on how you look at it), by structuralism, post-structuralism and the adventures of Tel Quel, an ascendancy shown in Barthes’s familiar and, by then, even over-familiar theoretical language of the sign. At the same moment, Surrealism was on the verge of being challenged or supplemented (again depending on how you view it) as an art historical project by the new precedence given the texts of Bataille over Breton’s by some art historians writing on Surrealist art and beyond who were attached to the journal October, conceived by Rosalind Krauss and Michelson in 1976 as ‘an updated version of Tel Quel’ in the words of Rose who was in on the preliminary discussions.47

We are not waiting for Godot With its lingering attraction to semiotics, post-structuralism and postmodernism, our current art history remains far more inclined towards Barthes’s interpretation of Rauschenberg and Pop than Surrealism’s. I have introduced an extensive archive in this book that validates historically a Surrealist Rauschenberg and even shown support for it in the very contexts and statements that were meant to replace, obscure or contend it, as in Pleynet’s earlier reading of Rauschenberg in Tel Quel and Rauschenberg’s own later remarks about ‘humanitarian reportage’ with its emphasis on the indexical marks of sun, swimmer and dog. Currently, the Surrealist Rauschenberg has only limited consequence for the main interpretations of the Combines of the early 1960s. Yet Surrealism’s tendency towards an iconographic, ethical, aesthetico-poetic treatment of art privileging metaphor/analogy must have a place in any future art historical narrative or theory claiming explanatory force before Rauschenberg’s work.

Notes Introduction 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8

9

Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990, 60. Quoted in interview with Barbara Rose, Rauschenberg, New York: Vintage, 1987, 64. Brian O’Doherty, Object and Idea: An Art Critic’s Journal 1961–1967, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967, 116. The same critic’s review of Rauschenberg’s retrospective at the Jewish Museum two years earlier in 1963 had incidentally contested the artist’s remoteness from Surrealism in a manner that I will show is typical in the writing on Rauschenberg, stating his ‘main adhesive force is the anti-logic of the subconscious,’ which was what enabled him ‘to blaze a road from abstract expressionism to Pop,’ each of which, in turn, he writes, ‘in its own way draws on Surrealism,’ O’Doherty, Object and Idea, 113. I mean to dispute some less nuanced assertions, such as the recent bluff claim that Rauschenberg ‘seems to have been spurred by the example of the Dadaists and the Surrealists,’ Marco Livingstone, ‘Plural Energies: Rauschenberg’s Impact on British Pop,’ London: Offer Waterman, Robert Rauschenberg: Transfer Drawings from the 1950s and 1960s, 2016, 72–7, 76. This contention might itself have been spurred by R. B. Kitaj’s recollection in 1976 that Rauschenberg ‘had derived from [Willem] de Kooning, [Joseph] Cornell, Duchamp and Surrealism,’ and later claim, curiously difficult to either confirm or refute for Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns who were more circumspect about the matter: ‘I, too, had been fascinated by the collage and symbolising modes of the Breton circle as they (R. & J.) obviously were,’ Kitaj quoted by Marco Livingstone, Kitaj [1985], London: Phaidon, 1999, 199 n. 29. Dorothy Gees Seckler, ‘The Artist Speaks: Robert Rauschenberg,’ Art in America, vol. 54, no. 3, May–June 1966, 73–84, 76. Quoted in oral history interview with Robert Rauschenberg, 21 December 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, n. p. Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter, London and Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997, 306. Michel Foucault, ‘Postscript: An Interview with Michel Foucault’ [1983], Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel [1963], ed. and trans. Charles Ruas, London: The Athlone Press, 1987, 169–86, 174 (rendering of translation slightly modified). Philippe Audoin, Les Surréalistes [1973], Paris: Édition de Seuil, 1995, 128; Robert Benayoun, Le Rire des surréalistes, Paris: La Bougie du Sapeur, 1988, 15–20. For the view that Nadeau’s history also had a positive impact on young people, see the testimony of the Surrealist Alain Joubert: Claire Boustani, ‘Entretien avec Alain Joubert’ [2009], Fabrice Flahutez and Thierry Dufrêne (eds), Art et mythe, Nanterre: Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2021, 149-59 (accessed online at https:// books.openedition.org/pupo/2007?lang=en, 23 August 2022). Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Situation of the Writer in 1947’ [1948], What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman, London: Methuen & Co., 1967, 123–220.

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­10 André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism [1952], trans. Mark Polizzotti, New York: Paragon House, 1993, 31, 32. 11 Georges Goldfayn and Gérard Legrand, ‘Le seul véritable vivant,’ Médium: Communication surréaliste, no. 1, November 1953, 3. 12 André Breton, ‘On Surrealism in Its Living Works’ [1955], Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972, 295–304, 303, 304. 13 William S. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968, 176. 14 Sandra Zalman, Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015, 109. My search of the British Library catalogue across 1948–59 – that is, between the Surrealists’ 1947 exhibition in Paris and Richard Howard’s translation of Breton’s Nadja (1928) in 1960 – yielded two well-known studies and a thin, obscure translation from the series ‘Movements in Modern Art’: Wallace Fowlie, Age of Surrealism, New York: Swallow Press, 1950; Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, New York: The Noonday Press, 1959; Alfred Schmeller, Surrealism, trans. Hilde Spiel, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1956. 15 Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 182. 16 Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 180. 17 Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 182. 18 Quoted in Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, 90. For the best-known account in which Rauschenberg associated such arty navel-gazing directly with the New York poetry scene, see Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1980, 89. In a briefer version he is categorical: ‘I hated all that metaphoric suffering,’ quoted in John Gruen, ‘Robert Rauschenberg: An Audience of One,’ ARTnews, vol. 76, no. 2, February 1977, 44–8, 47. 19 Leonard B. Meyer ‘The End of the Renaissance? Notes on the Radical Empiricism of the Avant-Garde,’ The Hudson Review, vol. 16, no. 2, summer 1963, 169–86, 178. One critic who would have read this article on publication later stated that it was ‘widely discussed by artists,’ Irving Sandler, American Art of the 1960s, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, 63. His example is Andy Warhol who cited Meyer’s article in the year it was published while acknowledging: ‘I think John Cage has been very influential,’ quoted by G. R. Swenson, ‘From “What Is Pop Art? Part 1”’ [1963], Steven Henry Madoff (ed.), Pop Art: A Critical History, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997, 103–11, 105. 20 Meyer ‘The End of the Renaissance?’ 177. Rauschenberg was quoted by Meyer from Dorothy C. Miller (ed.), Sixteen Americans, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959, 58. For the others, see Robbe-Grillet quoted in Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study, London: John Calder, 1962, 134; ‘The dramatic character is on stage, that is his primary quality: he is there,’ Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘Samuel Beckett, or Presence on the Stage’ [1953 and 1957], For a New Novel [1963], trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989, 111–25, 111; Bruce Morrissette, ‘The New Novel in France,’ Chicago Review, vol. 15, no. 3, winter/spring 1962, 1–19, 18; John Cage, ‘Experimental Music’ [1961], Silence: Lectures and Writings [1961], London: Marion Boyars, 1968, 7–13, 10. 21 Meyer ‘The End of the Renaissance?’ 174. 22 Meyer ‘The End of the Renaissance?’ 176. 23 Meyer ‘The End of the Renaissance?’ 176; Cage, Silence, 12.

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24 See O’Doherty, Object and Idea, 117. O’Doherty wrote later of a ‘Whitmanesque plenitude in Rauschenberg’s reaction to life’ in the early 1960s, and of Rauschenberg’s work up to 1969: ‘[a]s propaganda for nothing more than perception – to see the world fresh – it had an Emersonian innocence, a Whitmanesque exuberance,’ Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth, New York: Random House, 1973, 194, 197. Cage only discovered Thoreau around the time O’Doherty’s journal writings appeared in 1967 and after that he mentions him frequently as an inspiration, see, for instance: John Cage, For the Birds: In Conversation with Daniel Charles [1976], Boston, MA and London: Marion Boyars, 1981. For a definition of the ‘culturalist interpretation’ of Rauschenberg’s work as ‘embodying something peculiar about the American experience,’ see Roger Cranshaw and Adrian Lewis, ‘Re-reading Rauschenberg,’ Artscribe, no. 29, June 1981, 44–51, 44, 51 n. 1. 25 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art, 1956–1966’ [1989], Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2000, 461–529, 479. See John Cage, ‘Lecture on Nothing’ [1959] and ‘45’ for a Speaker’ [1954], Silence, 108–27, 110; 146–93, 151. 26 Susan Sontag, ‘Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition’ [1962], Against Interpretation [1966], London: Vintage, 2001, 263–74, 269. 27 Ivan C. Karp, ‘Anti-Sensibility Painting’ [1963], Madoff (ed.), Pop Art, 88–9, 88. 28 Karp in Madoff (ed.), Pop Art, 89. 29 Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’ [1964], Against Interpretation, 275–92, 275, 276. 30 Susan Sontag, ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility’ [1965], Against Interpretation, 293–304, 298. 31 Susan Sontag, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ [1967], Styles of Radical Will [1969], New York: Picador, 2002, 3–34, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 16, 29, 32. 32 Barbara Rose, ‘ABC Art’ [1965], Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed., Gregory Battcock, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968, 274–97, 291; James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001, 144. 33 Barbara Rose and Irving Sandler (eds.), ‘Sensibility of the Sixties,’ Art in America, vol. 55, no. 1, January–February 1967, 44–57. 34 The judgement had been given explicitly at the beginning of the decade in Sandler’s review of the New York exhibition ­Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain (1960–1) that seems to allow for the continuation of a Surrealist sensibility but not of Surrealism itself: ‘There can be no question that the Surrealist spirit persists and will probably continue to do so, but the particular kind of enchantment exhumed in this display stopped enchanting long ago,’ Irving Herschel Sandler, ‘New York Letter,’ Art International, vol. 4, no. 10, 31 December 1960, 33. 35 Sandler, American Art of the 1960s, 60. 36 Sandler, American Art of the 1960s, 61. For more details on the theoretical context I am sketching than space here allows, see my ‘On “Sensibility”: Art, Art Criticism and Surrealism in New York in the 1960s,’ Journal of Art Historiography, no. 23, December 2020, n. p. 37 José Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ L’Oeil, no. 172, April 1969, 42–50, 43, 45. Pierre slightly misquotes or misrenders Cage’s quotations: ‘ . . . object is fact, not symbol,’ John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’ [1961]; ‘Ideas are one thing and what happens another,’ John Cage, ‘Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?’ [1961], Silence, 98–108, 108 and 194–259, 222.

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38 ‘la métaphore, du message et autre balivernes poussiéreuses,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 44. 39 Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 43, 45. 40 Cage’s quotation was one of the two epigraphs that introduced Rose’s chapter ‘After Abstract Expressionism,’ in which it is stated that the ‘atmosphere’ in which Pop was nurtured was ‘generated mainly by the composer John Cage,’ and where Pop is said to have been launched by Rauschenberg and Johns: ‘[t]wo artists close to Cage who applied his attitude toward painting and, in doing so, attacked abstract expressionism at its foundations were Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns,’ Barbara Rose, American Art Since 1900: A Critical History, London: Thames and Hudson, 1967, 211, 216. 41 Studies of the long history of Surrealism – taking it seriously as a critical and cultural force in the 1950s and 1960s – have proliferated since 2000: apart from the sources I use here and those cited in Gavin Parkinson, ‘No Fun’ (review of Susan Laxton, Surrealism at Play, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019) The Oxford Art Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, March 2020, 137–55, see Joanna Pawlick, Remade in America: Surrealist Art, Activism, and Politics, 1940–1978, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2021; Abigail Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021, 180–244; Elliott H. King and Abigail Susik (eds.), Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022 (Rauschenberg does not figure in these volumes apart from my own contribution to King and Susik). The global reach of Surrealism, notice of its continuity and vital political dimension after the Second World War reached a wider audience recently in the exhibition and catalogue by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern, Surrealism Beyond Borders, New York and London, 2021 (exhibition catalogue). 42 Thomas Crow, ‘Rise and Fall: Theme and Idea in the Combines of Robert Rauschenberg,’ Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, 231–55, 253. 43 Quoted in Julia Brown Turrell, ‘Talking to Robert Rauschenberg: An Interview with Julia Brown Turrell,’ Paul Schimmel and Lisa Mark (eds.), Rauschenberg Sculpture, Fort Worth TX: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 1995, 49–82, 73. 44 Frank O’Hara, ‘Bob Rauschenberg’ (exhibition review), Art News, vol. 53, no. 9, January 1955, 47. O’Hara visited Rauschenberg’s studio at the time of the review and he would dedicate a poem to the artist later that decade: Frank O’Hara, ‘For Bob Rauschenberg’ [1959], The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara [1971], ed. Donald Allen, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972, 322. For further discussion and a good introduction to Rauschenberg, allegory and postmodernism, see Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, Iowa, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2006, 189–232. 45 John Ashbery, ‘Five Shows Out of the Ordinary: Robert Rauschenberg,’ Art News, vol. 7, no. 1, March 1958, 40. If Ashbery was suggesting a poetic dimension by this phrase, it might be the one perceived forty years later by another admirer who imagined the viewer of a Rauschenberg work ‘crossing, Cocteau-like, through the barrier between reality and imagination,’ Walter Hopps, ‘Introduction: Rauschenberg’s Art of Fusion,’ Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997, 20–9, 25. 46 Quoted in Rose, Rauschenberg, 96. For a similar remark made a few years later, see Rauschenberg quoted in Robert Rauschenberg, video interview by David A. Ross,

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Walter Hopps, Gary Garrels and Peter Samis, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 6 May 1999, unpublished transcript at the SFMOMA Research Library and Archives, N 6537.R27 A35 1999a, 52. 47 Quoted by Turrell in Rauschenberg Sculpture, 73. 48 Rose, Rauschenberg, 112, 114. 49 Stockholm: Moderna Museet, The Pontus Hultén Collection . . ., 2004, 431. 50 Hultén looked back on the ‘revelation’ and ‘confirmation’ of Rauschenberg’s first solo exhibition in Paris held from 27 April till 8 June 1961 at Daniel Cordier’s gallery, but he must have viewed the artist’s work earlier: Pontus Hultén, ‘Afterword,’ Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, 284–5, 285. 51 Pontus Hultén quoted in Pontus Hultén and Julia Brown Turrell, ‘A Conversation about the Sculpture of Robert Rauschenberg,’ Rauschenberg Sculpture, 9–46, 14. In this conversation, Hultén spoke of how a ‘piece of junk’ in a sculpture by Rauschenberg ‘all of a sudden, by an unconventional operation, indescribable probably, became as you say, poetry,’ contrasting Rauschenberg’s work to Duchamp’s readymades as though it offered an answer to them: ‘“[l]ook how beautiful it can be, and how simple, and how poetic,”’ then characterizing the US artist’s lightness of touch as ‘poetic powder,’ before avowing of the Happening by Rauschenberg that he witnessed, Elgin Tie (1964): ‘I don’t think there is any profound meaning, or political or social meaning. For him the liberation is not political or social, it’s poetic,’ having its only meaning in ‘the click when things go from being junk to being poetry,’ which ‘hasn’t very much to do with calculation or with contemplation or with consciousness, it happens in the unconscious,’ finally stating that the elements of a Combine lose their identity and ‘become poetic metaphors,’ Hultén quoted in Hultén and Turrell in Rauschenberg Sculpture, 18, 21, 30, 34. 52 Hultén quoted in Hultén and Turrell in Rauschenberg Sculpture, 11. 53 Pontus Hultén (ed.), The Surrealists Look at Art, trans. Michael Palmer and Norma Cole, Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1990. 54 Hultén in Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, 2005, 285, 284. 55 Hultén in Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, 284, 285. Among the many other tributes to various aspects of the oeuvre as ‘poetry’ or ‘poetic’ since the first sightings of the Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (1958–60), I select the following: Rauschenberg’s friend and dealer Ileana Sonnabend later spoke of the work shown at the Stable Gallery, New York in January 1954 as ‘very beautiful, even poetic’ and also perceived a ‘poetic and ephemeral quality’ generally across Rauschenberg’s work: quoted in Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, 83, 98; Rubin called the Combine an ‘autobiographical poem,’ William Rubin, ‘Young American Painters,’ Art International, vol. 4, no. 1, January 1960, 25–31, 26; gallery owner Sidney Janis excluded Rauschenberg from his pioneering exhibition New Realists (1962) due to ‘techniques’ that he thought ‘less factual than they are poetic or expressionist,’ Sidney Janis, ‘On the Theme of the Exhibition’ [1962], Madoff (ed.), Pop Art, 39–40, 39; a French critic believed the show of recent work at the galerie Ileana Sonnabend in 1963 had a ‘poésie sauvage et rare,’ Marie-Thérèse Maugis, ‘Rauschenberg,’ Les Lettres françaises, no. 267, 28 February–6 March 1963, 13; another with Surrealist connections observed ‘une réalité poétique’ in the Combines: Jean-François Revel, ‘XXXIIe Biennale de Venise: Triomphe du “Réalisme Nationaliste,”’ L’Oeil, no. 115/116, August 1964, 2–11, 6; a German art historian claimed to discern ‘a kind of poetic alienation’ alongside a ‘poetic eloquence [that] greatly fascinated the

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Notes young American artists’ in the early 1960s silkscreen paintings: Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century: An Analysis of the Artists and Their Work, vol. 1 [1965], trans. Ralph Mannheim, New York and Washington: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967, 376; Rauschenberg’s work of the later 1960s was said to increase ‘le pouvoir d’évocation poétique d’éléments disparates’ and his oeuvre generally to constitute an event that was ‘plastique et poétique à la fois’ by Pierre Gaudibert, ‘Préface,’ Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Robert Rauschenberg: Oeuvres de 1949 à 1968, 1968, n. p.; O’Doherty wrote: ‘[b]y bringing together the common images of the day, week, month, year, decade, Rauschenberg did a service usually performed by poetry,’ O’Doherty, American Masters, 194; the Hoarfrost series (1974–6) was reviewed as ‘[d]ecidedly brilliant visual poetry’ by Joseph Dreiss, quoted in Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, 165; Robert Hughes saw in the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI, 1985–91) ‘the arcadian as utopian, spinning a poetry of affirmation out of an opaque and hideously conflicted time,’ quoted in Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, 41; a persistent critic lamented to Rauschenberg: ‘[w] hat’s gone now in painting is poetry. There is poetry in your work. I think there is poetry in Jasper Johns’s work. The big cutoff comes when the poetry goes. Poetry means one thing to one person and another to someone else, but it signifies’ (no response from the artist is recorded): Rose, Rauschenberg, 114; one writer is unswervingly effusive on the oeuvre, which is said to be ‘multi-directional and open-ended, poetic and evocative,’ while the Combine Curfew (1958) is referred to as a ‘“tone poem,” its objects and images existing in poetic interpenetration within a harmonious tonal field’ and Monogram (1955–9) said to be imbued with ‘the poetry and sentimentality of [Joseph] Cornell,’ Roni Feinstein, Random Order: The First Fifteen Years of Robert Rauschenberg’s Art, 1949–1964, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1990, 5, 122, 272; the same author is equally unreserved elsewhere on the ‘humanity, the sense of rightness and humour, and the poetry and beauty that characterize the whole of Rauschenberg’s art,’ commending his work (by contrast with Warhol’s) as ‘poetic, involved with improvisation and multidirectional associative content’ while indulging in ‘poetry, expression, and sensuality,’ Roni Feinstein, ‘Imagery and Content’ and ‘Epilogue,’Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962–64, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990, 75–90, 90 and 91–2, 91; Rauschenberg’s process was called ‘visual poetry’ by the curator Walter Hopps, ‘An Order Found,’ Washington: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s, 1991, 170; a major essay on Bed (1955) conceives Rauschenberg’s oeuvre as ‘a poetry of difference’ emerging from a ‘dialectical sense of identity,’ James Leggio, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed and the Symbolism of the Body,’ Essays on Assemblage, New York: Museum of Modern Art, Studies in Modern Art, no. 2, 1992, 79–117, 107; the artist’s eyewitness record of the launch of Apollo XI was recorded with ‘poetic energy’ in one account, which also views an ‘unbridled poetic enthusiasm’ in his art inspired by the event: Robert S. Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, 132, 143; one art historian imagines Rauschenberg presenting his work ‘[p]oetically, if somewhat cryptically,’ at the symposium of the exhibition The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1961: Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2003, 1; another writer on the artist referred to the ‘highly poetic works of the seventies,’ Sam Hunter, Robert

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Rauschenberg: Works, Writings, and Interviews, Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2005, 96; elsewhere, a Combine by Rauschenberg is even seen to outdo the poets: ‘[o]f the many modern poets who have sought to recuperate ancient mythography, it would be difficult to name one who has surpassed the success in that endeavour of Painting with Grey Wing [1959],’ Thomas Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music and Design, 1930–1995, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, 66; and recently, Rauschenberg’s materials are said to submit ‘a different kind of poetry’ to those of Minimalist art, and bets are hedged as the work is seen as driven by ‘some public and some much more private, and indeed poetic’ concerns, while ‘poetic ideas, fantasies, personal conversations, and dreams informed Rauschenberg’s early1970s [Cardboards and Cardbirds] as much as his interest in consumer culture and recent art,’ Mark Godfrey, ‘“Source and Reserve of My Energies”: Working from Captiva,’ Achim Borchardt-Hume (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, London and New York: Tate Modern and The Museum of Modern Art, 2016, 284–93, 290, 291, 292. 56 ‘Factualist’ is the term used by Lawrence Alloway, ‘Rauschenberg’s Development,’ Washington: National Collection of Fine Arts, Robert Rauschenberg, 1976, 3–23, 8. Johns had been deemed ‘an established Factualist’ (by contrast with Rauschenberg, no less) in the New Realists catalogue in 1962: Janis in Madoff (ed.), Pop Art, 39.

Chapter 1 1

2

3

4 5

Quoted from the New York Times, 19 December 1964 in Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990, 99; Ed Krčma, Rauschenberg/Dante: Drawing a Modern Inferno, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017, 19. As illustrations by an artist who already worked on an allusive register, whether he wanted to or not, those for Dante’s Inferno have always been exceptional in the discourse of ‘Rauschenberg, poet,’ leading to one categorical estimation that they ‘reaffirm and modernize the ancient tradition of ut pictura poesis that insisted upon the close relationship between painting and poetry. As Dante’s poem is replete with speaking pictures, so are Rauschenberg’s drawings paradigms of mute poetry or visible speech,’ Graham Smith, ‘“Visibile Parlare”: Rauschenberg’s Drawings for Dante’s Inferno,’ Word & Image, vol. 32, no. 1, January–March 2016, 77–103, 100. ‘If Jasper Johns’s notebooks seem a parody of Wittgenstein, then [Donald] Judd’s and [Robert] Morris’s sculptures often look like illustrations of that philosopher’s propositions,’ Barbara Rose, ‘ABC Art’ [1965], Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968, 274–97, 291. James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001, 144. See Rose’s recollections of the period in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974, New York: Soho Press, Inc., 2000, 145–6. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sense and Sensibility: Reflection on Post ‘60s Sculpture,’ Artforum, vol. 12, no. 3, November 1973, 43–53. Krauss, ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ 46, 47–8, 49. In the 1990s, Krauss seems to have recalled her own impressions differently, declaring: ‘[b]y 1965 it should have been obvious that something was going on in Minimalism besides “concrete thereness,”

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for the galleries in which the various works were displayed were even then awash with the effects of optical illusionism,’ Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Mind/Body Problem: Robert Morris in Series’ [1994], Robert Morris, ed. Julia Bryan-Wilson, London and Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2013, 65–109, 93. 6 Krauss, ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ 47. 7 Susan Sontag, ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility’ [1965], Against Interpretation [1966], London: Vintage, 2001, 293–304, 296, 298. 8 Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture [1977], Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1999, 298 n. 12. 9 Krauss, Passages, 250, 253. 10 Krauss, Passages, 254, 256. 11 Krauss, Passages, 259. 12 Leo Steinberg, ‘Jasper John: The First Seven Years of His Art’ [1962, 1963], Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, 17–54, 52. 13 Krauss, Passages, 266. 14 Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘Old “Values” and the New Novel (Nature, Humanism, Tragedy)’ [1958], trans. Bruce Morrissette, Evergreen Review, vol. 3, no. 9, summer 1959, 98–118. See Roland Barthes, ‘There Is No Robbe-Grillet School’ [1958], Critical Essays [1964], trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 91–5, 92. 15 Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘Nature, Humanism, Tragedy’ [1958], For a New Novel [1963], trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989, 49–75, 53. 16 Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, 54. 17 Krauss, Passages, 270. This unreferenced quotation by Krauss predates her immersion in post-structuralism and while it is obscure it might derive from the idea that ‘[l]inguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing. . . . Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner “thing” he thinks to “translate” is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely,’ Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ [1967], Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, New York: Fontana/Collins, 1977, 142–8, 145, 146. 18 Krauss in Bryan-Wilson (ed.), Robert Morris, 86. In the same volume, a concern with Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’ is detected in Morris’s work from 1970 by Jon Bird, ‘Minding the Body: Robert Morris’s 1971 Tate Gallery Retrospective’ [1999], Bryan-Wilson (ed.), Robert Morris, 153–75, 160–1. For an extended reading via Wittgenstein (with John Cage in the background) mainly of the ‘obviousness’ of Slab (1962), see W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Wall Labels: Word, Image, and Object in the Work of Robert Morris,’ New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem, 1994, 62–79. For Morris’s dialogue with Cage from the letters of 1960–3 up to Morris’s work of 1970, see Branden W. Joseph, ‘Robert Morris and John Cage: Reconstructing a Dialogue’ and Robert Morris, ‘Letters to John Cage,’ October, no. 81, summer 1997, 59–69 and 70–9. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was ‘much consulted by Morris’ who also read and referred to Robbe-Grillet in his early notebooks according to Jeffrey Weiss, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013, 68, 75 n. 91, 97. Johns was perhaps the first artist to read Wittgenstein in a way that was productive for his work, probably turned onto the philosopher by

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Cage who had been introduced to his writings around 1960: see John Cage, ‘Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas’ [1964], A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings [1963], Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969, 73–84, 74; John Cage, For the Birds: In Conversation with Daniel Charles [1976], Boston, MA and London: Marion Boyars, 1981, 153–4. This is not the place to chronicle the interest shown in Wittgenstein by artists from Johns through Eduardo Paolozzi to Morris and Joseph Kosuth, a subject I return to briefly in my seventh chapter, but it will be the topic of a future study. 19 Annette Michelson, ‘Robert Morris – An Aesthetics of Transgression’ [1969], BryanWilson (ed.), Robert Morris, 7–49, 10. 20 Krauss, Passages, 270. 21 Krauss, Passages, 270. 22 Krauss, Passages, 280. It should be noted that elsewhere, the metaphorical charge of Rauschenberg’s work was being idly asserted with no sign of caution, as in this statement published the same year as Krauss’s book, regulated by the rhetoric of both modernism and (esoteric) Surrealism: ‘[h]is vision is such that the everyday – a crumpled scrap of paper, a photograph, a newspaper headline, a postcard, a rusty bucket, a door or, indeed, a stuffed goat – becomes transmuted into an expressive metaphor, the ­meaning of which is as allusive as it is somehow charged with clarity and myriad inner meanings,’ John Gruen, ‘Robert Rauschenberg: An Audience of One,’ ARTnews, vol. 76, no. 2, February 1977, 44–8, 45. 23 Krauss, ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ 46. 24 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image’ [1974], Robert Rauschenberg, ed. Branden W. Joseph, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2002, 39–55, 51. 25 Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 50. 26 See Krauss’s remarks on her break with Greenberg in 1970 in Newman, Challenging Art, 292. 27 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Perpetual Inventory’ [1997], Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 93–131, 96. 28 I am referring mainly to the modification of Surrealist art and photography with recourse primarily to the writings of Georges Bataille and Walter Benjamin: Rosalind Krauss, ‘Nightwalkers,’ Art Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, spring 1981, 33–8; Rosalind Krauss, ‘Giacometti,’ New York: Museum of Modern Art, ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, vol. 2, 1984, 503–33; Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone, L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism, New York and London: Abbeville Press, 1985; Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1985, 43–118; Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1993, 33–93, 149–95; Rosalind Krauss, ‘“Michel, Bataille et moi,”’ October, no. 68, spring 1994, 3–20. For the site of the premature burial, see Clement Greenberg, ‘Surrealist Painting’ [1944], The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgements, 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986, 225–31. 29 Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 96. 30 Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 96–7. Krauss was slightly misquoting Stella’s complaint in the vein of Robbe-Grillet about ‘the old values in painting – the

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31 32 33 34

35

Notes humanistic values’ that ‘end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas’ when really the artist ‘is making a thing,’ uttered in the widely circulated discussion of the mid-sixties in which both he and Judd had rejected ‘reduction’ as an aim, but whereas Stella saw reduction rather as a by-product of something else that he found hard to define, Judd shifted his footing to dismiss the term altogether as a judgement determined by comparison with what critics expected to see in their work based on the experience of previous (European) art; Judd also specifically stated of his work: ‘I don’t consider it nihilistic or negative or cool or anything else,’ Bruce Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’ [1964, 1966], Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art, 148–64, 157–8, 159, 160. Years later, Rose would recall of Stella and Judd: ‘[l]iteralism, which was this kind of anti-European statement, was the point of demarcation [from Greenberg],’ quoted in Newman, Challenging Art, 221. Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2003, 84. Rauschenberg quoted by Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 97; Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1980, 201. Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 99. Rauschenberg quoted by Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 123. The first person to couple the discussions of brick and glass of water as evidence of Rauschenberg’s self-contradiction as well as his ‘quick, richly associative mind’ was Roni Feinstein, Random Order: The First Fifteen Years of Robert Rauschenberg’s Art, 1949–1964, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1990, 6, 444–5 n. 35; and also in Roni Feinstein, ‘Introduction,’ Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962–64, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990, 19–25, 25. Let us note in passing that the reluctantly associative, putatively anti-expressive Rauschenberg of the brick and glass of water is the very same artist who stated unprompted many years later in the presence of his Automobile Tire Print (1953): ‘I think of it as a Tibetan prayer wheel,’ and, elsewhere in the same ­interview: ‘[y]ou have to have room for other people to express their life, so I never explain my work,’ Rauschenberg quoted in Robert Rauschenberg, video interview by David A. Ross, Walter Hopps, Gary Garrels and Peter Samis, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 6 May 1999, unpublished transcript at the SFMOMA Research Library and Archives, N 6537.R27 A35 1999a, 25, 58. In one of his last interviews, Rauschenberg set himself apart from Pop artists who ‘ne veulent pas que l’objet renonce à aucune de ses intentions originelles,’ whereas his own interest lay in ‘la mobilité des objets, des pensées et des attitudes, et la relation à la forme; transformer l’objet,’ which was why, he said perplexingly, ‘j’adore l’oeuvre de Robbe-Grillet,’ where, in fact, things are usually said to be presented unadorned and uncommunicative, and therefore linked to Pop, as they were by Robbe-Grillet himself: Emmanuelle Lequeux, ‘Interview de Robert Rauschenberg,’ Nice: Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Rauschenberg in the Gap between: Entretiens avec Robert Rauschenberg, 2005, 19–28, 21. Douglas Crimp, ‘On the Museum’s Ruins,’ October, no. 13, summer 1980, 41–57, 46, 56. When the text was republished in a slightly amended state, Persimmon was chosen as the lead image: Douglas Crimp, ‘On the Museum’s Ruins,’ The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983,

Notes

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39 40

41 42 ­43

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43–56, 46. Both were reproduced (as themselves appropriated, by an artist in one case and by the museum in another) when the text was reprinted in the fuller study: Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins [1993], Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1997, 49, 57. By then, it had become possible to write of ‘Rauschenberg’s pioneering postmodernist work Persimmon,’ David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, 57; allegory had already allowed the overheated claim that Rauschenberg’s oeuvre was ‘increasingly capable of standing as emblem – hinge – for the past decades,’ Stephen Melville, ‘Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism,’ October, no, 102, winter 1981, 55–92, 89. The earliest glimpse of the postmodern Rauschenberg in print seems to have occurred in the writings from 1971 of theorist of the postmodern Ihab Hassan, where, we are told: ‘[t]hree names recurred with special frequency: John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Buckminster Fuller,’ Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, London and New York: Verso, 1998, 17. See the references to Sontag (her ‘Aesthetics of Silence’ of 1967) and Surrealism as well as the significance given to minimalism and ‘silence or exhaustion’ in the work of Beckett, Cage, Duchamp, Rauschenberg and others in Ihab Hassan, ‘POSTmodernISM,’ New Literary History, vol. 3, no. 1 (‘Modernism and Postmodernism: Inquiries, Reflections, and Speculations’), autumn 1971, 5–30, 14, 23. Crimp, ‘On the Museum’s Ruins,’ 56, 56 n.18. Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism’ [1980], Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation [1984], ed. Brian Wallis, New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999, 203–35, 209, 223. Owens in Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism, 209, 223, 226–7. Sontag’s new sensibility was labelled ‘post-modern, or anti-art’ as early as 1966 by Robert Boyers, ‘On Susan Sontag and the New Sensibility,’ Salmagundi, vol. 1, no. 3, 1966, 27–38, 31; more recently, it was characterized as a gendered riposte to the ‘old sensibility’ of the Old Left and New York intellectuals like Irving Howe, a ‘direct challenge’ to the ‘high modernism’ they esteemed: James Penner, ‘Gendering Susan Sontag’s Criticism in the 1960s: The New York Intellectuals, the Counter Culture, and the Kulturkampf Over “the New Sensibility,”’ Women’s Studies, no. 37, 2008, 921–41, 932. Owens in Wallis (ed.), Art after Modernism, 213. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art’ [1982], Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth Century Art, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2015, 173–226, 179, 181, 183. Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 130–1 n. 59. The term was used by (Artforum contributor) Carter Ratcliff, quoted in Newman, Challenging Art, 281. See Craig Owens, ‘Earthwords’ (book review), October, no. 10, autumn 1979, 120–30. For a recent iconographic, biographic and mythic interpretation that perceives readable, ‘explicit allegories’ in the Combines while taking to task the fragmenting, anti-totalizing, ‘ruins of meaning’ thesis of postmodern Baroque allegory stemming from Benjamin, theorized by Owens and consented to by Krauss, see Thomas Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music and Design, 1930–1995, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, 72–7; Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 130–1 n. 59.

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44 Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 96. 45 Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 109, 110, 111. 46 Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 107. In fact, Hollier’s own reading leans heavily on earlier texts by Krauss herself, affirming indexicality in Surrealist painting and Duchamp’s work, arguing for a parallel between the ‘autobiographical’ ‘I’ and ‘you’ in Breton and elsewhere, but overemphasizing the distinction between these and Proustian ‘fiction’ (where, equally, the ‘I’ is used but cannot be called ‘indexical’ in the same sense): Denis Hollier, ‘Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows’ [1991], trans. Rosalind Krauss, October, no. 69, summer 1994, 110–32, 130. As for Barthes, Krauss’s use of his two texts, concerned respectively with press images and advertisements, for a reading of Rauschenberg’s ‘Random Order’ is at least questionable, as is her attribution here and elsewhere of an indexical character to photography, which is nowhere to be found in either: Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’ [1961] and ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ [1964], Image-Music-Text, 15–31 and 32–51. 47 Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 122. 48 Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 109. 49 Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Random Order,’ Location, vol. 1, no. 1, spring 1963, 27–31; André Breton, Nadja [1928], trans. Richard Howard, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1960. 50 ‘ressortissent au degré zéro de la représentation,’ Michel Beaujour, ‘Qu’est-ce que Nadja?’ La Nouvelle Revue Française, year 15, no. 172 (‘André Breton et le mouvement surréaliste’), 1 April 1967, 780–99, 797. By contrast, see the opinions expressed on the ‘intensity’ and ‘imminence’ of the photographs for Nadja by Roger Shattuck, Michelson and Benjamin in Ian Walker, ‘Nadja: A “Voluntary Banality”?’ City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002, 48–67, 55, 61, 62. 51 It was first published as Rosalind Krauss, ‘Perpetual Inventory,’ New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, 1997, 206–23; then as Rosalind Krauss, ‘Perpetual Inventory,’ October, no. 88, spring 1999, 86–116. 52 Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 106, 107. The relevance of the Cagean ‘sensibility’ to Location is evident in a major article in the journal by a friend of Cage’s culminating in a discussion of the composer: Peter Yates, ‘After Modern Music,’ Location, vol. 1, no. 1, spring 1963, 73–80. It is further borne out by Cage’s later remark that the article published in the short-lived magazine by Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Agenbite of Outwit,’ detailing the modern transition through electronic media from a visual to an auditory field of knowledge, belonged on the list of ten most important ‘books’: Cage, For the Birds, 225. 53 Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 114. With that word ‘upright,’ Krauss was challenging Steinberg’s alternative postmodern reading of Rauschenberg’s ‘flatbed picture plane,’ which argued for an orientation ‘referring back to the horizontals on which we walk and sit, work and sleep,’ however the striated ‘veils’ of the Dante drawings do not dictate a ‘vertical’ reading as she suggests (think of the thin paper protecting the photographs in wedding albums, for instance) and their flickering, hatched surfaces educed by the rubbing of the solvent transfer method can be said to play in the mind towards the horizontal register in the same way as Steinberg argues for the Erased de Kooning Drawing, confirmed in photographs of Rauschenberg actually performing the technique: Leo Steinberg, ‘Other Criteria’ [1968, 1972], Other

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Criteria, 55–91, 82, 86–7, 87; for the artist at work, see London: Offer ­Waterman, Robert Rauschenberg: Transfer Drawings from the 1950s and 1960s, 2016, 7–9, 16. Ed Krčma recounts in detail the materials and technique used in the solvent transfer method and is right to distinguish its ‘repurposing’ from the supposed expressiveness of automatic drawing; however, an irresistible technical parallel with Surrealism exists through Ernst’s practice of frottage, which is not directly identified by Krčma but is evoked through his scattered descriptions of solvent transfer, where ‘[t]he artist is not in direct control of the immediate effects of the action of his manual rubbing, which only become apparent once the clipping is lifted and the spectral image revealed’ and his mention of its ‘process of blind rubbing’ and the ‘vagueness’ and ‘indeterminacy’ of the final product, corresponding ‘to the freewheeling associative capacities of the imagination’ where the individual images are freed from their original contexts and ‘set running within those in-folded, analogical, mobile spaces of the mind,’ Krčma, Rauschenberg/Dante, 12, 13, 132, 134, 136, 137, 160–1. Indeed, one Rauschenberg specialist claimed ‘the transfer technique has often been related to Ernst’s use of frottage,’ but then does not say where: Feinstein, Random Order, 348. Among the first, presumably, to notice a possible relationship was Rauschenberg’s main proponent in France, the poet and critic Alain Jouffroy, who as a former Surrealist accordingly linked the technique to that of decalcomania: Alain Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ L’Oeil, no. 113, May 1964, 28–34 and 68–9, 68. The reproductions of Jean-Jacques Lebel’s transfer drawings of 1961 and 1964 are actually accompanied by the term ‘frottage’ as a descriptor in Saint-Étienne: Musée d’Art Moderne, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Peintures/Paintings/Collages/Assemblages, 1955–2012, 2012, 2, 16, 69, 70, 71. 54 Leo Castelli and Michael Sonnabend would recite Dante to gatherings of wartime émigrés in the United States in the early 1940s: Annie Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, 152. It has been reported that Sonnabend had gone to Venice in his youth to learn Italian, specifically so he could read Dante in the original: Leah Dickerman, ‘Canto by Canto: An Introduction,’ Robert ­Rauschenberg: Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2017, 9–23, 15. 55 As translator of the 1954 version of the Inferno from which Rauschenberg worked, John Ciardi was the obvious first choice to script these summaries, but he turned the job down because he could not stand Rauschenberg’s work: Dickerman in Robert Rauschenberg: Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, 17. Sonnabend’s synopses were recently reprinted: Michael Sonnabend, ‘Canto Summaries for Dante’s Inferno,’ Robert Rauschenberg: Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, 94–103. 56 Feinstein, Random Order, 325; Smith, ‘Visibile Parlare’, 85–6. Both texts were reproduced in English (though there was a brief introduction to Ashton’s text in Italian, French and English) and Cage’s came first, interspersed with various reproductions of Combines; they were preceded by a third essay by an Italian art historian that stated the unimportance of symbolism in the Combines because ‘all works of art should be able to live even after their symbolic elements have worn away, even after the “death of metaphor” animating them,’ Gillo Dorfles, ‘Rauschenberg, or Obsolescence Defeated,’ Metro, no. 2, May 1961, 32–5, 34 (all images including the Dante illustrations were reproduced in black and white except for Rebus). For more on Castelli’s involvement in Metro from its beginnings, the centrality of Rauschenberg to those plans and problems with the writings and images in the second issue, see the

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first half of Graham Smith, ‘Bruno Alfieri, Leo Castelli and Robert Rauschenberg: Metro and the Introduction of Rauschenberg into Italy,’ Visual Resources, vol. 33, no. 3/4, December 2017, 295–331. 57 Krčma, Rauschenberg/Dante, 19, 23, 24–6. Rauschenberg completed a second Inferno project comprising two horizontal collaged silkscreens, commissioned (probably due to the award to the artist of the Grand Prix to Best Foreign Artist at the Venice Biennale in 1964) by Life to commemorate the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth, published in the magazine on the front and back of a three-page foldout titled ‘A Modern Inferno’ on 17 December 1965: see Graham Smith, ‘Rauschenberg’s Modern Infernos for Life Magazine,’ Visual Resources, vol. 32, no. 1/2, 2016, 145–68. 58 John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’ [1961], Silence: Lectures and Writings [1961], London: Marion Boyars, 1968, 98–108, 103, 107. 59 Cage, Silence, 103. The previous year, in a letter of 21 March 1960 to his friend the critic Peter Yates, Cage wrote: ‘[a]nother thing I am grateful to you for: having led me to Wittgenstein,’ John Cage, The Selected Letters of John Cage, ed. Laura Kuhn, Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016, 218–19, 218. Around the end of that decade, he conceded in interview his very limited grasp of the philosopher’s writings: ‘I didn’t understand everything. I retained this sentence: “Something’s meaning is how you use it,”’ Cage, For the Birds, 153. ‘[T]he meaning of a word is its use in the language,’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [1953], trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986, prop. 43. 60 Cage, Silence, 99. 61 Cage, Silence, 59. 62 John Cage, ‘[Robert Rauschenberg]’ [1953], An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, New York: Da Capo, 1970, 111–12. For original publication details see Feinstein, Random Order, 92–3, 129–30 n. 9. Cage had read Breton’s text in Robert Motherwell’s groundbreaking volume The Dada Painters and Poets (1951) two years earlier where Breton quoted parts of Aragon’s ‘Manifesto of the Dada Movement,’ which had been first published on the opening page of Littérature in May 1920 as a kind of manifesto of manifestos: ‘“No more painters, no more writers, no more religions, no more royalists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more police, etc.,”’ André Breton, ‘For Dada’ [1920], The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology [1951], ed. Robert Motherwell, Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981, 199–206, 203. The longer performance in the original is even more numbing and is the exact opposite in its sentiment to Cage’s semi-imitation: see Louis Aragon, ‘Manifeste du mouvement Dada,’ Littérature, year 2, no. 13, May 1920, 1 (comparable though less extreme statements were made elsewhere for Dada by Francis Picabia, Richard Huelsenbeck and Theo van Doesburg). Later, Cage placed Motherwell’s book alongside the ones by his Zen mentor D. T. Suzuki on the reading list for the course he taught in 1958 at the New School for Social Research in New York: Amy Jo Dempsey, The Friendship of America and France: A New Internationalism, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1999, 55. One writer who discerns a ‘positive tonality’ in the White Paintings adds that they ‘have nothing of the humour of the Surrealists,’ though neither this nor any other Surrealist trait has previously been claimed for them to my knowledge: Vincent Katz, ‘A Genteel Iconoclasm,’ Tate Etc., no. 6, autumn 2006, n. p. https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/genteel-iconoclasm (accessed 15 August 2018). For a reading of the White Paintings by way of Cage’s interest in the

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theatre theory of one-time Surrealist Antonin Artaud, see Lucy Bradnock, ‘Life in the Shadows, Towards a Queer Artaud,’ Papers of Surrealism, no. 8, spring 2010, n. p. 63 Cage, Silence, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106. 64 John Cage, ‘Foreword,’ Silence, ix–xi, x. 65 Cage, Silence, x. 66 Cage, For the Birds, 112, 116. 67 John Cage, ‘Lecture on Nothing’ [1959] and ‘45’ for a Speaker’ [1954], Silence, 108–27, 109, 110; 146–93, 151, 183. For a review of the French edition of Silence (1970), more than half of which is given over in attempting to figure out what Cage means by ‘poetry,’ see Marcelin Pleynet, ‘Cage et la modernité’ (book review), La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 107, 1–15 December 1970, 3–4. 68 For the Surrealists’ take up of Brown, see Gérard Legrand, ‘De l’histoire, de la volupté et de la mort: Sept projets de thèses en l’honneur de Sigmund Freud et de Norman O. Brown,’ La Brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 5, October 1963, 7–17. Also see reference to the enthusiastic exchange over Brown by Surrealists in the United States in 1965 in Abigail Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021, 219. 69 In the late 1960s or early 1970s, Cage confessed: ‘I’ve never really appreciated Surrealist works,’ Cage, For the Birds, 221–2. He is quoted in later life as saying ‘I preferred Dada to its successor,’ that in the 1930s ‘my heart didn’t go out to Surrealism at all’ and that he ‘never liked’ Surrealism due to what he saw as its ‘involvement with psychoanalysis,’ but his remarks here and earlier divulge little knowledge of Surrealism and are usually made (as are those about Pop and conceptual art) through a negative comparison with Dada and Neo-Dada, seemingly motivated chiefly by his closeness to and admiration for Duchamp, Johns and Rauschenberg: Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage [1987], New York and London: Routledge, 2003, 13, 179, 180. His interest in Artaud since his days teaching at Black Mountain College from 1948 to 1953 is well known and was often stated: Cage, For the Birds, 52, 165, 166. 70 Cage, Silence, 159. 71 André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ [1924], Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972, 1–47, 26. As it was put by one art historian, ‘relationships between Rauschenberg’s compositions and the horrors of the Inferno are sweeping and metaphorical rather than literal,’ Smith, ‘Rauschenberg’s Modern Infernos for Life Magazine,’ 145. 72 Dore Ashton, ‘The Collaboration Wheel: A Comment on Robert Rauschenberg’s Comment on Dante,’ Arts & Architecture, vol. 80, no. 12, December 1963, 10–11 and 37, 10. 73 For Ashton’s enthusiastic comments about the White Paintings and Black Paintings on show at the joint event with Twombly at the Stable Gallery in 1953, see Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, 82. Lippard’s recollection of her vacillation in the 1960s between the spare art of the time and ‘the messy and metaphorical – Dada and Surrealism’ is quoted in Newman, Challenging Art, 258. 74 Dore Ashton, ‘Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno,’ Metro, no. 2, May 1961, 52–61, 53. 75 Nearly every block of text contains one of more of these words; for instance: like Dante, Ashton writes, Rauschenberg ‘is an artist, intent on making his own world via

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his symbols,’ ‘R may have meant this little exposed figure to symbolize all humanity. . . . Is he the medieval symbol of Everyman?’ ‘[t]he arrow illustrates Dante’s simile of a boat moving swiftly as an arrow,’ ‘[a]ll the roaring and buzzing and trembling and wailing matched graphically by R as it was matched metaphorically by Dante,’ colour is ‘symbolic,’ ‘[h]andless clocks, eyes and ears are familiar symbols in 20th-century art,’ Ashton, ‘Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno,’ 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61. Her account of her intimate partnership with Rauschenberg on the extended texts for the illustrations places emphasis on Dada, but then states: ‘[i]t is this tributary from Dadaism up through Surrealism that feeds Rauschenberg’s imagination and makes him the ideal Dante illustrator,’ adding, ‘I conceived [the Inferno] to be a symbolic expression of an introspective journey which could never be plotted. This is exactly how Rauschenberg read the poem,’ which is about as far from the ‘factist’ Rauschenberg as can be imagined: Ashton, ‘The Collaboration Wheel,’ 10. The references to allusion and its poetic terms increase in the extended texts, of course, where we read in relation to Canto XXVII: ‘R. has scattered emblems, symbols, signs, letters, and symbolic colours all over,’ Ashton in Robert Rauschenberg, Drawings for Dante’s Inferno, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1964, 26. Elsewhere, we are told in the commentary for Canto VIII: ‘[t]hroughout the illustrations R., in the authentic Romantic tradition, identifies massive industry with evil dehumanization. His protest against the machine, registered ironically, is true to the tradition born in the nineteenth century and sustained in successive twentieth-century art movements, particularly Dada and Surrealism,’ then in the one for Canto XXI: ‘[h]is masters were the Dadas. . . . Above all there was Marcel Duchamp, who is to R. as Ser Brunetto Latini was to Dante . . . Dante was something of a Dada . . . .,’ and finally of Canto XXIII, less to Rauschenberg’s taste: ‘[n]ote on R’s contemporaneity: the handless clock, a familiar twentiethcentury symbol. Surrealism. Another parentage, another link, another of the many cross references R. provides,’ Ashton in Rauschenberg, Drawings for Dante’s Inferno, 11, 21, 23. 76 Dore Ashton, ‘Art: Derivation of Dada’ (exhibition review), New York Times, 30 March 1960, 42. His conscious grasp of allegory might even predate the period of the Dante illustrations and Allegory, since Rauschenberg looked back upon some of the works shown at his first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons, such as the painting Garden of Eden (1950–1), as ‘allegorical cartoons,’ quoted in Gruen, ‘Robert Rauschenberg: An Audience of One,’ 46. 77 Roman Jakobson, Fundamentals of Language, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1956, 92. 78 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology [1964], trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, London: Jonathan Cape, 1967, 60. Jakobson placed Cubism at the metonymic pole, ‘where the object is transformed into a set of synecdoches,’ Jakobson, Fundamentals of Language, 92. However, Barthes argued that ‘neither type implies the exclusive use of one of the two models,’ Elements of Semiology, 60. In this book I will be concerned mainly with the metaphorical drift of the imagination in the presence of Rauschenberg’s imagery as a justification for the Surrealists’ interest in his work, but a reading of René Magritte’s painting setting out from Jakobson by taking in both metaphor and metonymy, while conceding that the ‘Surrealists practiced almost limitless and arbitrary use of the metaphor and of manipulated similarities,’ has been carried out by Randa Dubnick, ‘Metaphor and Metonymy in the Paintings of

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René Magritte,’ Contemporary Literature, vol. 21, no. 3 (‘Art and Literature’), summer 1980, 407–19, 409. One monographer compares Rauschenberg’s work to Cubism rather than Surrealism to argue that he ‘used collage as a vehicle for content and as a metaphor for consciousness,’ Feinstein, Random Order, 9. 79 Owens, ‘Earthwords,’ 129–30. 80 André Breton, ‘Surrealist Situation of the Object: Situation of the Surrealist Object’ [1935], Manifestoes, 255–78, 268. 81 André Breton, Surrealism and Painting [1965], trans. Simon Watson Taylor, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, 46, 64, 154, 290, 389 (translations modified). Also see the three important statements of the post-war period insisting upon and expanding the principal role of analogy and metaphor in ‘poetic intuition’ in art, play and poetry, but only as they function in a (poetic) life: André Breton, ‘Ascendant Sign’ [1948], Free Rein, trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, 104–7; André Breton, ‘L’un dans l’autre,’ Médium: Communication surréaliste, no. 2, February 1954, 17–20, 17; André Breton, ‘On Surrealism in Its Living Works’ [1955], Manifestoes, 295–304, 303, 304. 82 Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 401. 83 Dore Ashton quoted in Various, ‘A Symposium on Pop Art’ [1963], Steven Henry Madoff (ed.), Pop Art: A Critical History, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997, 65–81, 69–73, 69. Alloway had argued in Architectural Design two years earlier that ‘the mystery of objects’ was a theme explored by both Surrealism and ‘junk culture,’ but whereas Surrealist objects were ‘esoteric fetishes,’ ‘junk culture’ was involved in ‘the comedy of waste,’ Lawrence Alloway, ‘Junk Culture’ [1961], Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic, ed. Richard Kalina, London and New York: Routledge, 2006, 77–80, 80. 84 Ashton quoted in Madoff (ed.), Pop Art, 69; ‘métaphore d’un ordre idéal,’ Alloway in Paris: Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Jim Dine, 1963, n. p. At some point between giving her paper at the symposium in December 1962 and publishing it in Arts Magazine in April 1963, Ashton incorporated a brief, substantiating paragraph based on her reading of Alloway’s untitled text, which views Dine’s tableaux as though they were unadorned readymades, asserting: ‘[c]e que nous rencontrons, c’est l’objet aussi littéralement et catégoriquement que possible,’ yet this was a literalism with consequences: ‘[t]andis que les surréalistes recherchent le mystère, Dine le montre tranquillement comme inéluctable,’ concluding ‘[c]es objets ont le mystère des descriptions détaillées. Mais contrairement à l’exactitude des oeuvres surréalistes dans lesquelles les conventions des vieux maîtres ont été parodiées, le style de Dine est fait d’abordement immédiat et de franchise physique,’ Alloway in Jim Dine, n. p. (Ernst was Alloway’s point of contrast). Dine’s appeal to the Surrealists has rarely been observed – two other untitled texts out of four in total in the catalogue were by former Surrealists: the one by Jouffroy attempted to distinguish Dine from Magritte and the Surrealists, the other by Nicolas Calas claimed some common ground between Dine and Magritte; even Breton got in on the act after viewing the Sonnabend show, predictably tilting Dine’s work towards the wing of Dada he favoured in a note dated 8 April 1963 that he did not publish: ‘[l]’oeuvre de Jim Dine présente l’intérêt d’une démarche extrême, qui déborde de loin le cadre esthétique. Elle me paraît l’ultime aboutissement de celles de Duchamp, de Picabia, de Man Ray. L’objet, à commencer par le plus utilitaire, n’a jamais été plus spectaculairement,

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plus significativement pris à partie,’ André Breton, ‘[Sur Jim Dine],’ [1963], Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4, Paris: Gallimard, 2008, 1172. None of this was known to Marcel Broodthaers, ‘Gare au défi: Pop Art, Jim Dine, and the Influence of René Magritte’ [1963], trans. Paul Schmidt, October, no. 42 (‘Marcel Broodthaeers: Writings, Interviews, Photographs’), autumn 1987, 32–4. 85 Ashton quoted in Madoff (ed.), Pop Art, 70. 86 Ashton quoted in Madoff (ed.), Pop Art, 70. 87 Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 401–2; Ashton quoted in Madoff (ed.), Pop Art, 70 (at the ellipsis, Breton had left out from Ashton’s text: ‘[o]bjects have always been no more than cues to the vagabond imagination’). 88 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 1 (‘Special Issue on Metaphor’), autumn 1978, 143–59, 149. 89 Ashton quoted in Madoff (ed.), Pop Art, 70. 90 Ashton quoted in Madoff (ed.), Pop Art, 70. 91 Ashton quoted in Madoff (ed.), Pop Art, 71. Feinstein takes the intervention by Ashton to be directed at Rauschenberg as ‘an impersonal factualist,’ adding ‘[h]er view of Rauschenberg’s art changed yearly,’ but Ashton’s remarks were clearly aimed at Cage’s take on the oeuvre, and if Feinstein’s second remark has a ring of truth it is because Ashton evaluated the work as it came in (the illustrations for Dante’s Inferno were, for her, his highest achievement) and did not bow to the sycophancy that Rauschenberg already attracted and has since become the norm, especially in the exhibition catalogues devoted to him: Feinstein, Random Order, 322, 324. ­92 Cage, Silence, 103; Smith, ‘Visibile Parlare,’ 89; Crow, Long March of Pop, 77. 93 Krauss in Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, 107; Julia Blaut, ‘Transfer-Drawings, Prints, and Silkscreened Paintings, 1958–1970,’ Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, 156; Joseph, Random Order, 177; Joanne Morra, ‘Rauschenberg’s Skin: Autobiography, Indexicality, Auto-Eroticism,’ New Formations, no. 46 (‘The Prosthetic Aesthetic’), spring 2002, 48–63, 55; Joanne Morra, ‘Drawing Machine: Working through the Materiality of Rauschenberg’s Dante and Derrida’s Freud,’ The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2006, 265–87, 267, 270, 273, 278, 279. Blaut was long anticipated by the following in Ashton: ‘[s]ince noise is paramount in most cantos, [Rauschenberg] establishes at the very beginning a thickly scribbled rain of pencilled lines as noise equivalent. For smells he has had to manoeuvre a bit, using among other images a stinking fish to match Dante’s innumerable descriptions of vile stenches,’ Ashton, ‘The Collaboration Wheel,’ 11. For a more recent analogy with television, see Lewis Kachur, ‘Five Rauschenberg Transfer Drawings and Their Times,’ Robert Rauschenberg: Transfer Drawings from the 1950s and 1960s, 6–17, 8. 94 Feinstein, Random Order, 128. 95 Feinstein, Random Order, 135 n. 37. 96 Dore Ashton, ‘History Printer,’ Artforum, vol. 36, no. 1, September 1997, 99 and 152, 99. Ashton was targeting the Edenic language advanced by Rauschenberg to promote the White Paintings – ‘presented with the innocence of a virgin,’ he wrote, ‘[d]ealing with the suspense, excitement, and body of an organic silence, the restriction and freedom of absence, the plastic fullness of nothing, the point a circle begins and ends. . . . It is completely irrelevant that I am making them – Today is their creater [sic]’ – in the year he encountered Cage, which aligned well

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with Meyer’s blank slate rhetoric early the following decade: letter to Betty Parsons of October 1951 on Black Mountain College writing paper quoted by Lawrence Alloway, ‘Rauschenberg’s Development,’ Washington: National Collection of Fine Arts, Robert Rauschenberg, 1976, 3–23, 3 The artist never consciously deviated from that reading, remarking of the White Paintings in 1999: ‘they don’t have any history,’ Rauschenberg quoted in Robert Rauschenberg, video interview, SFMOMA Research Library and Archives, 16.

Chapter 2 1

The main reference work on Duchamp’s importance to artists from the 1950s remains Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 2 ‘forte assimilation au surréalisme,’ Clémence Bigel, Le Pop’Art à Paris: Une histoire de la réception critique des avant-gardes américaines entre 1959 et 1978, vol. 1, unpublished MA thesis, Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, 2013, 51, 76, 84, 90, 194. 3 Important in this respect was Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, London and Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001. I note other contributions below to the scholarship on Duchamp’s role in the creation of Surrealist exhibitions. 4 Bigel, Le Pop’Art à Paris, 200, 201. 5 Robert Rosenblum, ‘Castelli Group,’ Arts, vol. 31, no. 8, May 1957, 53; Susan Hapgood, ‘Neo-Dada,’ Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958–62, ed. Susan Hapgood, New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1994, 11–65, 58 n. 1. 6 ‘Jasper Johns . . . is the newest member of a movement among young American artists to turn to a sort of neo-Dada – pyrotechnic or lyric, earnest but sly, unaggressive ideologically but covered with aesthetic spikes. Johns’s first one-man show . . . places him with such better-known colleagues as Rauschenberg, [Cy] Twombly, [Allan] Kaprow and Ray Johnson,’ Anonymous, ‘Cover,’ Art News, vol. 56, no. 9, January 1958, 5. 7 For ‘Neo-Dada’ as a ‘putdown,’ see Catherine Craft, An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012, 11, 235 n. 44. 8 Hapgood (ed.), Neo-Dada, 11–12; Craft, Audience of Artists, 10. Briefly, the main events included Robert Motherwell’s long-awaited book The Dada Painters and Poets of 1951 and Robert Lebel’s 1959 monograph Marcel Duchamp (both of which Duchamp helped with) alongside the publication of the collected writings Marchand du sel (1958), the important 1950 exhibition Duchamp advised on, Challenge and Defy, held at the Sidney Janis Gallery, the 1952 Duchamp siblings’ exhibition at the Rose Fried Gallery that Duchamp helped promote, Duchamp Frères & Sœur: Oeuvres d’Art (which sparked the much-discussed, reputation-enhancing Life article by Winthrop Sargeant, ‘Dada’s Daddy,’ Life, vol. 23, no. 17, 28 April 1952, 100–11), the 1953 exhibition Dada, 1916–1923, also held at the Sidney Janis Gallery, which Duchamp conceived and curated, and the four Schwitters retrospectives that took place at the Sidney Janis Gallery from 1952 to 1962.

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Dorothy Gees Seckler, ‘The Artist Speaks: Robert Rauschenberg,’ Art in America, vol. 54, no. 1, May–June 1966, 73–84, 74. 10 Annie Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, 134–6, 144–51. 11 Bigel, Le Pop’Art à Paris, 35, 74. Hapgood mistakenly has as first use the Art International review-essay I discuss in my seventh chapter by Françoise Choay, ‘Dada, Néo-Dada, et Rauschenberg,’ Art International, vol. 5, no. 8, 20 October 1961, 82–4 and 88; Hapgood (ed.), Neo-Dada, 58 n. 1. 12 Michel Ragon, ‘L’Art actuel aux Etats-Unis’/‘Art Today in the United States,’ Cimaise, series 6, no. 3, January–February–March 1959, 6–35; and for the four-year stay, see the positive review of Rauschenberg’s first solo show in France at the galerie Daniel Cordier: Michel Ragon, ‘L’avant-garde’ (exhibition reviews), Arts, no. 821, 10–16 May 1961, 7. 13 Ragon, ‘L’Art actuel’/‘Art Today,’ 28, 29. 14 In that year, the French Surrealists gently corrected their young US counterparts Franklin Rosemont and Lawrence ­DeCoster, who were planning to establish Surrealist activity in Chicago, by remedying their nostalgia for Dada and their false impression that Johns was a revolutionary because he painted targets and flags in odd colours: Claude Tarnaud, ‘Correspondance: D’une lettre de Claude Tarnaud à Robert Benayoun,’ La Brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 5, October 1963, 68. See Penelope Rosemont, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields, San Francisco: City Lights, 2019, 184; Abigail Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021, 191–2. Also see the accusation that the ‘beaux étendards’ of Johns were the initiators of the ‘grande déclaration de chauvinisme américain,’ Robert Benayoun, ‘Où rien n’arrive,’ La Brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 6, June 1964, 12–21, 20. 15 Both Rauschenberg and Johns are mistakenly thought to have made their Parisian debut at EROS by Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement [1997], trans. Alison Anderson, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, 590; and in an otherwise-valuable account of the organization of the exhibition through documentation made available quite recently: Marie Bonnet, ‘Anti-Reality! Marcel Duchamp, André Breton et la VIIIe Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme, Paris, Galerie Daniel Cordier, 1959,’ Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, no. 87, spring 2004, 97–115, 98. The error was repeated in a later interview with the Surrealist Alain Joubert who put the presence of Bed at EROS down to the ‘trans-esthétisme’ du surréalisme,’ Claire Boustani, ‘Entretien avec Alain Joubert’ [2009], Fabrice Flahutez and Thierry Dufrêne (eds), Art et mythe, Nanterre: Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2021, 149-59 (accessed online at https://books.openedition.org/ pupo/2007?lang=en, 23 August 2022). 16 Jean-Paul Ameline, ‘Comment les Combines de Rauschenberg ont conquis l’Europe: essai d’histoire culturelle (1958–1964),’ Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, 2006, 287–306, 289, 290. 17 See the teaser advertising ‘un rendez-vous exceptionnel’ from December to January 1960 (the show would be extended) under the names of Marcel Duchamp and André Breton: BIEF: Jonction surréaliste, no. 8, 15 July 1959, n. p. 18 See Daniel Cordier, 8 ans d’agitation, Paris: Daniel Cordier, 1964, n. p.; Viviane Tarenne, ‘Histoire de la Galerie,’ Donations Daniel Cordier, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989, 491–523. Also see Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968, London: Thames & Hudson, 2005, 152. 9

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­19 André Breton, ‘Avis: Aux exposants, aux visiteurs,’ L’Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme 1959–1960, ed. André Breton, Paris: Galerie Daniel Cordier, 1959, 5–8, 5–6. 20 Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 154; Tarenne in Donations Daniel Cordier, 506–9. See Leo Castelli, Daniel Cordier, Ileana Sonnabend, ‘Le rôle des galeries,’ Paris: Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris-New York, 1977, 173–9. Sales receipts and letters dating from July 1958 demonstrate a budding professional and personal relationship between Cordier and Castelli, including enquiries from Cordier about prices of the works by Rauschenberg shown at the Paris Biennale: correspondence with galerie Daniel Cordier, Leo Castelli Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, box 10, folder 40. 21 Steven Harris, ‘EROS, C’est la Vie,’ Art History, vol. 43, no. 3, June 2020, 564-87, 574. I would like to thank the author for showing me an unpublished version of this essay when this book was in its very early stages in 2012; I would also like to apologise to him for mistakenly omitting mention of his work in my essay on this material: ‘“To Be a Painter Means to Oppose”: Exhibiting and Politicizing Robert Rauschenberg, 1959-65,’ Elliott H. King and Abigail Susik (eds.), Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance, University Park PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022, 92–113. 22 Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, London: Pimlico, 1998, 411; Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996, 164. Duchamp’s visit happened soon after the opening of Art and the Found Object, which took place from 12 January till 6 February 1959 at the Time-Life Reception Center in New York, displaying work by Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Schwitters and others, as well as Bed by Rauschenberg who recalled: ‘The meeting with Duchamp was very high spirited. He was obviously and openly interested in our work,’ quoted in Lewis Kachur, ‘Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain: Duchamp’s Exhibition Identity,’ Anne Collins Goodyear and James W. McManus (eds.), AKA Marcel Duchamp: Meditations on the Identities of an Artist, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2014, 142–59, 150. 23 ‘un peu accidentelle,’ José Pierre, André Breton et la peinture, Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1987, 311 n. 177. ‘Nous désirerions une oeuvre de caractère érotique (c’est Marcel Duchamp qui nous a conseillé de vous inviter . . ., ’ José Pierre, undated letter on Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme paper to Jasper Johns via Leo Castelli, correspondence with galerie Daniel Cordier, Leo Castelli Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, box 10, folder 40. ­24 Harris, ‘EROS, C’est la Vie,’ 574. ­25 Nicolas Calas, ‘ContiNuance,’ Art News, vol. 57, no. 10, February 1959, 36–9 (this was based on a lecture delivered at The Club in New York a short time earlier according to Roni Feinstein, Random Order: The First Fifteen Years of Robert Rauschenberg’s Art, 1949–1964, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1990, 315–16). 26 Nicolas Calas, ‘Heirs U.S.A.’ [1959], Art in the Age of Risk and Other Essays, New York: E. F. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968, 16–25, 22. 27 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 22–3. 28 See Lena Hoff, Nicolas Calas and the Challenge of Surrealism, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2014, 263–4. 29 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 25.

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30 On Target with Four Faces and Target with Plaster Casts, Calas’s brevity and gauche choice of vocabulary characteristically threaten to upend a promising theoretical proposition: ‘oneness has been killed, whether by the repetition of that face or by the subdivision of that body,’ Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 23. Paradoxically, Steinberg credited the promise of the proposition by abbreviating it even further: ‘Nicolas Calas once wrote: “Oneness is killed either by repetition or by fragmentation,”’ Leo Steinberg, ‘Jasper John: The First Seven Years of His Art’ [1962, 1963], Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, 17–54, 35. 31 Harris, ‘EROS, C’est la Vie,’ 574; ‘“le lit” sur les conseils de Marcel Duchamp,’ José Pierre, undated letter on Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme paper to Robert Rauschenberg via Leo Castelli, correspondence with galerie Daniel Cordier, Leo Castelli Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, box 10, folder 40. 32 Harris, ‘EROS, C’est la Vie,’ 574; Leo Castelli, letter of 10 September 1959 to José Pierre, correspondence with galerie Daniel Cordier, Leo Castelli Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, box 10, folder 40. A letter from Castelli a few weeks later informed Cordier that the two works were about to be dispatched and asked that Cordier insure Bed for $3000; this note seems to have gone astray because a request followed from Cordier’s assistant for insurance details for both Bed and Target with Plaster Casts to which Castelli responded (during the run of EROS) with an insurance valuation of $4000 each (letters of the following year sent from Castelli during the planning of Rauschenberg’s solo show at Cordier’s gallery reveal that insurance valuations for Combines ranged from $1400 to $10000 and prices from $100 to $600): Leo Castelli, letters of 17 October and 23 December 1959, and 21 March, 22 March and April 1961 to Daniel Cordier, correspondence with galerie Daniel Cordier, Leo Castelli Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, box 10, folder 40. 33 Harris, ‘EROS, C’est la Vie,’ 574. 34 Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1980, 137; also see James Leggio, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed and the Symbolism of the Body,’ Essays on Assemblage, New York: Museum of Modern Art, Studies in Modern Art, no. 2, 1992, 79–117, 80. 35 Emily Genauer, ‘Wrong US Art Has Spoleto in a Dither,’ New York Herald Tribune, 15 June 1958, 14–15, 14. 36 Genauer, ‘Wrong US Art Has Spoleto in a Dither,’ 14–15. 37 Hans Haacke, ‘Lessons Learned,’ Tate Papers, no. 12, autumn 2009, n. p.: https:// www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/12/lessons-learned (accessed 19 October 2018). 38 For Michael White’s account of Haftmann’s role in the origin of Dada: Kunst und Antikunst, Richter’s quotation of the very sympathetic assessment of Dada by Haftmann from the latter’s Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert (1954) and Haftmann’s postscript to Richter’s book, see Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art [1965], London: Thames & Hudson, 2016, vi–xi, 81–2, 215–22. By the time of the expanded version of his book in 1965, Haftmann had decided that Rauschenberg had been, since the second half of the 1950s, the most influential artist of his day: Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century: An Analysis of the Artists and Their Work, vol. 1 [1965], trans. Ralph Mannheim, New York and Washington: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967, 376.

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39 Haacke, ‘Lessons Learned,’ n. p. In another version of events, the great work is said to have remained in its crate in Kassel: Catherine Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Works, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015, 139. 40 For the most recent re-telling in this context, see Harris, ‘EROS, C’est la Vie,’ 574; earlier recorded by Tomkins, Off the Wall, 143–4; Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns, London: Reaktion Books, 1994, 49; Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005, 136–7, 144–5; and Varnedoe, Jasper Johns, 128. For brief exhibition histories of both up to their inclusion in the Surrealist exhibitions, see Mary Beth Carosello, ‘Inventory and Exhibition History of Combines,’ Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, 288–308, 290; Joan Young with Susan Davidson, ‘Chronology,’ Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997, 550–9; Lilian Tone, ‘Chronology,’ Varnedoe, Jasper Johns, 118–396, 124–69. The second but not the first of these places Odalisk at EROS, too, however, so far as I know, there is no documentary evidence to support this claim: Young with Davidson in Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, 558. 41 Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle, 130. 42 The illusion due to the low ceiling is equally evident in less well-known installation photographs that are free of distortion, such as the colour one situated across from the title page of José Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ L’Oeil, no. 172, April 1969, 42–50; and the black and white one in Robert Benayoun, Le Rire des surréalistes, Paris: La Bougie du Sapeur, 1988, 19. Calas called Bed ‘framed’ in his text published in February 1959 and it was by the time it was photographed hung at EROS, but it is not in its catalogue reproduction for that event, which was sent by Castelli, nor in early photographs taken in 1958 in Rauschenberg’s studio around the beginning of its display history, and to my knowledge it is not currently known exactly when it was framed: Breton (ed.), L’Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme 1959–1960, 18. The same photograph of the unframed Bed, a stock image from Castelli who still owned it, was reproduced with the famous text by John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work,’ Metro, no. 2, May 1961, 36–50, 47. For a previously unremarked, accidental contrast between Bed reproduced in colour framed and in black and white with sagging pillow apparently unframed, see Washington: National Collection of Fine Arts, Robert Rauschenberg, 1976, 9, 83. 43 Leo Steinberg, ‘Other Criteria’ [1968, 1972], Other Criteria, 55–91. For a discussion of this part of the EROS layout as a precedent for Duchamp’s Étant donnés (1946–66), see Michael R. Taylor, ‘Eros Triumphant,’ Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, ed. Jennifer Mundy, London: Tate Modern, 2008, 157–75. 44 In a detailed discussion of the show, one art historian has argued for a tactile theme in the room, which also showed a rarely noticed, now-lost work by Enrico Baj: Harris, ‘EROS, C’est la Vie,’ 578. 45 It is worth pointing out that the catalogue for EROS contains Rauschenberg’s Bed and Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts each reproduced full page (only a handful of other works were shown in that way, including Duchamp’s With My Tongue in My Cheek of 1959), bookending the essay on Charles Fourier by Simone Debout, ‘La plus belle des passions,’ Breton (ed.), L’Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme 1959–1960, 19–25. 46 In a letter to the publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert of 23 June 1959, perhaps prompted by the confirmation around that time of the staging of EROS, Breton lamented

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49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57

Notes the demise of the journal Le Surréalisme, même, which had been published by the financially stricken Pauvert, by protesting (presciently, but perhaps with some exaggeration) that Surrealism ‘is once again gaining great newsworthiness and with new sensational contributions assuring it resounding publicity,’ Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Sade’s Publisher: A Memoir [2004], Paris: Paris Writers Press, 2016, 233. William Rubin, ‘Young American Painters,’ Art International, vol. 4, no. 1, January 1960, 25–31, 26. Rubin continued: ‘[t]he strangeness of subject in Johns is not like that of the Surrealists. His flags and targets are not familiar objects in an unfamiliar context (à la Lautréamont), but objects deprived of context. We do not “associate” to them, but respond to their enigma. . . . As far as I know, no one has pointed out that all Johns’s favourite subjects share an emblematic “sign” character,’ Rubin, ‘Young American Painters,’ 26–7 (as just seen, Calas had pointed out Johns’s signs-without-significance in ‘ContiNuance’ in Art News a year earlier; Rubin’s disengagement of Rauschenberg and Johns from Surrealism is made to sound more peremptory by his subsequent denial in the same article of any connection between their work and René Magritte’s). Myers was then the director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery; his friendship with Rauschenberg was confirmed in an author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15 December 2020. Accounts vary about Myers’s actual job description at View: see John Bernard Myers, ‘Surrealism and New York Painting 1940–1948: A Reminiscence,’ Artforum, vol. 15, no. 8, April 1977, 55–7, 56; Charles Henri Ford (ed.), View: Parade of the Avant-Garde, 1940–1947, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991, xv. John Bernard Myers, ‘The Impact of Surrealism on the New York School,’ Evergreen Review, vol. 4, no. 12, March–April 1960, 75–85, 75, 77. See Steinberg, Other Criteria, 24 (this quotation is incorrectly attributed to Steinberg himself by Sandra Zalman, Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism, Farnham and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2015, 92). Myers, ‘The Impact of Surrealism on the New York School,’ 78. Myers, ‘The Impact of Surrealism on the New York School,’ 83. André Breton, ‘Ascendant Sign’ [1948], Free Rein, trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, 104–7, 106 (translation modified). See the comparable assessment of the following year, probably steered by Castelli, arguing that New York artists are ‘poetic and spontaneous to the limits of “folk art” or even on the threshold of symbolism,’ and that ‘Jasper Johns, for example, points out a number of surrealistic allusions under the symbols of modern civilization,’ redeeming ‘the banal and common side of the symbols themselves,’ reappraising ‘the ugly (the Surrealists had worked in quite another direction many years ago),’ while Johns and Rauschenberg are said to work ‘in the intermediate zone between “folk art” and Surrealism’ (along with the less likely Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Ray Parker): A. [Bruno Alfieri], ‘Chamberlain’s Automobiles,’ Metro, no. 2, 90–1, 90, 91. Marcel Jean, The History of Surrealist Painting [1959], trans. Simon Watson Taylor, New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1960, 344. The apparently innocent coincidence of the publication of Histoire de la Peinture Surréaliste with the opening of EROS was noted in the review of Jean’s book by José Pierre, ‘Miroirs voilés,’ BIEF: Jonction surréaliste, no. 10–11, 15 February 1960, n. p. Susan L. Power, ‘Surrealist Intrusion and Disenchantment on Madison Avenue, 1960,’ Julia Drost, Fabrice Flahutez, Anne Helmreich and Martin Schieder (eds.), Networking Surrealism in the USA: Agents, Artists, and the Market, Heidelberg: Arthistoricum.net, 2019, 428–47, 432, 435. This is an indispensable resource for

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detail of the origins and display of Surrealist Intrusion; for an interpretation, see in the same volume: Lewis Kachur, ‘D’Arcy Galleries and New York Late Surrealism: Duchamp, Johns, Rauschenberg,’ Drost, Flahutez, Helmreich and Schieder (eds.), Networking Surrealism in the USA, 448–61. Bonnefoy’s introductory letter to Breton requesting advice on which established and younger European Surrealist artists he might show (after more than ten years of specializing in tribal and preColumbian artefacts) is dated 30 January 1960: see https://www.andrebreton.fr/ en/work/56600100241310 (accessed 3 September 2020). Jean-Jacques Lebel had advised Bonnefoy on contemporary Surrealist artists he might show even before Bonnefoy’s correspondence with Breton that led to the conception of Surrealist Intrusion, see the letters of 12 and 25 February 1960: https://www.andrebreton.fr/en/ work/56600100241310 (accessed 3 September 2020) and Power, ‘Surrealist Intrusion and Disenchantment on Madison Avenue, 1960,’ Drost, Flahutez, Helmreich and Schieder (eds.), Networking Surrealism in the USA, 433, 433–4 n. 18. 58 See the brief appreciation by Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Öyvind Fahlström’ [1961], Art and Literature, no. 3, autumn–winter 1964, 219. 59 Marcel Duchamp, Affectt Marcel._ The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk, trans. Jill Taylor, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000, 371; Kachur in Goodyear and McManus (eds.), AKA Marcel Duchamp, 151. For a full list of these bespoke additions by various Surrealists to the display of works, which seem to have been provided to compensate for the unspectacular staging by comparison with previous Surrealists exhibitions due to the conventional gallery dimensions and Bonnefoy’s reluctance to come up with the money to make it happen (unfortunately ruling out Duchamp’s idea of a thick foam rubber mat throughout meant to encourage visitors to jump up and down in front of the exhibits), see Power in Drost, Flahutez, Helmreich and Schieder (eds.), Networking Surrealism in the USA, 441, 442, 442–3 n. 49. 60 For a remarkable, comprehensive account of the staging and Dalinian outcome of Surrealist Intrusion, along with an eye-witness report of the clumsy and frankly egotistical Duchamp who appeared in the course of the organization of this event and who should be better known to art historians, see Édouard Jaguer, ‘À propos d’un écart absolu de Marcel Duchamp (et de l’exposition internationale du surréalisme de New York, 1960–1),’ Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, no. 5 (‘Marcel Duchamp & Salvador Dalí’), 2003, 23–47. 61 R. B. [Robert Benayoun], ‘Lit,’ Breton (ed.), L’Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme, 119–42, 131. Also see the section given over to the dialectical image of the train-bed, an oneiric modification of the wagon-lit, beginning with the Rousselian image: ‘[t]he bed hurtles along on its rails of blue honey,’ in André Breton, ‘Fata Morgana’ [1940], Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. and trans. Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Mary Ann Caws, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982, 131–55, 137. ­62 ‘Le Lit de Rauschenberg, dans son feu d’artifice de pollutions picturales, semble destiné à provoquer, par l’outrance même de son aspect, l’élan du spectateur hors des associations d’idées déprimantes,’ José Pierre, ‘Le Surréalisme dans la Grotte d’amour,’ Art International, vol. 4, no. 1, 1960, 57–61, 60. 63 In a conversation carried out in the context of US Surrealism in 1982, the filmmaker Pat Ferrero and the Surrealist writer and poet Nancy Joyce Peters were led to comparable metaphorical observations to these, through discussion of quilts and beds, however, not Bed: Ferrero: ‘Because of its place on the bed, the quilt is connected to all the key moments in life – birth, lovemaking, illness, marriage, death. The bed is where intimacy occurs at many different levels. It gives the quilt a special

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Notes kind of impact.’ Peters: ‘As an emblem of Eros, of the whole life cycle,’ Pat Ferrero and Nancy Joyce Peters, ‘Out of the Mainstream: Traditional Arts and Untamed Genius,’ Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination, ed. Paul Buhle and Others, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982, 59–72, 64. For discussion of the quilt of Bed, see Leggio in Essays on Assemblage, 95–100; and for further enquiry into the gendered nature of Rauschenberg’s use of fabric in this period, see Lisa Wainwright, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Fabrics: Reconstructing Domestic Space,’ Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed, London: Thames and Hudson, 1996, 193–205, 197–8. One author notes the surprising absence of commentary on the sexual connotations of both Target with Plaster Casts and Bed up to and beyond the end of the 1960s, over a decade after EROS: James Boaden, ‘Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage? The North American Reception of Dada and Surrealism,’ A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, ed. David Hopkins, Malden, MA, Oxford, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 400–15, 406. For a relevant reading of Johns that goes beyond Target with Plaster Casts, see Roberta Bernstein, ‘“Seeing a Thing Can Sometimes Trigger the Mind to Make Another Thing,”’ Varnedoe, Jasper Johns, 39–75, 47–9. Also see Kenneth E. Silver, ‘Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art,’ Russell Ferguson (ed.), Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955–62, Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992, 179–203, 188–90; Butt, Between You and Me, 136–62. For a perceptive comparison between Duchamp’s casting of body parts and Johns’s in the framework of Surrealist Intrusion, see Kachur, ‘D’Arcy Galleries and New York Late Surrealism: Duchamp, Johns, Rauschenberg,’ 459. See, for example, the by-the-way suggestion that Canyon may ‘be a commentary on homosexual desires,’ Kenneth Bendiner, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Canyon,’ Arts Magazine, vol. 56, no. 10, June 1982, 57–9, 59; the ‘anal’ (not necessarily queer) reading by Jonathan Weinberg, ‘It’s in the Can: Jasper Johns and the Anal Society,’ Genders, no. 1, March 1988, 40–56; Silver in Ferguson (ed.), Hand-Painted Pop, 179– 203; Feinstein, Random Order, 281–95; Jonathan Katz, ‘The Art of Code: Jasper Johns & Robert Rauschenberg,’ Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership, ed. Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, London: Thames and Hudson, 1993, 189–207; Laura Auricchio, ‘Lifting the Veil: Robert Rauschenberg’s ThirtyFour Drawings for Dante’s Inferno and the Commercial Homoerotic Imagery of 1950s America,’ Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel and Ellen E. Berry (eds.), The Gay ‘90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies, New York and London: New York University Press, 1997, 119–54, 144; Jonathan Katz, ‘Dismembership: Jasper Johns and the Body Politic,’ Performing the Body/Performing the Text, ed. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, 170–85; Butt, Between You and Me, 145–6, 153; Tim Folland, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Modernism: The Early Combines and Decoration,’ The Art Bulletin, vol. 92, no. 4, December 2010, 348–65. The earliest queering of Rauschenberg’s work was made with measured flagrancy in the uncompromising ‘Satyr in the Sphincter’ interpretation of Monogram by Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change, London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1981, 335. This was probably not the work of the Surrealists who had chosen Target with Plaster Casts for EROS precisely ­because of the cast of the penis and reproduced it in the catalogue with all doors open (for some reason, neither Johns’s construction nor Rauschenberg’s Bed were reproduced or even mentioned in the briefer

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catalogue of Surrealist Intrusion), but Bonnefoy’s since he had written to Breton: ‘[v]ous connaissez comme moi l’Amérique et vous savez sans doute que la notion d’érotisme en peinture doit être abordée ici avec une prudence calculée. . . . l’érotisme ne devrait pas se poser à New York et surtout dans une grande exposition rétrospective en manifeste absolu du surréalisme,’ letter of 26 February 1960: see https://www.andrebreton.fr/work/56600100241310 (accessed 20 September 2020). One interesting hypothesis has it that perhaps the concealment did take place at Surrealist Intrusion to parallel Duchamp’s then unknown work-in-progress Étant donnés (1946–66) through ‘a sensitivity to the erotic power of concealment,’ Boaden in Hopkins (ed.), Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 407. For the background to the concealment of the breast in Matta’s painting behind what looks like a baby’s bib marked ‘censored’ and apparently shaped to rhyme with the apron of the mannequin in the same display, to call attention to both what was concealed and the infantilism of the censors (the tableau had already been relocated from Brentano’s book shop due to a protest by the New York League of Women), see W. G. Rogers, Wise Men Fish Here: The Story of Frances Steloff and the Gotham Book Mart, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1965, 155–6; and Arturo Schwarz (ed.), The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, vol. 2, revised and expanded, London: Thames and Hudson, 1997, 781. 68 Annette Michelson, ‘But Eros Sulks,’ Arts, vol. 34, no. 6, March 1960, 32–9, 34–5. 69 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 90; this passage in ‘Other Criteria’ had been recycled from an earlier 1965 lecture titled ‘Rauschenberg’s Bed,’ as stated in Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg: A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture, Houston, Chicago and London: The Menil Collection and The University of Chicago Press, 2000, 73 n. 19. 70 This question put to Johns’s work acted as the ­subheading for the final section of his groundbreaking essay on the artist: Steinberg, Other Criteria, 52. Steinberg dropped the word ‘poetic’ when, much later, he recalled discussing the question with an encouraging Rauschenberg in autumn 1961 (the essay was complete by the end of that year); he recorded conversing with Rauschenberg about the Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) as early as about 1957 and lecturing on his work routinely from 1959, the same year as EROS: Steinberg, Encounters, 12, 15, 23. 71 Steinberg, Encounters, 15. 72 Steinberg, Encounters, 29. 73 Steinberg, Encounters, 15. 74 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 23. In a text originally drafted in 1967, Steinberg characterized the conservatism of the academic humanities in general, leaving Surrealists surprisingly absent from his list of those happily unencumbered by the professional habits of art history: ‘[t]he attempts to cope with more private or more freely metaphorical and evasive aspects of art become professionally suspect [in the academy]. They tend to be left to art writers, popularizers, critics, psychologists. . . . Sexuality is a case in point. A few exceptions apart, the disciplined history of art remains to this day coy and chaste,’ Leo Steinberg, ‘Objectivity and the Shrinking Self,’ Daedalus, vol. 98, no. 3 (‘The Future of the Humanities’), summer 1969, 824–36, 831. 75 Franklin Rosemont, ‘Herbert Marcuse and the Surrealist Revolution,’ Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, no. 4, 1989, 31–8, 33. For confirmation, see Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, 629; and also the remarks in Alain Joubert, Le Mouvement des surréalistes, ou le fin mot de l’histoire: mort d’un groupe – naissance d’un mythe, Paris: Maurice Nadeau, 2001, 296. While crediting Philippe Audoin with urging

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the Surrealists to explore the theme of commodification as discussed by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization, Joubert emphasised the strong collective nature of the organisation of L’Écart absolu and, unusually, the suggestion in its title that ‘le surréalisme rompait avec ses thèmes classiques et changeaient d’apparence,’ Boustani, ‘Entretien avec Alain Joubert,’ (accessed online at https://books.openedition.org/ pupo/2007?lang=en, 23 August 2022). ‘The transformation of labor into pleasure is the central idea in Fourier’s giant socialist utopia,’ Herbert Marcuse, Eros & Civilisation [1955], London: Sphere, 1969, 173. Contact between Surrealism and Marcuse was fruitful and is only now becoming fully understood: see Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, 182–7 and 210–25. Beyond the extensive exchanges between Marcuse and the Chicago group collected by Rosemont, he was admired by the Paris Surrealists: see the references to Marcuse in Gérard Legrand, ‘De l’histoire, de la volupté et de la mort: Sept projets de thèses en l’honneur de Sigmund Freud et de Norman O. Brown,’ La Brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 5, October 1963, 7–17; Jean Schuster, ‘A l’ordre de la nuit, au désordre du jour,’ L’archibras, no. 1, April 1967, 4–9, 7, 9; the short interview in the next issue: Michel Pierson and Herbert Marcuse, ‘Herbert Marcuse’ [1966], L’archibras, no. 2, October 1967, 17; the quotation by Marcuse in the important statement by The Surrealist Movement, ‘The Platform of Prague’ [1968], Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (eds. and trans.), Surrealism against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001, 58–66, 63; Herbert Marcuse, ‘Sur le surréalisme et la révolution,’ Bulletin de liaison surréaliste, no. 6, April 1973, 20–9; Jacques Abeille, Vincent Bounoure, Robert Guyon, ‘Libre échange avec Herbert Marcuse,’ Bulletin de liaison surréaliste, no. 7, December 1973, 1–23. 76 Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 180. 77 Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 181. 78 ‘Le personnage, le totem central de l’exposition était Le Consommateur, sorte d’épouvantail de près de quatre mètres de haut, aux bras écartés, fait d’un monstrueux matelas rose, parfaitement bordé, ourlé, capitonné. Une sirène d’alerte lui tenait lieu de tête. Sa gidouille abritait une machine à laver à hublot qui brassait, par intervalles, des journaux. Dans son dos s’ouvrait un Frigidaire d’où s’échappait un voile de mariée. Silbermann, qui l’avait conçu et fait construire, lui avait donné une voix: son discours était composé d’appels bredouillants de radio-taxis,’ Philippe Audoin, Les Surréalistes [1973], Paris: Édition de Seuil, 1995, 172. For an eyewitness account by a visitor to L’Écart absolu, see Penelope Rosemont, Dreams & Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, SDS & the Seven Cities of Cibola in Chicago, Paris & London. A 1960s Notebook, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2008, 59. In another version with different details, the same visitor recalls ‘the walls around it lit up with little white lights, BIP!-BIP!-BIP!,’ Rosemont, Surrealism, 23. ­79 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1995, 29. For a reading of the nearly twelve foot high colossus as a Fourierist. feminist protest, see Sandra Zalman, ‘Passionate Attraction: Fourier, Feminism, Free Love, and L’Écart absolu,’ Elliott H. King and Abigail Susik (eds.), Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022, 76–91. 80 ‘Je me souviens de l’émotion de mes amis lorsque, à l’Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme organisée chez Daniel Cordier, en 1959, Rauschenberg envoya, sur le

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conseil de Duchamp, Bed . . ., ’ José Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ L’Oeil, no. 172, April 1969, 42–50, 48. 81 Joubert, Mouvement des surréalistes, 300; Ross, Fast Cars, 53. 82 ‘The roughly ten-year period on either side of the end of the Algerian War in 1962 was perhaps the last time that French people were greeted by a resounding chorus proclaiming the “new,”’ Ross, Fast Cars, 157. 83 Favourable mention of Duchamp is made on nearly every page of the first issue of Médium: Communication surréaliste in 1953 and he crops up in every number of that journal up to its fourth and last one in January 1955. This enthusiasm for Duchamp continued in the journal that followed Médium; there was, for instance, the brief, influential interview by Jean Schuster, ‘Marcel Duchamp, vite,’ Le Surréalisme, même, no. 2, spring 1957, 143–5; and a trailer for Lebel’s book: Robert Lebel, ‘Marcel Duchamp: Liens et Ruptures, Premiers essais, le Cubisme, le Nu descendant un escalier,’ Le Surréalisme, même, no. 3, autumn 1957, 21–31. Duchamp’s tactless inclusion of the reviled Salvador Dalí’s Sistine Madonna (1958) in Surrealist Intrusion led to rare if roundabout criticism by the Surrealists in the tract We Don’t EAR It That Way (1960) and from Breton in a letter of 11 December 1960: Duchamp, Affectt Marcel, 371–2. Subsequently, Duchamp’s name is barely uttered in the Surrealists’ more substantial journal La Brèche: Action surréaliste of 1961–5, even though there was subsequent contact and correspondence with Breton: Kachur in Goodyear and McManus (eds.), AKA Marcel Duchamp, 156, 159 n. 43. For Duchamp’s typically mixed views of Breton and his more uncomplicated ones of Surrealism, see Thomas Girst, The Duchamp Dictionary, London: Thames & Hudson, 2014, 8–9, 173.

Chapter 3 Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2010, 1. 2 A letter sent from Daniel Cordier to Leo Castelli a few weeks after the conclusion of EROS records a brief meeting, then continues: ‘me réjouis fort de cette exposition Rauschenberg que nous préparons ensemble pour l’anneé prochaine,’ Daniel Cordier, letter of 6 April 1960 to Leo Castelli, correspondence with galerie Daniel Cordier, Leo Castelli Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, box 10, folder 40. The month before, Castelli and Rauschenberg had seen how impressive Bed looked at Cordier’s in the big photo spread of EROS accompanying the review by Annette Michelson, ‘But Eros Sulks,’ Arts, vol. 34, no. 6, March 1960, 32–9. 3 Ikegami, Great Migrator, 27. Amy Jo Dempsey, The Friendship of America and France: A New Internationalism, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1999, 52 n. 16. 4 Michel Ragon, ‘L’avant-garde’ (exhibition reviews), Arts, no. 821, 10–16 May 1961, 7. See The Surrealist Group, ‘Un hommage à Max Walter Svanberg’ [1961], José Pierre (ed.), Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, 1922–1969, tome 2: 1940–69, Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1982, 211–13. 5 The Surrealist Group, ‘The Revolution First and Always!’ [1925], Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (eds. and trans.), Surrealism against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001, 95–7. 1

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Charles Sowerwine, France since 1870: Culture, Society and the Making of the Republic [2001], Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 248. 7 Sowerwine, France since 1870, 248. 8 Sowerwine, France since 1870, 248. 9 Sowerwine, France since 1870, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254. 10 Sowerwine, France since 1870, 257. ­11 Sowerwine, France since 1870, 257. 12 Sowerwine, France since 1870, 257. 13 Sowerwine, France since 1870, 259. 14 The Surrealist Group, ‘Freedom Is a Vietnamese Word’ [1947], Richardson and Fijalkowski (eds. and trans.), Surrealism against the Current, 193–4, 193. The moral failure of the media gave the Surrealists their introduction: ‘Is there a war in Vietnam? One can hardly doubt it. The press in “free” France, more than ever subject to censorship, remains silent. . . . Not a word is heard about the fierce repression perpetrated there in the name of democracy,’ Richardson and Fijalkowski (eds. and trans.), Surrealism against the Current, 193. 15 For some detail, see Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014, 3–5. The close relationship between the Surrealists’ protests against colonialism in Morocco in the 1920s and Vietnam in the 1940s, and between those and the later Declaration of the 121, has been made by Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement [1997], trans. Alison Anderson, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, 463, 594, 760 n. 17. For confirmation, see Claire Boustani, ‘Entretien avec Alain Joubert’ [2009], Fabrice Flahutez and Thierry Dufrêne (eds), Art et mythe, Nanterre: Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2021, 149–59 (accessed online at https:// books.openedition.org/pupo/2007?lang=en, 23 August 2022). For a selection of the Surrealists’ declarations against colonialism including those referred to here, see Richardson and Fijalkowski (eds. and trans.), Surrealism against the Current, 180–97. 16 Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism [2002], trans. Sharon Bowman, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, 407. Roger refers only to some remarks by Louis Aragon, ‘Fragments d’une conférence,’ La Révolution surréaliste, no. 4, 15 July 1925, 23–5; his claim that ‘the United States is eradicated’ in Surrealism’s redrawing of the map of the world in 1929 does not acknowledge the relative enlargement of Alaska and survival of Hawaii, implying Roger’s misunderstanding of its ideological, cultural and political erasure of the mainland United States (France was also expunged apart from Paris): Roger, American Enemy, 407; Anonymous, ‘Le Monde au temps des surréalistes,’ Variétés (‘Le Surréalisme en 1929’), June 1929, 26–7. Roger might have added the opinion found in the defence of Charlie Chaplin (Aragon’s again), first given in English, that the United States was ‘as immense a ­reservoir of stupidity as of merchandise ever ready to overflow and particularly ready to cretinise the amorphous customers of Europe,’ The Surrealist Group, Hands Off Love, Paris: Transition, 1927, 1–2. The Surrealists had said far worse things about the French than this and were only ‘anti-American’ in the way they were ‘anti-French,’ while their admiration for Chaplin was just one strand of their enthusiasm for the culture of the United States; in the words of one Surrealist recollecting his first contact with the movement in Paris in 1947: ‘J’arrivais dans un groupe en renouveau vital, où tous les vieux discours étaient déjà sommés de se réévaluer, un Surréalisme ragaillardi 6

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par l’Amérique . . . , ’ Robert Benayoun, Le Rire des surréalistes, Paris: La Bougie du Sapeur, 1988, 18. 17 ‘Je hais autant que quiconque et qu’eux-mêmes peuvent le haïr la manière dont les USA se comportent avec mes amis les Noirs et plus encore, si possible, la manière dont ils se sont comportés avec mes amis les Indiens. J’ai horreur de l’hypocrisie sexuelle qui règne aux USA et de la licence honteuse d’elle-même qui s’ensuit. . . . Les USA, rien ne m’est plus contraire que leur pragmatisme de pacotille, rien ne m’écoeure intellectuellement comme leur trouvaille des Digests, rien ne me révolte tant que leur complexe de supériorité. J’abomine leur mainmise sous couvert d’argent sur l’Amérique centrale, sur l’Amérique du Sud. Les prenant à leur stade actuel et bien obligé de constater qu’ils étendent à l’Ancien Continent leur dessein impérialiste, je nie frénétiquement que la stupidité de Coca-Cola de ses dirigeants et de ses banquiers puisse avoir raison de l’Europe . . ., ’ André Breton, ‘[Allocution au meeting du 30 Avril 1949],’ Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, Paris: Gallimard, 1999, 1107–13, 1111–12. 18 David Ellwood, ‘“You Too Can Be Like Us”: Selling the Marshall Plan,’ History Today, vol. 48, no. 10, October 1998, 33–9, 33, 37; Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993, 31. 19 For a concise history of military and other interference by the United States globally since 1945, see the classic exposé by William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only ­Superpower [2001], London: Zed Books, 2014, 162–220. 20 Kuisel, Seducing the French, 20. 21 For an illustration of the Surrealists’ support for the Cuban Revolution (at least until 1968), see The Surrealist Group, ‘The Example of Cuba and the Revolution’ [1964], Richardson and Fijalkowski (eds. and trans.), Surrealism against the Current, 126–8. 22 Max Kozloff, ‘American Painting during the Cold War,’ Artforum, vol. 11, no. 9, May 1973, 43–54, 47. Also see the article that followed it detailing the US funding of culture for propaganda purposes after the Second World War: Eva Cockroft, ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,’ Artforum, vol. 12, no. 10, June 1974, 39–41. 23 Kuisel, Seducing the French, 38. 24 Kuisel, Seducing the French, 104–5. 25 Sowerwine, France since 1870, 262. 26 Kuisel, Seducing the French, 150. 27 Sowerwine, France since 1870, 266. 28 For their tract, see The Surrealist Group, ‘Hungary, Rising Sun’ [1956], Richardson and Fijalkowski (eds. and trans.), Surrealism against the Current, 125–6. 29 See, for instance, the report of Breton’s concerns about an American defeat in the Korean War in Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, revised and updated, Boston: Black Widow Press, 2009, 514. 30 See Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 [1977], New York: NYRB, 2006, 98. 31 ‘La mobilisation des surréalistes en faveur des insurgés algériens a été rapide, contrairement aux autres intellectuels,’ Carole Reynaud Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes 1919–1969 [2001], Paris: CNRS, 2010, 268. 32 For Breton’s role in organizing the Comité d’action des intellectuels, see Dionys Mascolo, ‘Pour saluer André Breton’ [1966], A la recherche d’un communisme de pensée, Paris: Fourbis, 1993, 217–20. And for further remarkable information about the Surrealists’ activities up to that time and beyond against the war in Algeria,

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33 34 35 36

37

38 39 40

41 42 43

Notes including the visit paid by Breton and Benjamin Péret to an imprisoned member of the Front de Libération Nationale or FLN, see Reynaud Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes, 262–83. See André Breton, ‘Parlant au Meeting “Pour la Défense de la Liberté”,’ Le Surréalisme, même, no. 1, October 1956, 4–5; Pierre de Massot, ‘Le Prisonnier de la mer,’ Le Surréalisme, même, no. 2, spring 1957, 159–62. See, for instance, the untitled statement by the Editorial Board of Le Surréalisme, même, no. 2, spring 1957, 169; and the brief notice by Benjamin Péret, ‘Assez de tortures!,’ Le Surréalisme, même, no. 3, autumn 1957, 95. Horne, Savage War of Peace, 298; Reynaud Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes, 265, 276. Various, ‘Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War’ [1960], Richardson and Fijalkowski (eds. and trans.), Surrealism against the Current, 194–7. See the almost complete record of (non-) publication in Pierre (ed.), Tracts, tome 2, 391. Pierre does not mention that on the initiative of Jean-Jacques Lebel, the tract was inserted into the second issue of the Milanese Surrealist journal edited by Arturo Schwarz, Front unique, dated winter 1960 (see my next chapter): author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 3 September 2021. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1995, 162. For the context and drafting of the Declaration of the 121 and its repercussions for the signatories, see Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, 592–4; Catherine Brun, ‘Genèse et postérité du Manifeste des 121,’ L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 54, no. 4 (‘The Algerian War of Independence and Its Legacy in France, Algeria, and Beyond’), winter 2014, 78–89; Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot, Partenaire invisible: essai biographique, Seyssel: Éditions Champ Vallon, 1998, 391–402; Pierre (ed.), Tracts, tome 2, 205–8, 390–96; Reynaud Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes, 262–3. Schuster is called a ‘poet and journalist’ and the Surrealists and their associates such as Lebel and Alain Jouffroy are off topic in the densely contextualised account of visual culture in France of the period by Feldman, From a Nation Torn, 123. Georges Bataille wanted to sign the Declaration of the 121 but was asked not to, as explained by Maurice Blanchot, ‘For Friendship’ [1993], trans. Leslie Hill, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 22 (‘Disastrous Blanchot’), 2000, 25–38, 29–30. Bataille’s daughter Laurence and Diego Masson, the son of Declaration signatory André, had been involved in covert pro-Algerian activities since as early as 1954: Laurel Jean Fredrickson, Jean-Jacques Lebel and French Happenings of the 1960s: The Erotics of Revolution, New York: Bloomsbury, 2021, 54. Horne, Savage War of Peace, 416; Blanchot, ‘For Friendship,’ 32. Pierre (ed.), Tracts, tome 2, 392. Susan L. Power, ‘Surrealist Intrusion and Disenchantment on Madison Avenue, 1960,’ Julia Drost, Fabrice Flahutez, Anne Helmreich and Martin Schieder (eds.), Networking Surrealism in the USA: Agents, Artists, and the Market, Heidelberg: Arthistoricum.net, 2019, 428–47, 441, 442 n. 46. See Robert Benayoun, ‘Letter to Chicago’ [1963], Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley (eds.), Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009, 169–71, 170. Horne, Savage War of Peace, 455. Horne, Savage War of Peace, 455–6.

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44 For a fuller account of events than I can give here, see Pierre Abramovici, Le Putsch des généraux: De Gaulle contre l’armée, 1958–1961, Paris: Fayard, 2011. 45 Horne, Savage War of Peace, 456; Ikegami, Great Migrator, 29–31. 46 ‘Le vernissage a eu lieu hier soir, dans une atmosphère de très grande sympathie, avec beaucoup de monde, et l’exposition se présente comme un grand succès, au moins de curiosité,’ Daniel Cordier, letter of 28 April to Leo Castelli, correspondence with galerie Daniel Cordier, Leo Castelli Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, box 10, folder 40 (an update sent halfway through the run of the show on 16 May declared its continuing success while lamenting the reluctance or inability of European customers to pay the requested prices). 47 Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde [1965], Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, 226, 227. 48 See the account by Ileana Sonnabend quoted in Ikegami, Great Migrator, 31. For some brief comment on Rauschenberg’s exhibit at Cordier’s gallery and a list of the twelve Combines shown, see Alfred Pacquement, ‘La première exposition Rauschenberg à Paris, Galerie Daniel Cordier, mai 1961,’ Paris: Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris-New York, 1977, 580–3. 49 Alain Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg et la liberté d’indifférence,’ XXe siècle, year 35, no. 40 (‘US Art 1’), June 1973, 125–31, 125; Jean-Paul Ameline, ‘Comment les Combines de Rauschenberg ont conquis l’Europe: essai d’histoire culturelle (1958–1964),’ Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, 2006, 287–306, 294. 50 André Parinaud, ‘Un “misfit” de la peinture new-yorkaise se confesse,’ Arts, no. 821, 10–16 May 1961, 18. 51 André Breton, Entretiens 1913–52, Paris: Gallimard, 1952. 52 Tomkins, Bride and the Bachelors, 227. 53 Sonnabend quoted in Tomkins, Bride and the Bachelors, 227. Also see Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1980, 189–90. 54 Ameline in Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, 294. 55 ‘fausses audaces au service des nouveaux riches,’ ‘ni un cri de révolution ni une provocation délibéré mais un acte de présence et d’existence,’ José Pierre, ‘Ou va l’art abstrait?’ Combat-Art, no. 79, 5 June 1961, 2. 56 ‘un de les objets les plus provoquants,’ Pierre, ‘Ou va l’art abstrait?’ 2. As I noted in my previous chapter, Pierre had indicated nearer the time of EROS that Bed ‘semble destiné à provoquer,’ José Pierre, ‘Le Surréalisme dans la Grotte d’amour,’ Art International, vol. 4, no. 1, 1960, 57–61, 60. 57 ‘étonnante légèreté,’ ‘aisance inconnue même des dadaistes,’ José Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ L’Oeil, no. 172, April 1969, 42–50, 45. 58 Pontus Hultén and Julia Brown Turrell, ‘A Conversation about the Sculpture of Robert Rauschenberg,’ Fort Worth, TX: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Rauschenberg Sculpture, 1995, 9–46, 18, 11. For the overcooked suggestion that Rauschenberg invented certain techniques to ‘mysteriously, even mediumistically, produce works of art,’ see Sam Hunter, Robert Rauschenberg: Works, Writings, and Interviews, Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2005, 28. 59 ‘insondable sottise,’ Pierre, ‘Ou va l’art abstrait?’ 2; ‘“Être peintre [en Amérique] signifie être opposant,”’ Rauschenberg quoted in Parinaud, ‘Un “misfit” de la peinture new-yorkaise se confesse,’ 18.

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60 Pierre, ‘Ou va l’art abstrait?’ 2. 61 The debt owed to Rauschenberg’s Combines by the work of Pierre’s friend Hervé Télémaque who was very close to Surrealism is obvious and has been stated, which began when the Haitian artist saw Hymnal (1955) in the period he spent in New York from 1957 to 1961; the chair in Pilgrim is echoed in the stepladder in Télémaque’s Confidence (1965) (shown at L’Écart absolu), but the prevalence of psychoanalytic autobiography in Télémaque’s art generally is not shared by Rauschenberg’s (indeed, the stepladder belonged to Télémaque’s grandfather): Alexia Guggémos, ‘La complainte de l’objet,’ Télémaque, ed. Julie Rouart, Paris: Flammarion, 2015, 47–61, 51. 62 José Pierre, Pop Art: An Illustrated Dictionary [1975], trans. W. J. Strachan, London: Eyre Methuen, 1977, 128. 63 For the Surrealists’ uses of the cinema and theatre le Ranelagh in the 1960s courtesy of Henri Ginet, the painter and director of the establishment, see Alain Joubert, Le Mouvement des surréalistes, ou le fin mot de l’histoire: mort d’un groupe – naissance d’un mythe, Paris: Maurice Nadeau, 2001, 272–6; Penelope Rosemont, Dreams & Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, SDS & the Seven Cities of Cibola in Chicago, Paris & London. A 1960s Notebook, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2008, 62–7. 64 Kozloff, ‘American Painting during the Cold War,’ 52. 65 See Joseph Ruzicka (ed.), ‘Transcript of the Symposium,’ John Elderfield (ed.), Essays on Assemblage, New York: The ­Museum of Modern Art, 1992, 124–55. 66 Robert Benayoun and José Pierre, ‘Alchimie de l’objet, cabotinage du déchet,’ La Brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 2, May 1962, 49–54. 67 ‘dressent des autels dérisoires à l’industrie automobile, à la plomberie, à la quincaillerie,’ Benayoun and Pierre, ‘Alchimie de l’objet,’ 53. 68 ‘un esprit d’investigation assez sévère semble conduire ses assemblages,’ Benayoun and Pierre, ‘Alchimie de l’objet,’ 53. 69 Leah Dickerman, Rauschenberg: Canyon, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2013, 38. 70 ‘minable,’ Benayoun and Pierre, ‘Alchimie de l’objet,’ 53. For an inaccurate reproduction of Canyon, with the pillow cropped, look no further than André Breton, Surrealism and Painting [1965], trans. Simon Watson Taylor, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, 385 (it is reproduced accurately on the corresponding page of the original French version of the book). 71 For the continuity of mythic themes in Rauschenberg, see Dickerman, Rauschenberg: Canyon, 31, 40; Ed Krčma, Rauschenberg/Dante: Drawing a Modern Inferno, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017, 37–41; and for the extensive use of pillows: James Leggio, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed and the Symbolism of the Body,’ Essays on Assemblage, New York: Museum of Modern Art, Studies in Modern Art, no. 2, 1992, 79–117, 95. 72 For this Combine as a generator of fiction, see Claude Simon, Conducting Bodies [1971], trans. Helen R. Lane, New York: Grove Press, 1974. It is discussed by the author in Claude Simon, ‘Fiction Word by Word’ [1972], Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 5, no. 1, spring 1985, 34–46. A later commentator has analysed how both Canyon and, especially, another Combine Charlene acted as generators for Simon: Jean H. Duffy, Reading between the Lines: Claude Simon and the Visual Arts, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998, 98–113. 73 ‘une véritable apothéose du vrac,’ Benayoun and Pierre, ‘Alchimie de l’objet,’ 52–3.

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74 ‘L’originalité de Rauschenberg, c’est de présenter des é­ léments qui relèvent parfois de la catégorie du déchet, mais transcendant cet “assemblage” de déchets par une dimension lyrique qui en fait l’héritier de ce que la récente école américaine a pu connâitre de plus dynamique, de plus explosif. Par cette dimension lyrique, Rauschenberg échappe le plus souvent à l’ornière de l’ordure dans laquelle s’enlisent complaisamment tant d’artistes – qu’il s’agisse des spécialistes de l’affiche dechirée (Hains, Villeglé, Dufrêne) ou de Burri et de ses toiles de sac cousues, lacérées, carbonisées . . ., ’ Benayoun and Pierre, ‘Alchimie de l’objet,’ 53. 75 André Breton, Mad Love [1937], trans. Mary Ann Caws, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987, 53. 76 Breton, Mad Love, 53. 77 André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ [1924], Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972, 1–47, 20 (Breton’s italics). Breton quoted the first three dicta from the threepage mini-treatise, positioned at the front of his own literary review by Pierre Reverdy, ‘L’image,’ Nord-Sud, no. 13, March 1918, n. p. 78 André Breton, ‘Ascendant Sign’ [1948], Free Rein, trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, 104–7, 104. 79 Breton, Free Rein, 107. 80 I have discussed the Surrealists’ rejection of Nouveau Réalisme, along the same theoretical lines I am setting out here for their admiration of Rauschenberg, in my Futures of Surrealism: Myth, Science Fiction and Fantastic Art in France 1936–1969, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015, 159–67. 81 ‘Chez Rauschenberg, le degré du déchet est dépassé par le fait que sa peinture recèle un élément de subversion. Dans ses titres, ses éléments de composition, on perçoit un cri de protestation, une revendication sociale, et sans doute politique, qui explique la gêne de certains critiques d’art lorsqu’ils les confrontent’/‘Les autres cherchent à découvrir un ordre esthétique, et uniquement esthétique, dans les choses viles, abjectes. Rauschenberg vise plus haut,’ Benayoun and Pierre, ‘Alchimie de l’objet,’ 53. 82 It is unlikely that the two Surrealists missed La France déchirée held at Restany’s galerie J from 14–28 June the previous year where references to Algeria showed through the torn posters on display by Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, so they presumably viewed the ambiguity of the show as apolitical in a similar way to a more recent writer on the subject; that is, as ‘above the contending political forces that were indeed tearing France to shreds’ and trading in ‘a vocabulary destined to return their subjects to quiescence,’ Tom McDonough, ‘The Beautiful Language of My Century’: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945–1968, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2007, 74, 97. 83 Dorothy Gees Seckler, ‘The Artist Speaks: Robert Rauschenberg,’ Art in America, vol. 54, no. 3, May–June 1966, 73–84, 84. 84 Alex Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013, 315. 85 Clémence Bigel, Le Pop’Art à Paris: Une histoire de la réception critique des avantgardes américaines entre 1959 et 1978, vol. 1, unpublished MA thesis, Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, 2013, 61.

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86 Bigel, Le Pop’Art à Paris, 56. 87 Rauschenberg quoted in Parinaud, ‘Un “misfit” de la peinture new-yorkaise se confesse,’ 18; Lebel confirmed he saw that exhibition: author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15 December 2020. 88 I get to the Biennale in my sixth chapter, but for the manoeuvring that lay behind Rauschenberg’s triumph in Venice and the reaction in France, as well as a detailed look at the US Pavilion, see Laurie J. Monahan, ‘Cultural Cartography: American Designs at the 1964 Venice Biennale,’ Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1990, 369–416. 89 Robert Benayoun, ‘Où rien n’arrive,’ La Brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 6, June 1964, 12–21. 90 ‘pères directs du Pop Art,’ Otto Hahn, ‘Pop Art and ­Happenings,’ Les Temps modernes, year 19, no. 212, January 1964, 1318–31, 1319; Hahn’s piece is referred to by Benayoun, ‘Où rien n’arrive,’ 15. Sonnabend regarded the article as a major breakthrough in Europe for Rauschenberg and Pop in advance of the Venice Biennale (Hahn directed his readers to Sonnabend’s gallery at the end of his article), according to Ikegami, The Great Migrator, 47. 91 For the script, see Kenneth Koch, ‘The Construction of Boston’ [1962], A Change of Hearts: Plays, Films, and Other Dramatic Works 1951–1971, New York: Random House, 1973, 131–50, 131; for descriptions, see Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater 1962–1964, Epping: Bowker Publishing Company, 1983, 126; and Nancy Spector, ‘Rauschenberg and Performance, 1963–67: A “Poetry of Infinite Possibilities”,’ Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997, 226–45, 239 (and see the rare photographs by Hans Namuth on 252). For a brief eyewitness account including word of Rauschenberg’s dissatisfaction at the final result, see Tomkins, Bride and the Bachelors, 229; and for a longer one given as dryly as an anecdote by David Niven, see Tomkins, Off the Wall, 192–7. The most extensive single piece of writing on the event (with more photographs) relates Tinguely’s wall blocking the view of the audience and Rauschenberg’s creation of rain in the performance to Duchamp’s twine installation and ‘rain room’ at the 1942 and 1947 exhibitions of Surrealism respectively: Dempsey, Friendship of America and France, 146–54, 204–7. 92 To my knowledge, Benayoun did not attend the performance, but his archive reveals that like Rauschenberg he was a reader of Esquire magazine in the 1960s, which he, too, used for collage material, so he certainly read what remains the most detailed account of the organization and staging of The Construction of Boston, set down in that publication by the then leaseholder of the theatre and producer of the play: John Wulp, ‘Happening: A Timely Exercise in the Pursuit of Happiness,’ Esquire, vol. 60, no. 360, November 1963, 134–8 and 184–7. 93 ‘Rien de tout ceci n’est bien nouveau,’ Benayoun, ‘Où rien n’arrive,’ 14. 94 ‘Cette généralisation ne saurait inclure Bob Rauschenberg dont les titres, les inscriptions et les collages, à l’appui d’assemblages comme le Canyon de 1959 (l’aigle empaillé) ont toujours fonctionné dans un sens nettement antipatriotique et subversive. Je regrette que cet artiste qui, précurseur involontaire du pop, en est dissocié par les critiques les plus puristes comme Thomas Hess, se soit

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mêlé sans doute par un effet d’émulation, à des manifestations comme La Construction de Boston,’ Benayoun, ‘Où rien n’arrive,’ 20 n. 4. For Rauschenberg’s own later admission that he identified the bald eagle with ‘authority,’ yielding an associative and surely political aspect from Canyon, see Robert S. Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, 100. 95 Thomas B. Hess, ‘Pop and Public’ [1963], Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Steven Henry Madoff, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997, 100–2, 101. 96 ‘[l]’atrocité de la guerre réduite . . . aux dimensions d’une absurdité ridicule,’ José Pierre, ‘Peinture et autre,’ La Brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 6, June 1964, 1. Lenk opined: ‘Où est la nouveauté? Chez nous, en Allemagne, sous le bombardements, c’était tous les jours Dada!’ quoted by Pierre, ‘Peinture et autre,’ 1. In his second judgement, comparing the context of the First World War with that of the 1960s, Pierre was in accord with William Seitz who had declared three years earlier in his exhibition essay on assemblage: ‘[s]ocial and emotional life is scarcely more secure at present than it was during the youth of [Alfred] Jarry, [Jacques] Vaché, Schwitters, or Duchamp,’ New York: Museum of Modern Art, The Art of Assemblage, 1961, 87. 97 Hahn published on Masson in Les Temps Modernes and L’Express across 1964–5, culminating in his short monograph where Surrealism receives only curt notice: Otto Hahn, Masson, trans. Robert Erich Wolf, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1965. 98 ‘art d’association,’ ‘univers synthétique,’ Otto Hahn, ‘Le Surréalisme: À l’heure du musée ou de la jeunesse?,’ Arts, no. 10, 1–7 December 1965, 20 and 29, 20. ­99 ‘Il y a Rauschenberg qui crée une objectivité de la vue dont toute hiérarchie est bannie puisqu’en ce monde, tout, au même moment, a la même importance. Par làmême, il rejette le terme ridicule de “poésie” et le remplace par “actualité,”’ Hahn, ‘Le Surréalisme: À l’heure du musée ou de la jeunesse?’ 20. Another salvo from the same critic in a review of L’Écart absolu in L’Express that month characterized Surrealism as, again, artistically outdated and culturally reactionary in its supposedly impotent complaints about modern technology, while its current artists such as Alberto Gironella plagiarised Johns and Louise Nevelson, and Hervé Télémaque mimicked Roy Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg: Otto Hahn, ‘Le Surréalisme face à la machine à laver’ [1965], Avant-Garde: Théorie et provocations, Paris: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 1992, 166–8. 100 Quoted in Parinaud, ‘Un “misfit” de la peinture new-yorkaise se confesse,’ 18. 101 This is not the place for a fuller account of Surrealism’s position on Pop art, which was by no means straightforward: in my first chapter I cited favourable comments by Surrealists on Dine; also see, for instance, Benayoun’s admiring remarks on James Rosenquist in his article on Happenings that follow on from his defence of Rauschenberg and, on the same artist in that issue of the journal, José Pierre, ‘Comment réussir un chef-d’oeuvre “pop”: En homage à James Rosenquist,’ La Brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 6, June 1964, 48–9. The defence of Rauschenberg and certain Pop artists mounted by Surrealists like Pierre, critics such as Jouffroy and friends in the middle like Édouard Jaguer are edited out of the historical record conferred by Hahn, Avant-Garde, 7.

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Chapter 4 1

2­ 3 4

5 6

7

8 ­9

Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2010, 19; Bordeaux: Musée d’art contemporain, Collection Sonnabend: 25 années de choix et d’activités d’Ileana et Michael Sonnabend, 1988, 77. Author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15 December 2020. Author phone conversation with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 11 January 2018. Author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15 December 2020; Paul B. Franklin, ‘Coming of Age with Marcel: An Interview with Jean-Jacques Lebel,’ Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, no. 7 (‘Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg, Patrick Waldberg’), 2006, 10–29, 14. See Alain Jouffroy, ‘Pour une révolution du regard’ [1960, 1963, 1964], Une révolution du regard [1964], Paris: Gallimard, 2008, 185–209, 193. Pierre Restany, ‘J.J. 2: The Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Libertarian Humanism,’ Uli Todoroff and Sophie Haaser (eds.), Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 1998, 121–6, 121, 122; Alyce Mahon, ‘Outrage aux Bonnes Moeurs: Jean-Jacques Lebel and the Marquis de Sade,’ Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, 93–112, 93; Franklin, ‘Coming of Age with Marcel,’ 11, 14; Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov (ed.), ‘Lebel et la bête’, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2018, 15–24, 16–17. Author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15 December 2020; Franklin, ‘Coming of Age with Marcel,’ 18, 28 n. 21. Jean-Paul Clébert, Dictionnaire du surréalisme, Paris: Seuil, 1996, 335; Mahon in Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, 97; Alyce Mahon, The Marquis de Sade and the AvantGarde, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020, 201; Laurel Jean Fredrickson, Jean-Jacques Lebel and French Happenings of the 1960s: The Erotics of Revolution, New York: Bloomsbury, 2021, 25 (some of these accounts have incorrectly placed Lebel’s entrance into the Surrealist group at 1953, 1954 or 1956). Robert Fleck, ‘Jean-Jacques Lebel and Critical Montrage,’ Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, ed. Axel Heil, Robert Fleck and Alyce Mahon, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2014, 133–56, 147. Author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15 December 2020; Fleck in Heil, Fleck and Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, 139, 141; Kristine Stiles, ‘Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Phoenix and Ash,’ Jean-Jacques Lebel: Works from 1960– 1965, London: The Mayor Gallery, 2003, 3–12, 8; Gunnar B. Kvaran, ‘Lebel/Rebel,’ Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, 51–8, 52. Lebel’s first solo show was held in 1955 at the Galleria Numero in Florence (it included his oil on panel of that year, titled Iceberg de poche: Portrait of Diana, dedicated to Breton and given to him the following year) and his fourth from 25 February to 6 March 1961 at the Galleria II Cavallino in Venice from where it travelled that year to Arturo Schwarz’s gallery in Milan; his first exhibition in Paris was held in 1957 at the galerie Iris Clert during the period of Yves Klein’s memorable events there and in advance of Rauschenberg’s equally legendary gesture, the telegram titled The Is a Portrait of Iris Clert If I Say So (1961) meant for the Clert portraits exhibition that year, then in 1963 Lebel exhibited alone (and arranged a Happening) at

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the galerie Raymond Cordier where the Surrealists had promoted Max Walter Svanberg two years earlier (and Lebel had staged a collective show and one of the earliest Happenings in Europe the year before): see ‘Solo Exhibitions,’ Heil, Fleck and Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, 250; Jean-Jacques Lebel and Androula Michaël, Happenings de Jean-Jacques Lebel ou l’insoumission radicale, Paris: Hazan, 2009, 48–57, 90–5; Centre Pompidou, Jean-Jacques Lebel, 121–5. 10 See Robert Lebel, ‘Marcel Duchamp: Liens et Ruptures, Premiers essais, le Cubisme, le Nu descendant un escalier,’ Le Surréalisme, même, no. 3, autumn 1957, 21–31. A measure of his activity in Surrealism can be gained from the short notices: JeanJacques Lebel, ‘Présentation de Martini,’ BIEF: Jonction surréaliste, no. 3, 15 January 1959, n. p.; Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘FEU!’ BIEF: Jonction surréaliste, no. 4, 15 February 1959, n. p.; and the very brief text based on a recent exhibition by Agustín Cárdenas: Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘Continent retrouvé,’ BIEF: Jonction surréaliste, no. 6, 15 April 1959, n. p. ­11 André Breton (ed.), L’Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme 1959–1960, Paris: Galerie Daniel Cordier, 1959, 118. 12 ‘arrivisme,’ ‘totale confusion des valeurs,’ The Surrealist Group, ‘Mise en garde,’ BIEF: Jonction surréaliste, no. 12, 15 April 1960, n. p. In a kind of society diary column, Lebel had made what the Surrealists regarded as unrepresentative remarks for a Surrealist, partly by identifying himself as a Surrealist at all, in spite of all the Cocteau-bashing he indulged in: Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘Voici comment rêve, pense, joue, écrit, se fâche un jeune surréaliste,’ Arts, no. 768, 30 March–5 April 1960, 2. The Surrealists protested that day in a letter to Parinaud, the editor of the newspaper, where they already characterized Lebel as a non-Surrealist, accused of a ‘confusion mentale’ and ‘l’arrivisme cosmopolite pris pour la suppression des frontières,’ and in a tract dated 14 April the imminent statement ‘Mise en garde’ was included along with that letter and another to Parinaud signed by Édouard Jaguer, the editor of the equally misrepresented art and culture review Phases, similarly protesting what it called the ‘stupéfiantes élucubrations’ that had appeared in Arts courtesy of Lebel: The Surrealist Group and Édouard Jaguer, ‘[Mise au point]’ [1960], Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, 1922–1969, ed. José Pierre, tome 2: 1940–69, Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1982, 194–7, 195, 196 (this was the first document co-signed by the Surrealists and the main figures behind Phases). More detail can be found in Laurel Fredrickson, ‘Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Revolution: The French Happening, Surrealism, and the Algerian War,’ France and the Visual Arts since 1945: Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art, ed. Catherine Dossin, New York: Bloomsbury, 2018, 169–91, 179–81. One version of events has it that the departure of Lebel was triggered when he expressed dissatisfaction with a Surrealist tract and questionnaire dated 9 February 1960, which attempted (unsuccessfully) to build bridges with potential allies in the closing weeks of EROS: Hugo Daniel, ‘Insurrection de l’art,’ Centre Pompidou, Jean-Jacques Lebel, 33–44, 44 n. 15; this is plausible judging from its dismissal of ‘un soi-disant [sic] “anarchisme” d’essence primaire, absolument indigne de la grande lignée libertaire’ when Lebel had become deeply involved in anarchism, partly through the review Noir et Rouge, which he had praised in BIEF (Surrealism had ended its relations with another anarchist periodical Le Libertaire earlier in the decade): The Surrealist Group, ‘À vous de dire,’ Pierre (ed.), Tracts, tome 2, 183–4, 184 (it was inserted into BIEF: Jonction surréaliste, no. 10–11, 15 February 1960,

218

13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20

Notes n. p.). For Lebel’s own account and the multiple crises he shouldered at the time, see Jean-Jacques Lebel and Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, Poésie directe: Happenings, Interventions, Paris: Opus International Edition, 1994, 56, 57, 59–60. His reports of the rupture tend to play it down or characterize it is a liberation and he soon came to have a good relationship with Breton and certain other Surrealists anyway, but Lebel regarded himself as ‘post-Surrealist’ from this moment, which might mean he considered Surrealism a historical category, overtaken by Neo-Dada, Happenings, Pop art and so on: Mahon in Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, 99, 104 n. 49; Jean-Jacques Lebel and Cécile Bargues, ‘Il faut changer le jeu et non pas les pièces du jeu,’ Nantes: Musée d’Arts de Nantes, Archipel: Fonds de dotation Jean-Jacques Lebel, 2020, 15–35, 22–4. See Anonymous, ‘Les journées surréalistes de Milan,’ BIEF: Jonction surréaliste, no. 7, 1 June 1959, n. p. See Axel Heil, ‘Interdit au delà,’ Heil, Fleck and Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, 15–39, 22–3 n. 15. Anonymous, ‘Les journées surréalistes de Milan,’ n. p.; Fleck in Heil, Fleck and Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, 149. For some rare information on the first series of Front unique, see Daniel in Centre Pompidou, Jean-Jacques Lebel, 36–7, 44 n. 17; Fredrickson, Jean-Jacques Lebel and French Happenings of the 1960s, 30–2. See the essay by the Algerian poet Henri Kréa, ‘La révolution algérienne ou la victoire de l’esprit,’ Front unique, no. 1, spring/summer 1959, 16–19. In the same issue appeared the historic anti-colonial tract by Jean-Paul Marat, ‘Du droit qu’ont nos colonies de secouer le joug tyranique de la métropole’ [1791], Front unique, no. 1, spring/summer 1959, 15. Lebel quoted from author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 3 September 2021. J.-B. Myers, ‘Note sur le surréalisme aux Etats-Unis,’ Front unique, no. 2, winter 1960, 30–2. Author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15 December 2020. ‘La géneration suivante subit avec moins réticence l’influence du Surréalisme. On peut vraiment dire que l’action painting est une extension du hasard surréaliste. Les critiques Harold Rosenberg et Hanna [sic] Arendt ont chacun mis les points sur les i en ce qui concerne l’Expressionisme Abstrait, inventé par des journalistes friands de formules. Un coup cynique porté aux idolâtres de l’Action et de la Spontaneité fut l’exposition de Robert Raushenberg [sic] où l’on put voir deux “action paintings” côté à côté et parfaitement identiques. Raushenberg [sic], ainsi que Jasper Johns et Larry Rivers ne sont certes pas indifférents à l’humour noir et à d’autres activités surréalistes auparavant laissées pour compte,’ Myers, ‘Note sur le surréalisme aux Etats-Unis,’ 31–2. By the time of his later, full-length account of thirty-five years or so of life with artists, poets and dealers in New York, beginning with the Surrealists and Duchamp, Myers had long decided that ‘both Rauschenberg and Johns are at best minor painters,’ John Bernard Myers, Tracking the Marvelous: A Life in the New York Art World, London: Thames and Hudson, 1984, 216. The artistic and literary networks linking French and US artists and writers through galleries and publications that are set out in Myers’s book, as well as the social exchange of information reported there and evident in journals such as the Evergreen Review and Art and Literature, provide much evidence for informal correspondence between Rauschenberg, Surrealism and French culture, for which

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John Ashbery is a highly suggestive figure, since across the twelve issues of Art and Literature from March 1964 to spring 1967 where he served on the editorial board, the review published, as well as his own work and that of several Surrealists, the writings of Achim von Arnim, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Robert Bly, John Cage, Nicolas Calas, René Crevel, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Desnos, Clement Greenberg, Johns, Heinrich von Kleist, Kenneth Koch, Michel Leiris, Lucy Lippard, Harry Matthews, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Myers himself, Frank O’Hara, Marcelin Pleynet, Francis Ponge, Rauschenberg, Robert Rosenblum and Philippe Sollers: see David Spittle, John Ashbery and Surrealism, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Newcastle University, 2016, 1–14. 21 John Bernard Myers, ‘The Impact of Surrealism on the New York School,’ Evergreen Review, vol. 4, no. 12, March–April 1960, 75–85, 83. 22 The first showing in a European publication of Rauschenberg’s Monogram seems to have been in the Italian review Azimuth, edited by artists Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni in Milan and therefore presumably known to Schwarz and Lebel who later reported his admiration for Manzoni’s work and recalled meeting up with him in Milan during this period: Lebel and Bargues, ‘Il faut changer le jeu et non pas les pièces du jeu,’ Musée d’Arts de Nantes, Archipel, 25. It is reproduced untitled a few pages into the inaugural issue of September 1959, in what appears to be the same photograph that was carried by Front unique (so probably provided by the Leo Castelli Gallery) and accompanied by the first and final stanzas of the poem ‘Narcissus Pseudonarcissus’ (1952–3) by future Gruppo 63 member Elio Pagliarani, which enlisted the dejected goat into the correlation it made between post-war poverty in Italy and bohemian rebirth (Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts of 1955 was reproduced more prominently, in the same issue on the opening page spread, all doors open, following its appearance at Johns’s solo exhibition in March at the Galleria d’arte del naviglio also in Milan): see Elio Pagliarani, ‘Narcissus Pseudonarcissus’ [1952–3], The New Italian Poetry, 1945 to the Present: A Bilingual Anthology, Lawrence R. Smith (ed. and trans.), Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1981, 183–5. The poem was translated a few years later in a review very well known to both Rauschenberg and Johns: Elio Pagliarani, ‘Narcissus Pseudonarcissus’ [1952–3], Art and Literature, no. 5, summer 1965, 74–5. I am very grateful to Gražina Subelytė for her advice and direction following my enquiries about Azimuth. 23 Emma Stenström, ‘Another Kind of Combine: Monogram and the Moderna Museet,’ Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, vol. 76, no. 1/2, 2007, 40–7, 40. 24 Cecilia Widenheim, ‘A Goat’s-Eye View – Monogram at the Moderna Museet,’ Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, vol. 76, no. 1/2, 2007, 48–59, 49. 25 Ikegami, Great Migrator, 146, 10. The Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme criticized so-called ‘Operation Linebacker II,’ the US bombing of Hanoi of December 1972, and there were demonstrations against the US ambassador to Sweden in 1973, which led to him being recalled from Stockholm: Widenheim, ‘A Goat’s-Eye View,’ 42–3. 26 Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2003, 132. 27 Kate Nesin, ‘“Miniature Monument”: Travel and Work in Italy and North Africa,’ Achim Borchardt-Hume (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, London and New York: Tate Modern and The Museum of Modern Art, 2016, 60–9, 67.

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28 Walter Hopps, ‘Introduction: Rauschenberg’s Art of Fusion,’ Walter Hopps (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997, 20–9, 29 n. 11; Nicholas Cullinan, ‘Double Exposure: Robert Rauschenberg’s and Cy Twombly’s Roman Holiday,’ The Burlington Magazine, vol. 150, no. 1264 (‘American Art and Architecture’), July 2008, 460–70, 468; Deborah Solomon, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997, 202, 235–7, 374. The same goes for the rare collages of c. 1952, called ‘versed in Surrealism’ and ‘Surrealist-inspired’ respectively by Charles F. Stuckey, ‘Rauschenberg’s Everything, Everywhere Era’ and Susan Davidson, ‘Early Work, 1949–1954,’ Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, 30–41, 34; 44 (though Davidson makes the connection with Cornell, as does Feinstein who triangulated them with the collages of Max Ernst and has made an intriguing connection between Cornell and Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts: Roni Feinstein, Random Order: The First Fifteen Years of Robert Rauschenberg’s Art, 1949–1964, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1990, 124, 126–7, 139 n. 59, n. 60 and n. 61, 265 n. 17). Elsewhere, Hopps made a mild comparison between Rauschenberg’s ‘hanging fetish works’ and the feathers and rope in certain Surrealist reliefs and sculptures by Joan Miró, and one between the wrapped, boxed stones of Soles (c. 1953) and Man Ray’s wrapped, found object The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (1920) ‘with its quintessentially Surrealist overtones,’ while dissociating the collages from those of Cornell and Ernst by way of their ‘restraint and minimalist abstraction,’ and further differentiating Rauschenberg’s boxes from Cornell’s due to the latter’s sophisticated ‘cultural allusions’ in spite of a shared tendency towards ‘visual metaphor,’ Walter Hopps, ‘An Order Found,’ Washington: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s, 1991, 112, 113, 115, 160. Those opinions were recently repeated without demurral by Hal Foster, ‘“Made out of the Real World”: Lessons from the Fulton Street Studio,’ Robert Rauschenberg, 88–97, 92–3. Feinstein makes a lot of the effect of Cornell’s ‘visual poetry’ on Rauschenberg, but to describe Cornell as Rauschenberg’s ‘Surrealist mentor’ is overdoing it: Feinstein, Random Order, 122. Nevertheless, Rauschenberg’s one week show Scatole e Feticci Personali of 3–10 March 1953 took place at the Galleria dell’Obelisco in Rome, which leaned towards Surrealist painting such as that of René Magritte and Yves Tanguy: Hopps in Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s, 115. My intention in this book is to show the affinities that Rauschenberg’s work has been said to share with the art and theory of Breton’s Surrealism rather than with Cornell’s work specifically, which was first detected in 1959 by Hilton Kramer, unfortunately, who regarded both Rauschenberg and Johns as ‘Cornell imitators’ (and harboured an intense dislike for all three artists), and it has been a feature of the Rauschenberg scholarship since: Feinstein, Random Order, 120–8, 138 n. 56, 314. I am very grateful to Ed Krčma for guidance on Rauschenberg and Cornell. 29 Max Kozloff, ‘Surrealist Painting Re-examined,’ Artforum, vol. 9, no. 1, September 1966, 5–9, 9. ­30 Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change, London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1981, 335. It was the properties of specifically ‘convulsive’ beauty that Breton was seeking to determine: André Breton, Mad Love [1937], trans. Mary Ann Caws, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987, 19.

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31 Lisa Wainwright, ‘Gustave and the Goat: Rauschenberg’s Monogram and Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio,’ The Burlington Magazine, vol. 159, no. 1377, December 2017, 956–63, 961. 32 Giovanni Aloi, Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces and the Art of the Anthropocene, New York: Columbia University Press, 2018, 222. Aloi relates Monogram and Oppenheim’s much-loved Surrealist object as ‘the very first works of art to employ the taxidermy medium,’ yet seems to have overlooked Hughes’s comparison between them, even though he refers to the larger reading of Monogram from The Shock of the New: Aloi, Speculative Taxidermy, 34 and 161–90. Marjorie Welish locates Rauschenberg’s three dimensional work closer to Surrealism than Dada, stating of the later Sant ‘Agnese (1973) that ‘the chair, seemingly in spatial translation, seems readying itself for the Surrealist domain of the marvellous,’ and, with reference to Coca-Cola Plan (1958), writes: ‘Surrealist in their heterogeneity and Neo-Dadaist because potentially anything goes, the artefacts Rauschenberg spins out under the rubric of assemblage are nonetheless at odds with those of Dadaist predecessors,’ while insisting in a discussion of Pail for Ganymede (1959) that Rauschenberg holds ‘an aversion toward keeping the object pure, he is much at home in the raggedy production that delighted the Surrealists,’ Marjorie Welish, ‘Pail for Ganymede,’ Fort Worth, TX: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Rauschenberg Sculpture, 1995, 85–126, 91, 100, 106. 33 Walter Hopps quoted in Robert Rauschenberg, video interview by David A. Ross, Walter Hopps, Gary Garrels and Peter Samis, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 6 May 1999, unpublished transcript at the SFMOMA Research Library and Archives, N 6537.R27 A35 1999a, 62. Its gaze was exploited by Sonnabend who placed Monogram at the beginning of part one of Rauschenberg’s 1963 Paris exhibition at her gallery where one newspaper review commented on ‘l’air terriblement sérieux’ of the goat: Jacques Michel, ‘Rauschenberg,’ Le Monde, no. 5618, 8 February 1963, 9; Clémence Bigel, Le Pop’Art à Paris: Une histoire de la réception critique des avantgardes américaines entre 1959 et 1978, vol. 1, unpublished MA thesis, Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, 2013, 62. 34 For the last of these, but understood within the logic of performance and without reference to Surrealism, see Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings, London: Harry N. Abrams, 1966, 163–4. For Bed and the Feticci Personali as ‘talismanic objects’ with ‘magical physical presence,’ see James Leggio, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed and the Symbolism of the Body,’ Essays on Assemblage, New York: Museum of Modern Art, Studies in Modern Art, no. 2, 1992, 79–117, 106; the ‘magical powers’ of the Feticci Personali and notice of the artist’s superstition are given by Rauschenberg himself, quoted and translated by Cullinan, ‘Double Exposure,’ 466–7 n. 50; Feinstein, Random Order, 123; Robert S. Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, 115; and Rauschenberg quoted in Robert Rauschenberg, video interview, SFMOMA Research Library and Archives, 37. 35 Quoted in Stenström, ‘Another Kind of Combine,’ 49. 36 Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems [1869 and 1870], trans. Paul Knight, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988, 216–17. 37 Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal, London: Reaktion, 2000, 51, 53. A similar position to Baker’s was taken ten years earlier by Feinstein, but on the work of the early 1960s, which equally overlooked floor-based counterexamples such as Alberto

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Giacometti’s Disagreeable Object (1931): ‘Rauschenberg’s sculptures existed in real space and time rather than in the Surrealist otherworld’ and ‘Rauschenberg’s sculptures did not occupy a space adjacent to reality in the manner of Surrealist objects; instead, in their physicality and palpability, they participated in real space and time,’ Feinstein, Random Order, 114, 308. ­38 I am very grateful to My Bungaard at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm for information relating to the display and conservation of Monogram. 39 Quoted in Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990, 90. Such a cool dismissal must be interpreted as a pose given Rauschenberg’s affection for the goat and Monogram itself, to the extent that one writer has reasonably suggested that ‘[i]t is likely that the artist found an analogy for himself in the goat,’ Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg, 73–4. 40 Suzi Gablik, Magritte, London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1970, 45. 41 For the support as a setting for ‘the three-round contest between the goat and the painting,’ in which ‘the painting is floored, and the goat stands victorious in the ring,’ see Roger Cranshaw and Adrian Lewis, ‘Re-reading Rauschenberg,’ Artscribe, no. 29, June 1981, 44–51, 49. 42 Gablik, Magritte, 77. 43 Gablik, Magritte, 77–8. 44 Gablik, Magritte, 109. 45 Gablik, Magritte, 101–2. 46 Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg, 72. ‘And at the sight of the blue flesh, between the knickerbockers and the tops of my boots, I sometimes thought of my son and the blow I had fetched him, so avid is the mind of the flimsiest analogy,’ Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, London: Picador, 1980, 157. 47 Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg, 16–17. 48 Letter of 1958 from Magritte to Gablik quoted in Gablik, Magritte, 111. 49 Magritte quoted in Gablik, Magritte, 111. 50 Rauschenberg quoted in interview in 1968 in Sam Hunter, Robert Rauschenberg: Works, Writings, and Interviews, Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2005, 139. For the plausible but unsourced claim that ‘the stuffed goat once functioned as a mascot for an Angora mill,’ see Alex Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar E ­ uropean and American Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013, 11. Rauschenberg’s glass of water, which travels through various silkscreen paintings, might be read as an homage to Magritte: doubled in the upper and lower spaces of Overdrive (1963), tripled in three darkening stages in Estate (1963), shaded a grainy blue halfway down to the far left of Bait (1963), coloured a darker blue and striated to the right of the horizontal work Die Hard (1963), coloured green on a green ground to the centre right of Retroactive I and green on a black ground in the very top left corner of Retroactive II (1964), green again against the right hand edge of Untitled (1964), highlighted against a cloud of white paint in Press (1964) and hovering in its own nook to the middle upper left of Persimmon (1964); when it appeared in the poster Rauschenberg designed for The Paris Review (1965), it was read alternatively and implausibly as a reference to the waterfall of Duchamp’s note in the Green Box: ‘[g]iven 1st the waterfall/2nd the illuminating glass’ by Roni Feinstein, ‘Imagery and Content,’ New York: Whitney Museum of American

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Art, Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962–64, 1990, 75–90, 90; Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp [1973], eds. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, London: Thames and Hudson, 1975, 26. Rauschenberg’s original Polaroid photograph of a glass of water from which they were reproduced was first published in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Perpetual Inventory,’ Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, 206–23, 219. It is reproduced again by an art historian who claims that ‘Rauschenberg employed his own photographs in his work in ways that ranged from the literal to the metaphorical,’ while quoting the artist to the effect that this particular image was supposed to douse not kindle associations: Graham Smith, ‘Photographs by Rauschenberg in His Early Work,’ Studies in Photography, vol. 30, no. 2, December 2016, 32–41, 38. 51 See Ikegami, Great Migrator, 121–7. 52 Leggio in Essays on Assemblage, 104, 105, 105–6. 53 Leggio in Essays on Assemblage, 107; Rauschenberg quoted in interview with Barbara Rose, Rauschenberg, New York: Vintage, 1987, 59. ­54 Ikegami, Great Migrator, 117. See the iconographic, allegorical, general theory of the Combine developed along mythic lines by Thomas Crow, ‘Rise and Fall: Theme and Idea in the Combines of Robert Rauschenberg,’ Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, 2005, 231–55; its origins lie in Thomas Crow, ‘This Is Now: Becoming Robert Rauschenberg,’ Artforum, vol. 36, no. 1, September 1997, 95–6, 98, 100, 139, 140, 144, 152; and it was revisited in Thomas Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music and Design, 1930–1995, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, 58–73. A vague claim about an iconography of flying and the earth in Monogram had been made a few years earlier by Hultén who hesitantly saw this achieved through ‘the basic discipline of formal structure’ by which the elements ‘become poetic metaphors,’ while stating ‘I don’t think Rauschenberg tried to send a message in this piece,’ and it is this typically nebulous, contentless rhetoric of ‘poetry’ that I am trying to give firmer ground to with recourse to Surrealist poetics here, while I agree with Hultén about both the metaphorical freightage of Monogram and its refusal of meaning: Pontus Hultén and Julia Brown Turrell, ‘A Conversation about the Sculpture of Robert Rauschenberg,’ Rauschenberg Sculpture, 9–46, 34. The two best-known, now more-or-less derided iconographical readings of Rauschenberg’s work are, firstly, the one made at the time of the 1977 Washington and New York retrospective that claims ‘Rauschenberg’s images can be compared to rebuses,’ then goes ahead and shows how to do it in a manner thought ‘excruciatingly literal’ even by another iconographer: Charles Stuckey, ‘Reading Rauschenberg,’ Art in America, vol. 65, no. 2, March/April 1977, 74–84, 81; Feinstein, Random Order, 37; and, secondly, the other inspired by it that makes not only a point-forpoint comparison attempting to prove that Rauschenberg recreated Rembrandt’s Abduction of Ganymede (1635) in Canyon, for some reason, ‘capturing through thematic emphases, visual juxtapositions, and metaphor the specific character of Rembrandt’s image,’ but also serves up one of the most slapdash, unconvincing iconographic comparisons anywhere of an artist’s work with Duchamp’s tour de force The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even or Large Glass (1915–23): Kenneth Bendiner, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Canyon,’ Arts Magazine, vol. 56, no. 10, June 1982, 57–9, 59. In my second chapter, I footnoted the queer iconographic readings; these have been duelled over, which is unsurprising given the emotions

224

55 56

57

58

Notes that such writing on Rauschenberg’s work generally arouses: see Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Eye to the Ground,’ Artforum, vol. 44, no. 7, March 2006, 244–8 and 317; Jonathan Katz, ‘Iconoclash,’ Artforum, vol. 44, no. 9, May 2006, 24. This ‘worn-out debate’ could now be revived to include another heavily inferential, single work comparison, this time of Monogram with Courbet’s massive tableau The Painter’s Studio (1855) – ‘not to be overlooked as a mere citation among many’ – an interpretation that Rauschenberg himself had characterized to the author as her own ‘poetry,’ Wainwright, ‘Gustave and the Goat,’ 956, 962, 956 n. 1. Catherine Craft, Robert Rauschenberg, London and New York: Phaidon, 2013, 70. Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg: A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture, Houston, Chicago and London: The Menil Collection and The University of Chicago Press, 2000, 70. Steinberg did not use the word ‘dialectic’ in his interpretation of Bed but he came close, speaking of an ‘unresolvable paradox’ between oil paint and sheets, of a ‘contradiction in terms’ between its customary use and upright position, its ‘[c]ontradictory . . . conflation of private and public’ between bedroom and museum, and of Rauschenberg ‘unmaking distinctions’ through the work: Steinberg, Encounters, 51. For elements of ‘contrast,’ ‘contradiction,’ ‘compromise’ and ‘inversion’ between individual elements in Monogram, see Cranshaw and Lewis, ‘Re-reading Rauschenberg,’ 47. In interview late in life, Rauschenberg stated as follows: ‘Je suis un artiste instinctif. Le choix des images se déroule de la même manière que pour les objets. S’il y a une contradiction intéressante, induite par leur rapprochement, alors je préfère cela à l’harmonie,’ Emmanuelle Lequeux, ‘Interview de Robert Rauschenberg,’ Nice: Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Rauschenberg in the Gap between: Entretiens avec Robert Rauschenberg, 2005, 19–28, 25. Kotz actually referred to the ‘surreal and mysterious world’ of the Kabal American Zephyr series, with its ‘[u]nusual juxtapositions of unexpected objects,’ while Rauschenberg called it ‘fantasy-macabre’ (however, it was not directly inspired by Surrealism but by the nineteenth-century woodblock prints of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi): Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, 215, 229. As well as flatly contradicting the artist’s literalist aims, Hultén’s reading of the ‘visionary’ elements of Rauschenberg’s earlier Sor Aqua (Venetian) (1973), in which twisted metal is suspended over a water-filled bathtub, as ‘a cloud, kind of thunderstorm . . . attached to a floating anchor,’ evokes a perfectly Magrittean dialectical image awaiting its painter, as well as betraying the persistence of the ‘associative’ tendency in writing on the artist outside of but inspired by Surrealism: Hultén and Turrell in Rauschenberg Sculpture, 42. A reading by a Surrealist that takes its cue from Gablik to place contradiction at the heart of Magritte’s method compares the artist’s imagery with the objects of Oppenheim and Paalen, among others, as I do with Rauschenberg’s and Magritte’s here, and also signals the importance of Lautréamont to it, identifying fixity and mobility as one of the ten antitheses – as in the Monogram-like Companions of Fear (1942) – that govern the Magrittean image: Vincent Bounoure, ‘Ni Ni Pour,’ Bulletin de liaison surréaliste, no. 4, December 1971, 22–31, 26, 27, 28. The interpretation was elaborated to include more images and a rebuttal of the study of Magritte by Michael Foucault (that had first appeared in 1968 in Les Cahiers du chemin and was about to be published in an expanded form as the book This Is Not a Pipe in 1973), lauding the virtue of the oeuvre: ‘transposer la logique hégélienne dans l’ordre du visible,’

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Vincent Bounoure, ‘Le thème de la contradiction chez Magritte,’ L’Oeil, no. 206/207, February–March 1972, 5–11, 9. 59 René Magritte, ‘Life Line’ [1938], Selected Writings, ed. Kathleen Rooney and Eric Plattner, trans. Jo Levy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016, 58–67, 63. 60 Rauschenberg acquired another painting and four works on paper by Magritte from 1961 onwards according to Roberta ­B ernstein, ‘René Magritte and Jasper Johns: Making Thoughts Visible,’ Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, 2006, 109–123, 123 n. 8. Among other paintings, The Proper Image IV can be seen in photographs of the artist’s studio in the 1960s, see New York: Gagosian Gallery, Selections from the Private Collection of Robert Rauschenberg, 2012, 18, 58–65. Johns came to own one painting and six works on paper in various media by Magritte, the first received as a gift around 1960; he saw Magritte’s The Month of the Grape Harvest (1959) at the time of his second solo show at the galerie Rive Droite in 1961 (it had been in Magritte’s show of recent work in the same space in 1959), but could not afford to buy it: Bernstein in Magritte and Contemporary Art, 123 n. 8 and n. 23; and it was in that year that his work was compared with Magritte’s in the famous essay (published the following year) by Leo Steinberg, ‘Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art’ [1962, 1963], Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, 17–54, 41–2. For further word of Johns’s presence at the Magritte show at Sidney Janis (which was the first exhibit that the US artist saw of Magritte’s work) and his collecting of Magritte in the 1960s, see Lilian Tone, ‘Chronology,’ Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996, 118–396, 123. 61 Suzi Gablik, Living the Magical Life: An Oracular Adventure, Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 2002, 167; Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1980, 109; oral history interview with Suzi Gablik, 27 February–1 March 2015, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, n. p. 62 Tomkins, Off the Wall, 109; oral history interview with Suzi Gablik, n. p. Also see Gablik, Living the Magical Life, 11. Tomkins has the two artists meeting in winter 1954, but elsewhere the encounter has been situated before the Magritte event at Sidney Janis: Bernstein in Magritte and Contemporary Art, 110. Johns met Magritte himself only once, at the opening of the Magritte retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1965: ­Bernstein in Magritte and Contemporary Art, 111. 63 Gablik, Living the Magical Life, 11. 64 Gablik, Living the Magical Life, 23; oral history interview with Suzi Gablik, n. p. 65 Although Gablik reported eight months of co-habitation, the letters between Magritte and his friend and lawyer (and Gablik’s lover) Harry Torczyner reveal it lasted from the first week of October 1960 till about the last week of April 1961: Gablik, Magritte, 7, 136; René Magritte and Harry Torczyner, Letters between Friends, trans. Richard Miller, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, 58, 64; oral history interview with Suzi Gablik, n. p. 66 Gablik, Living the Magical Life, 115–16. 67 Gablik, Magritte, 102.

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68 See Gagosian Gallery, Selections from the Private Collection of Robert Rauschenberg, 64. The other painting by Magritte owned by Rauschenberg, The Eternally Obvious (1954), ‘reached Rauschenberg’ through Gablik: Gagosian Gallery, Selections from the Private Collection of Robert Rauschenberg, 18. Later, in 1965, Gablik would exchange with Johns a 1953 page of sketches gifted to her by Magritte (previously discarded by the artist and rediscovered by Gablik in Magritte’s attic where she had set up quarters) for a small Flag painting: Bernstein in Magritte and Contemporary Art, 123 n. 13; Gablik, Living the Magical Life, 116, 119–20. Gablik also owned Untitled (c. 1955) by Rauschenberg (with the small parachute filling most of the lower right corner), which she sold to Johns: oral history interview with Suzi Gablik, n. p. 69 Rauschenberg quoted in interview in 1968 in Hunter, Robert Rauschenberg, 139. 70 At some point, Magritte exchanged an unnamed oil painting with Rauschenberg, said to be ‘one of the prizes of [Rauschenberg’s] private collection,’ for the wholly unMagrittean First Time Painting (1961), made on stage during the performance Homage to David Tudor (1961) and shown at the Nouveau Réalisme group show of 13 June–13 September 1961, organized by Pierre Restany at the galerie Muratore: Tomkins, Off the Wall, 193; Amy Jo Dempsey, The Friendship of America and France: A New I­ nternationalism, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1999, 89. However, Magritte’s enthusiasm was not really stoked for either his or Johns’s work: when Torczyner informed Magritte in a letter of 11 April 1963 that he was expecting a visit from Rauschenberg, ‘considered the foremost representative of the neo-realist [Pop art] American school of painting, and a great admirer of Magritte’s work,’ the news did not register sufficiently with the older artist for him to mention it in his reply, and he was still getting Rauschenberg’s name wrong in 1966 (calling him ‘Schossberg’ in a letter of 1 February as he sent a drawing each for him, Johns and Gablik), two years after the US artist had won the Grand Prix to Best Foreign Artist at the Venice Biennale: Magritte and Torczyner, Letters between Friends, 81, 132. As for Johns’s work, it was directly criticised by Magritte (or at least his flags were, which Magritte presumably knew were by him) in an interview on Belgian television in 1964 when he lumped it together with Pop behind the question: ‘Are we permitted to expect from Pop art anything more than a sugar-coated Dadaism?’ quoted in Gablik, Magritte, 73. 71 John Bernard Myers, ‘Surrealism and New York Painting 1940–1948: A Reminiscence,’ Artforum, vol. 15, no. 8, April 1977, 55–7, 57. 72 Fleck in Heil, Fleck and Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, 148 n. 10; Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, Remaking the Readymade: Duchamp, Man Ray, and the Conundrum of the Replica, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, 58. 73 Trotsky’s statement had been quoted by the teacher and co-founder of the Egyptian Surrealist group Ramsis Yunan as an epigraph for his expository article ‘Harakat al-Suriyalizm’ (‘The Surrealist Movement’), which appeared in the Cairo journal al-Risala on 4 September 1939 (where Schwarz would have read it at some point in the years before his expulsion from Egypt in 1949, since he knew Yunan and other members of the group Art et Liberté): see Don LaCoss, ‘Egyptian Surrealism and “Degenerate Art” in 1939,’ The Arab Studies Journal, vol. 18, no. 1 (‘Visual Arts and Art Practices in the Middle East’), spring 2010, 78–117, 102; and Kamien-Kazhdan,

Notes

74 75 76 77

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Remaking the Readymade, 51, 52. Lebel stated after the funeral of Péret in September 1959 that he had recalled Trotsky’s quotation at that event: quoted in Fredrickson, Jean-Jacques Lebel and French Happenings of the 1960s, 37. The passage, which was translated in an abbreviated version in both Front unique and al-Risala, has been rendered into English directly from Trotsky’s 1926 tribute to the poet Sergei Essenin as follows: ‘The revolution, above all, will in lofty struggle win for every individual the right not only to bread but to poetry,’ Leon Trotsky, Art and Revolution: Writings on Literature, Politics, and Culture [1970], ed. Paul N. Siegel, New York: Pathfinder, 2015, 181–6, 184. Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘Avis’ Front unique, no. 2, winter 1960, 1–4. Jean-Louis Bedouin, ‘En franchise,’ Édouard Jaguer, ‘Quelques images du nord’ and Ragnar von Holten, ‘En suède: du surréalisme malgré tout,’ Front unique, no. 2, winter 1960, 6–7, 10–17 and 21–4. Gregory Corso, ‘On the Death of a Lucky Gent’ and Alain Jouffroy, ‘Ahhh . . . !’ Front unique, no. 2, winter 1960, 25, 27. Jean-Jacques Lebel and Alain Jouffroy, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’Anti-procès?’ Front unique, no. 2, winter 1960, 36–9, 37.

Chapter 5 1 2

3

4

5

The strong connection between periodical and event was made to me in author phone conversation with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 11 January 2018. See the trilingual poster for the Venice leg: Alain Jouffroy and Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘Anti-Procès’ [1960], in Axel Heil, Robert Fleck and Alyce Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2014, 145; ‘[l]’idée de jugement devrait disparaître,’ Duchamp quoted in Alain Jouffroy, ‘Interview exclusive, Marcel Duchamp: l’idée de jugement devrait disparaître,’ Arts, no. 491, 24–30 November 1954, 13 (Duchamp was suggesting the suspension of the critical judgement of current art, but his remark came to be generalized by Jouffroy as the detachment characteristic of Duchamp, the new generation of artists and their art, and, as in Anti-procès, much else besides). Robert Fleck, ‘Jean-Jacques Lebel and Critical Montrage,’ Heil, Fleck and Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, 133–56, 149; Jean-Jacques Lebel and Alain Jouffroy, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’Anti-procès?’ Front unique, no. 2, winter 1960, 36–9, 36; reprinted in Jean-Jacques Lebel, Retour d’exil: peintures, dessins, collages, 1954–1988, Paris: Galerie 1900–2000, 1988, 84. Also see Lebel’s remarks in Jean-Jacques Lebel and Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, Poésie directe: Happenings, Interventions, Paris: Opus International Edition, 1994, 22, 60; and for details of L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely, see Jean-Jacques Lebel and Androula Michaël, Happenings de Jean-Jacques Lebel ou l’insoumission radicale, Paris: Hazan, 2009, 36–47. Laurel Fredrickson, ‘Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Revolution: The French Happening, Surrealism, and the Algerian War,’ France and the Visual Arts since 1945: Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art, ed. Catherine Dossin, New York: Bloomsbury, 2018, 169–91, 169, 190. Lebel is absent and Surrealism and Algeria virtually so in the otherwise politically inflected exhibition and catalogue produced by Tate Modern: London, The World

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Goes Pop, 2015; the same goes for Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, International Pop, 2015, 11–74 (where the two early showings of Bed that I detail in this chapter and the next are absent from the Visual Chronology in spite of the pre-eminence given Rauschenberg). 6 Susan Sontag, ‘Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition’ [1962], Against Interpretation [1966], London: Vintage, 2001, 263–74, 266, 269. 7 Sontag, Against Interpretation, 270, 272. 8 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Artaud’ [1956], The Book to Come [1959], trans. Charlotte Mandell, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003, 34–40, 38; Michel Foucault, History of Madness [1961], ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, London and New York: Routledge, 2006; and see Artaud’s attack on all schools, systems and tendencies including Surrealism published in the third issue of Tel Quel in autumn 1960: Antonin Artaud, ‘Shit to the Spirit’ [1947], trans. Jack Hirschman, Artaud Anthology, ed. Jack Hirschman, San Francisco: City Lights, 1965, 106–12, 111. Also see the special issue of the poetry review La Tour de feu, no. 63–4, December 1959, dedicated to Artaud with contributions from Breton and André Masson. Sontag’s interest in and writing on Artaud led to the edited collection: Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. 9 Lebel’s admiration for Artaud as writer, actor and artist has been persistent and passionate from at last 1953 up to the present day: see, for instance, the interviews: Jean-Jacques Lebel and Cécile Bargues, ‘Il faut changer le jeu et non pas les pièces du jeu’ and André Berne-Joffrey and Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘Antonin Artaud,’ Nantes: Musée d’Arts de Nantes, Archipel: Fonds de dotation Jean-Jacques Lebel, 2020, 15–35, 35; 192–206. For his installation L’Hommage à Antonin Artaud (2002), see Paris: Centre Pompidou, Jean-Jacques Lebel, 2018, n. p. 10 Sontag, Against Interpretation, 265. 11 Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘Lettre ouverte au regardeur’ [1966] in Lebel and Labelle-Rojoux, Poésie directe, 119–28, 124. 12 ‘promotion à un rôle actif marque un changement capital: la fin du féodalisme culturel et le début de l’ère annoncée par Lautréamont et les libertaires. L’art, lui aussi, doit être fait par tous et non par un,’ Lebel in Lebel and Labelle-Rojoux, Poésie directe, 124. ‘Poetry must be made by all. Not by one,’ Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems [1869 and 1870], trans. Paul Knight, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988, 279 (translation modified). In my next two chapters, I explore the priority given the regardeur by Lebel and Jouffroy, the Surrealists and others, alongside the influential statement by Marcel Duchamp, ‘[c]e sont . . . les REGARDEURS qui font les tableaux,’ made in interview in January 1955 with the Surrealist Jean Schuster, ‘Marcel Duchamp, vite,’ Le Surréalisme, même, no. 2, spring 1957, 143–5, 143. 13 In a later reckoning, Lebel extolled the historical significance to Happenings of the mutation of the gallery space carried out by Frederick Kiesler’s design for Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century (1942) and the shows organized by the Surrealists from the International Exhibition of Surrealism of 1938 to the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) of 1959–60: Lebel and Bargues, ‘Il faut changer le jeu et non pas les pièces du jeu,’ Musée d’Arts de Nantes, Archipel, 21–2. 14 ‘l’expérience poétique,’ ‘l’acte poétique,’ Lebel and ­Labelle-Rojoux, Poésie directe, 14.

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15 ‘événements psychiques,’ Lebel and Labelle-Rojoux, Poésie directe, 14. The link between poésie directe and anarchist ‘direct action’ has been made with deeper reference to Stéphane Mallarmé by Hugo Daniel, ‘Insurrection de l’art,’ Centre Pompidou, Jean-Jacques Lebel, 33–44, 40. 16 ‘Il s’agissait pour moi, dans la lignée de la théorie et la pratique d’Artaud, d’un théâtre des opérations magiques, d’une part, et, d’autre part, dans le contexte de la mutation introduite par John Cage (abolition de la frontière entre l’art et la vie, écoute du quotidian), d’arracher les langages à leurs contextes et supports conventionnels. Tu as évoqué Rimbaud. C’est lui, en effet, qui annonce le déferlement du poème dans la vie. Le “dérèglement de tous les sens.” L’expérience vécue qui “écrit” l’écrivain. Tout cela, me semble-t-il, est contenu dans l’expression “poésie directe,”’ quoted in Lebel and Labelle-Rojoux, Poésie directe, 13–14. See the letters of 13 and 15 May 1871 addressed respectively to Georges Izambard and Paul Demeny: Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, ed. and trans. Wallace Fowlie, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1966, 302–5 and 304–11. According to Pierre Restany, Lebel drew his inspiration from readymades, the Surrealist game of the ‘Exquisite Corpse,’ Cage’s levelling, non-exclusionary aesthetic, Rauschenberg’s Combines, Allan Kaprow’s environments and Happenings, Nam June Paik’s performances, Nouveau Réaliste appropriation and Fluxus (further explaining the Surrealist complaint of his ‘total confusion of values’): Pierre Restany, ‘J.J. 2: The Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Libertarian Humanism,’ Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, 1998, 121–6, 123. Lebel’s interest in Cage seems to date from his teens, before he joined the Surrealists: Alyce Mahon, ‘Outrage aux Bonnes Moeurs: Jean-Jacques Lebel and the Marquis de Sade,’ Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, 93–112, 96. In a pioneering article on Cage drawn out of an interview with the composer, Lebel explored selected works in the oeuvre along with Cage’s anarchism, teaching, ­influence, place among the twentieth-century avant-gardes and overriding allegiance to chance and indeterminism, under a title signalling a shared respect for the work of Duchamp: Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘John Cage entouré de nus, vite,’ La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 17, 1–15 December 1966, 28–9; Paul B. Franklin, ‘Coming of Age with Marcel: An Interview with Jean-Jacques Lebel,’ Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, no. 7 (‘Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg, Patrick Waldberg’), 2006, 10–29, 27 n. 9. For a further indication of Lebel’s esteem for the composer, see the use of the photograph of Cage performing Electronic Music for Piano in Stockholm in September 1964 as the central spread for Jean-Jacques Lebel, Lettre ouverte au regardeur, Paris: Éditions de la Librairie Anglaise, 1966, n. p. 17 This is not to say that those French poets were unknown to Cage or even to Rauschenberg, of course: see the recent narrative of the reception of Artaud in the United States, partly influenced by Lebel, which at points even confirms the persistence of these lineages: Lucy Bradnock, No More Masterpieces: Modern Art after Artaud, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020, 16, 17, 44, 66, 106, 171–4. 18 ‘synopsis d’une expérience vécue,’ quoted in Lebel and Labelle-Rojoux, Poésie directe, 16. Among the Happenings he organized in the 1960s are those actually titled Poésie directe (1963) and Hommage à Lautréamont (1967): Lebel and Michaël, Happenings de Jean-Jacques Lebel, 86–9 and 222–5.

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19 Lebel and Labelle-Rojoux, Poésie directe, 62; Lebel and Michaël, Happenings de JeanJacques Lebel, 36. For evidence that the Milan leg was originally supposed to happen in October 1960 and the itinerary extend to Stockholm and New York, see the defence of the project by Alain Jouffroy, ‘En voilà une question!’ France observateur, no. 535, Wednesday 3 August 1960, 16. 20 Jean-Jacques Lebel, The Epic Story of a Painting by Erró Kidnapped for Fifty-Two Years, Bergamo: Rafael Edizioni, 2014, 7. For the Algerian War of Independence as the determining factor for the entire Anti-Procès project, see Lebel and Michaël, Happenings de Jean-Jacques Lebel, 36–7; and Lebel and Bargues, ‘Il faut changer le jeu et non pas les pièces du jeu,’ Musée d’Arts de Nantes, Archipel, 25. For the analogy drawn by Lebel between Artaud’s atrocious electro-shock treatment while in the asylum of Paraire in Rodez during the Second World War and contemporary incidents of torture in Algeria, see Berne-Joffrey and Lebel, ‘Antonin Artaud,’ Musée d’Arts de Nantes, Archipel, 194. 21 ‘la souveraineté du poète comme de l’artiste et leur ­désobéissance systématique à tous les dogmes,’ ‘un refus de respecter les idoles et les règles du jeu intellectuel,’ collective declaration titled ‘Pour le droit de l’homme à disposer de lui-même,’ poster for Antiprocès, Paris: Galerie des quatre saisons, 1960. Alongside their political declarations, the manifesto-like statements made in the publications that accompanied Anti-Procès at two of its three locations (Paris and Milan) took aim mainly at the domestication of avant-garde art by critics, dealers and museums; the ones from Paris and Venice along with a briefer one predating the Milan event are reproduced as part of the dossier in the second issue of Front unique: Lebel and Jouffroy, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’Antiprocès?’ 36–9; reprinted in Lebel, Retour d’exil, 84–6; also see Lebel and Michaël, Happenings de Jean-Jacques Lebel, 264–7. For a brief record of the performance held at the Paris Anti-procès, see Mahon in Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, 99. 22 ‘la sclérose générale des activités intellectuelles, tout entières empêtrées dans la critique que les hommes qui les assument s’adressent continuellement,’ Lebel and Jouffroy, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’Anti-procès?’ 36; reprinted in Lebel, Retour d’exil, 85–6. Édouard Jaguer seemed to think that Anti-Procès was at once an outcome of the Declaration of the 121 (even though the Paris and Venice events predated it) and an act of ‘dissidence ouvertement dirigée contre le “jugement moral” cher aux surréalistes et à leurs voisins de Phases,’ Édouard Jaguer, ‘À propos d’un écart absolu de Marcel Duchamp (et de l’exposition internationale du surréalisme de New York, 1960–61),’ Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, no. 5 (‘Marcel Duchamp & Salvador Dalí’), 2003, 23–47, 24. 23 See Jouffroy and Lebel in Heil, Fleck and Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, 145. 24 The Surrealist Group, ‘Back to Your Kennels, Yelpers of God’ [1948], Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (eds. and trans.), Surrealism against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001, 152–5. The catalogue statement at the Venice Anti-procès was briefer, consisting of the same three paragraphs that led out the declaration in the Venice poster plus a fourth, also carried by the poster, while the remarks about the Biennales and the ripe, Surrealist rant against religion and culture were not included: Venice: Galleria Il Canale, AntiProcès, 1960, n. p. 25 Mahon in Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, 102. Elsewhere, it has been stated: ‘L’oeuvre de Lebel est profondément marquée par ces années

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d’apprentissage au sein du groupe surréaliste,’ Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov, ‘Lebel et la bête,’ Centre Pompidou, Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15–24, 17. Also see Fredrickson, ‘JeanJacques Lebel’s Revolution,’ 177. 26 Lebel, The Epic Story of a Painting by Erró, 7. 27 ‘le besoin d’agir sur le monde, et de le transformer,’ Alain Jouffroy, ‘Pour un dépassement de l’Anti-Procès par lui-même,’ Milan: Galleria Brera, Anti-Procès 3, 1961, n. p. 28 ‘insoumission absolue,’ Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘Déclaration,’ Anti-Procès 3, n. p. 29 Lebel, The Epic Story of a Painting by Erró, 7–9. 30 Various, ‘Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War’ [1960], Richardson and Fijalkowski (eds. and trans.), Surrealism against the Current, 194–7, 196. 31 Lebel, The Epic Story of a Painting by Erró, 9. 32 Fleck in Heil, Fleck and Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, 137. 33 Fleck in Heil, Fleck and Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, 137. For a very rare, minor acknowledgement of the appearance of ‘un Combine de Rauschenberg’ at Anti-Procès (without mention that it was Bed), see Jean-Paul Ameline, ‘Comment les Combines de Robert Rauschenberg ont conquis l’Europe: essai d’histoire culturelle (1958–1964),’ Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, 2006, 287–306, n. 78. 34 Nicolas Calas, ‘Heirs U.S.A.’ [1959], Art in the Age of Risk and Other Essays, New York: E. F. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968, 16–25, 22–3. 35 James Leggio, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed and the Symbolism of the Body,’ Essays on Assemblage, New York: Museum of Modern Art, Studies in Modern Art, no. 2, 1992, 79–117, 80–1; Rauschenberg quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1980, 137. For another selection of the interpretations centring on sex and violence from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s with a view to disputing them, see Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg: A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture, Houston, Chicago and London: The Menil Collection and The University of Chicago Press, 2000, 48–9. The first published observation of its violent connotations seems to have been made in an unsigned, minor review of that 1958 show at Castelli’s gallery subheaded ‘The Man Who Painted His Bed,’ Anonymous, ‘Trend to the “Anti-Art,”’ Newsweek, 31 March 1958, 94. They were evoked again in another early, but this time influential assessment in this passage: ‘[i]s there any need before we go to bed to recite the history of the changes and will we in that bed be murdered? And how will our dreams, if we manage to go to sleep, suggest the next practical step?’ John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’ [1961], Silence: Lectures and Writings [1961], London: Marion Boyars, 1968, 98–108, 106. 36 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1995, 119. 37 Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 [1977], New York: NYRB, 2006, 195. Torture in Algeria had been revealed by a former Buchenwald internee Claude Bourdet in L’Express as early as January 1955, see Robert Gildea, France since 1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 28. Also see Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed, New Haven and London: Yale University

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Press, 2007; Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 38 Horne, Savage War of Peace, 200; Ross, Fast Cars, 111. Censorship became commonplace in France over those years: Sartre’s preface for La Question had appeared in March 1958 in L’Express, the popular review in newspaper format that was seized no less than twelve times between 1958 and 1962: Ross, Fast Cars, 214 n. 56. The February issue of France Observateur containing extracts from Alleg’s book was also confiscated: Henri Alleg, The Question [1958], trans. John Calder, London: John Calder, 1958, 7. 39 Horne, Savage War of Peace, 231–4. 40 See Alain Jouffroy, ‘La “Question” de Matta’ [1958], Une révolution du regard [1964], Paris: Gallimard, 2008, 83–91, 88–90; and the Paris installation photograph in Anti-Procès 3, n. p. In an unpublished note denouncing recent pleas by his former friend the artist Simon Hantaï for a return to Christian values and establishment of a right-wing avant-garde, Breton provided Alleg’s book as the context for those remarks, along with the suppression of Sartre’s text and, more anecdotally but equally revealing of the atmosphere in France at the time, the harassment of the Surrealist Georges Goldfayn who was reportedly reading La Question on a bus when two individuals insisted he destroy it in front of them: André Breton, ‘[Autour de l’exposition Hantaï à la galerie Kléber]’ [1958], Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4, Paris: Gallimard, 2008, 1152–4. 41 Catherine Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Works, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015, 139. 42 Lisa Wainwright, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Fabrics: Reconstructing Domestic Space,’ Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed, London: Thames and Hudson, 1996, 193–205, 196. Kachur’s characterization of the ‘traditional “log cabin” pattern’ of the quilt lends emphasis to the interpretation of the cosiness of Bed: Lewis Kachur, ‘D’Arcy Galleries and New York Late Surrealism: Duchamp, Johns, Rauschenberg,’Networking Surrealism in the USA: Agents, Artists, and the Market, ed. Julia Drost, Fabrice Flahutez, Anne Helmreich and Martin Schieder, Heidelberg: Arthistoricum.net, 2019, 448–61, 459. 43 Wainwright in Reed (ed.), Not at Home, 198. 44 Wainwright in Reed (ed.), Not at Home, 199. 45 Quoted by Wainwright in Reed (ed.), Not at Home, 200; Alan R. Solomon, ‘Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Rauschenberg,’ New York: The Jewish Museum, 1963, n. p. 46 Ross, Fast Cars, 108–11. For a more detailed account of consumerism, domesticity and gender in France after the Second World War, see Rebecca J. Pulju, Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 47 Ross, Fast Cars, 71–7 and 183; Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘A Future for the Novel’ [1956], For a New Novel [1963], trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989, 15–24, 19. 48 Leggio in Essays on Assemblage, 93, 95. Leggio has the Shroud of Turin – ‘encountered and responded to’ for the first time by artists in the twentieth century in Surrealism, we are told – acting as a point of comparison with Bed, where ‘the Shroud’s bloodstains testify to the torture of the redeemer’ (there is, however, no supporting evidence about the Surrealists’ interest in the Shroud and no awareness of their interpretation of Bed, even though such speculations add weight to my

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own reading of its latencies): Leggio in Essays on Assemblage, 84, 88. For equally extensive, over-assured readings of Rauschenberg’s earlier works as metaphors for the body, which seem unaware of Leggio (even though one makes the comparison with the Shroud) and avoid the word ‘metaphor,’ see the psychoanalytic discussion of Rauschenberg’s supposed ‘search in the outside world for the lost body of childhood’ given by way of the writings of Ernest Jones and Norman O. Brown (the quotation is from Brown’s Life against Death of 1959) by Helen Molesworth, ‘Before Bed’ [1993], Robert Rauschenberg, ed. Branden W. Joseph, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2002, 75–89, 85, 89; and the one about the Combines as ‘a form of surrogate body . . . materialization of the body’s absent presence . . . embodied beings,’ and so on: Graham Bader, ‘Rauschenberg’s Skin,’ Grey Room, no. 27, spring 2007, 104–18, 106, 109, 111. Elsewhere, two of the illustrations for Dante’s Inferno have been said to register the artist’s body metaphorically, indexically, synechdochally and literally: Joanne Morra, ‘Rauschenberg’s Skin: Autobiography, Indexicality, Auto-Eroticism,’ New Formations, no. 46 (‘The Prosthetic Aesthetic’), spring 2002, 48–63, 56–9. 49 Quoted in Various, ‘Is Today’s Artist with or against the Past?’ Art News, vol. 57, no. 4, summer (June/July/August) 1958, 28–9 and 42–6 and 54–8, 46. Saint Serapion was crucified in 1240 in Algiers, believe it or not, during the Crusades, and is often referred to as Saint Serapion of Algiers; the painting of the ‘minor, English-born saint’ had been purchased by the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1951 and seen by Rauschenberg when it was reproduced full page in colour to illustrate an article in Art News by the museum’s director about how museums grow their collections, which must have been prompted by the purchase: Charles C. Cunningham, ‘How to Buy? – and What,’ Art News, vol. 50, no. 7, November 1951, 30–3 and 60–1, 30. Frank O’Hara might have seen the reproduction in Art News or when he visited Rauschenberg in late 1954 or early in 1955 because he referred to Zurbarán’s painting in a poem written two years before the one he dedicated to Rauschenberg: Frank O’Hara, ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ [1957], The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara [1971], ed. Donald Allen, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972, 197–8, 197. 50 Ross, Fast Cars, 77–8. 51 Ross, Fast Cars, 119. 52 Ross, Fast Cars, 111. 53 Alleg, The Question, 33, 52, 92; Ross, Fast Cars, 112. 54 Lebel quoted in Laurel Jean Fredrickson, Jean-Jacques Lebel and French Happenings of the 1960s: The Erotics of Revolution, New York: Bloomsbury, 2021, 102. 55 Horne, Savage War of Peace, 416; Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968, London: Thames & Hudson, 2005, 147–8; Ross, Fast Cars, 82, 113. 56 See Horne, Savage War of Peace, 486–500. 57 ‘Contrairement à un Matta, qui juge ses personnages, et prononce de justes réquisitoires contre la torture, Rauschenberg . . . ne cherche pas à intervenir dans le débat des idéologies ou, s’il intervient oralement, c’est toujours pour accentuer l’ambiguïté de sa démarche . . ., ’ Alain Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ L’Oeil, no. 113, May 1964, 28–34 and 68–9, 69. 58 ‘Le politique peut être poétique, la poésie peut être du visuel et du sonore,’ quoted in Lebel and Labelle-Rojoux, Poésie directe, 63.

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59 The Surrealist Group, ‘Des Biscuits pour la route’ [1960], José Pierre (ed.), Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, 1922–1969, tome 2: 1940–1969, Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1982, 185–91, 185. See the full back page spread of Arts devoted to EROS that includes Jouffroy’s review listing the young artists in the show, including Rauschenberg and Johns, as evidence that ‘[u]n nouveau surréalisme, plus explosif et plus déconcertant encore que le premier, existe à l’état latent dans les expressions plastiques de très nombreux jeunes artistes. C’est peut-être de lui que dépendra l’orientation de l’art de demain,’ A. J. [Alain Jouffroy], ‘Cette exposition: Un défi,’ Arts, no. 754, 23–29 December 1959, 16. On the same page appears an account of the ceremony led by Jean Benoît that accompanied the event: Alain Jouffroy, ‘Un acte surréaliste: L’exécution du testament de Sade,’ Arts, no. 754, 23–29 December 1959, 16. 60 For this and the trial of the Surrealists’ publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert in 1956 for bringing out four volumes of Sade’s writings (he was acquitted only in 1958), see Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 171; and Alyce Mahon, The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020, 126–33. The allusion to the equal scandal of the ‘“private” parts’ and torture, alongside the ‘exploitation of man by man’ and ‘the unbearable shine of someone out of sync with his environment,’ was made in the catalogue of EROS by Nora Mitrani, ‘Scandal’ [1959], Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, trans. Rikki Ducornet, ed. Penelope Rosemont, London: The Athlone Press, 1998, 236 (this appeared as an entry in the ‘Lexique succinct de l’érotisme’ in the catalogue: N. M. [Nora Mitrani], ‘Scandale,’ André Breton (ed.), L’Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme 1959–1960, Paris: Galerie Daniel Cordier, 1959, 138); it was a residue of a longer, earlier consideration of the topic in which we read: ‘[s]candal occurs every time a different principle, forever esteemed base and accursed, replaces the identity principle of logicians: that other principle is analogy,’ Nora Mitrani, ‘Scandal with a Secret Face’ [1950], trans. Myrna Bell Rochester, Rosemont (ed.), Surrealist Women, 227–30, 229. For Mitrani’s definition of scandal in the EROS catalogue as an interpretive key to the exhibition through an ‘unveiling that traverses economic, political, sexual, and psychological categories,’ see Steven ­Harris, ‘EROS, C’est la Vie,’ Art History, vol. 43, no. 3, June 2020, 564–87, 568. One reviewer interpreted the sign outside EROS, ‘Children under sixteen years of age not admitted,’ as perhaps a means of fending off the attentions of the police or a deliberate provocation, adding: ‘[a] wave of sexual censorship under the pressure of ecclesiastical groups constitutes one of the more depressing of the secondary aspects of the Gaullist regime,’ Annette Michelson, ‘But Eros Sulks,’ Arts, vol. 34, no. 6, March 1960, 32–9, 32 n. 2. Although Leo Steinberg had called Bed perhaps ‘Rauschenberg’s profoundest symbolic gesture,’ which in its upright comportment ‘continues to work in the imagination as the eternal companion of our other resource, our horizontality, the flat bedding in which we do our begetting, conceiving, and dreaming,’ the author of ‘Other Criteria’ was incapable in his later writing of imagining Bed as the site of either sex or violence, delivering a feeble rebuttal to those who could by way of an unbelievable literalism (it bears paint not blood, he wrote, paint is just paint, the paint is not all red, the bed is a single one not double, the lower part of the quilt is undisturbed, it is a panel not a bed) and insisting on the limits of vision over fantasy, as though he were newly unaware of the capacity of both the human imagination and historical and institutional context to trigger meanings for the

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work: Leo Steinberg, ‘Other Criteria’ [1968, 1972], Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, 55–91, 90; Steinberg, Encounters, 48–50. 61 Horne, Savage War of Peace, 416; Ameline in Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, 297 n. 78. Neither Lebel nor Jouffroy have been mentioned historically or figure among the signatories in the main discussions of the Declaration of the 121; it is stated accurately that it ‘was later signed by Lebel’ by Mahon in Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, 100 n. 32; and Lebel recently confirmed to me that Jouffroy, too, sent his consent too late for the first edition, but in time for the second in October, which was evidently overlooked by Pierre (ed.), Tracts, tome 2, 207–8; author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15 December 2020. 62 Lebel, The Epic Story of a Painting by Erró, 9; author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 3 September 2021. In the same year, Lebel performed a similar gesture by attaching various documents referring to the conflict in Algeria across the lower portion of the collage Je hais le règne du bourgeois et du flic (1961), which also included the 1956 Surrealist tract he had signed, Hongrie, soleil levant (responding to the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution that year, but also mentioning Algeria), along with others connected to Front unique and Anti-Procès (the collage contains the entire poster advertising the first manifestation in Paris in 1960). Between the Anti-Procès held in Venice and the one in Milan, Lebel and Jouffroy participated in a debate titled ‘Il manifesto del 121 e la civilizzazione occidentale’ on 13 October 1960 in Milan; the printed invitation for the event is included prominently to the top right of Lebel’s collage Esprit de Sel (1961): see Saint-Étienne: Musée d’Art Moderne, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Peintures/Paintings/Collages/Assemblages, 1955–2012, 2012, 47. 63 Lebel, The Epic Story of a Painting by Erró, 5. See the telling comparison made between the Grand tableau and collective drawings made by Surrealists in Marseille in the early 1940s, on the one hand, and co-created works by Matta and Brauner on the other: Daniel in Centre Pompidou, Jean-Jacques Lebel, 39. 64 Lebel, Retour d’exil, 84; and Lebel, The Epic Story of a Painting by Erró, 14. 65 Author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15 December 2020. 66 Kristine Stiles, ‘Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Phoenix and Ash,’ Jean-Jacques Lebel: Works from 1960–1965, London: The Mayor Gallery, 2003, 3–12, 9; Lebel, The Epic Story of a Painting by Erró, 11; Fleck in Heil, Fleck and Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, 149. 67 Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990, 20, 41. 68 Nevertheless, one commentator on the Dante illustrations by Rauschenberg and Dalí, respectively (whose watercolours were executed over the period 1951–60, so coincided in the later phase with Rauschenberg’s project), wrote of Rauschenberg’s ‘conscious sense of anger, ranging from simple irritation to deep revulsion, at modern society’s transgressions, especially in the socio-political arena,’ but this is not fully borne out by the artist’s selections of imagery from the press: Jean-Pierre Barricelli, ‘The Conscious and the Subconscious: Rauschenberg and Dalí Face Dante,’ Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 24, no. 4, 1987, 353–69, 354. For a more detailed journey through the suite that again presents the artist unpersuasively as a ‘fierce critic of the times,’ see Jean-Pierre Barricelli, ‘Rauschenberg’s Infernal

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Commentary,’ François Jost with Melvin J. Friedman (eds.), Aesthetics and the Literature of Ideas: Essays in Honor of A. Owen Aldridge, Newark, NJ and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1990, 178–99, 178. Dore Ashton wrote at the time that throughout the Dante suite there are ‘statements against militarism, political conflict, senseless patriotism and crass popular ideals, couched in the symbolic terms dear to Dante’s heart,’ but if she had used the more neutral phrase ‘images of militarism . . . [etc.]’ it would have served Rauschenberg’s typically ambiguous motivation better: Dore Ashton, ‘The Collaboration Wheel: A Comment on Robert Rauschenberg’s Comment on Dante,’ Arts & Architecture, vol. 80, no. 12, December 1963, 10–11 and 37, 11. In her haste to credit Rauschenberg (and herself) with ‘the first idiosyncratic Dante interpretations of this century,’ Ashton showed herself unaware of Dali’s efforts, by the way, which are ‘idiosyncratic’ at the very least, and were preceded by two other visitations of the Inferno by Jean Fautrier in 1930–2 and George Grosz in 1932: Ashton, ‘The Collaboration Wheel,’ 10; Graham Smith, ‘Rauschenberg’s Modern Infernos for Life Magazine,’ Visual Resources, vol. 32, no. 1/2, 2016, 145–68, 147, 165 n. 27. Rauschenberg was still planning to embark on an illustration of the Purgatorio as late as 1983: Roni Feinstein, Random Order: The First Fifteen Years of Robert Rauschenberg’s Art, 1949–1964, unpublished Ph.D. ­dissertation, New York University, 1990, 379 n. 40. 69 Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, 169. 70 Quoted in Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, 185. By ‘man’s accomplishments,’ Rauschenberg must have been referring to space travel and the Moon landing (he was among the artists given access to the launch site of Apollo XI at Cape Canaveral, then called Cape Kennedy, one of only seven invited to witness the launch on 16 July 1969 as dupes of government publicity), which he did not seem to recognize as related to other government policies that damaged the environment, threatened nuclear war or caused poverty, all of which he cared about deeply, a point made long ago by Max Kozloff, ‘American Painting during the Cold War,’ Artforum, vol. 11, no. 9, May 1973, 43–54, 53. Rauschenberg’s contributions to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Art Program sent out strong nationalistic messages according to Christin J. Mamiya, ‘We the People: The Art of Robert Rauschenberg and the Construction of American National Identity,’ American Art, vol. 7, no. 3, summer 1993, 40–63; a limp defence of Rauschenberg’s fascination with the space programme is attempted by Robert S. Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, 105–15. For his uses of images of astronauts in his illustrations for Dante’s Inferno and elsewhere in the 1960s, see Graham Smith, ‘Rauschenberg, Dante, Kennedy, and Space Exploration,’ Source: Notes in the History of Art, vol. 35, no. 3, spring 2016, 258–67. Later he dipped his toe into various countries between 1985 and 1991 through his establishment of the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI), which was criticized for creating tourist art without consequence, on the one hand, and lauded for its advertisement of ‘American values’ on the other (Rauschenberg admired John F. Kennedy and supported Jimmy Carter’s Presidential campaign in 1977, and is called by a biographer ‘a patriot, a citizen activist, and a humanitarian’): Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, 12, 37, 41, 172, 178, 223, 272; Catherine Craft, Robert Rauschenberg, London and New York: Phaidon, 2013, 136–7.

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71 Dore Ashton, ‘Response to Crisis in American Art,’ Art in America, vol. 57, no. 1, January–February 1969, 24–35, 30. Following news of the My Lai massacre of 1968, Rauschenberg was a leading figure among the twenty-six artists who protested against the war in Vietnam by opposing US government sponsorship of the 1970 Venice Biennale through the withdrawal of their work: Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, 176, 180. 72 Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2010, 13. 73 See Paris: Galerie Louis Carré & Cie, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Transferts, 2016. 74 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 84. 75 Fleck in Heil, Fleck and Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, 139, 140. 76 Lóránd Hegyl, ‘Jean-Jacques Lebel, Last of the Dadaists,’ Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, 13–17, 15. In the same volume, Lebel is defined as a ‘Neo-Dadaist artist’ by Mahon: Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, 93. For the claim that Lebel was ‘always more impressed by the artistic ideas of the Dadaists’ than the Surrealists, see Gunnar B. Kvaran, ‘Lebel/ Rebel,’ Jean-Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, 51–8, 52. For evidence of Lebel’s remarkably prescient Pop sensibility, see the Colgate advertisement pasted into You Help America (NY) (1961), reproduced in Musée d’Art Moderne, Jean-Jacques Lebel, 52. 77 Jouffroy and Lebel in Heil, Fleck and Mahon, Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades, 145. 78 They might also have been meant to echo the male bodies on display in the recently completed illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, reproduced that year in Metro: see Laura Auricchio, ‘Lifting the Veil: Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Drawings for Dante’s Inferno and the Commercial Homoerotic Imagery of 1950s America,’ Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel and Ellen E. Berry (eds.), The Gay ‘90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies, New York and London: New York University Press, 1997, 119–54. 79 ‘baudruche,’ The Surrealist Group, ‘Tir de barrage’ [1960], Pierre (ed.), Tracts, tome 2, 197–204. 199. The tract was co-signed by members of the international art and culture movement Phases, including the artists Guido Biasi and Fahlström whose work was reproduced, nevertheless, a few months later in the second issue of Front unique: Pierre (ed.), Tracts, tome 2, 203. Lebel had published a collaborative picturepoem with Lam in the group’s magazine Phases earlier in the year, which only underscores the incestuousness of the situation: Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘Macumba,’ Phases, First Series, no. 5/6, January 1960, 29. 80 André Breton, ‘Ascendant Sign’ [1948], Free Rein, trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, 104–7, 107. 81 Pierre (ed.), Tracts, tome 2, 199. 82 ‘cette sinstre “liberté d’indifférence,”’ ‘[l]’affaire Alleg est sans doute l’affaire Dreyfus de notre temps,’ Charles Estienne, ‘Pour un jugement moral,’ France observateur, no. 531, Thursday 7 July 1960, 24. See Alain Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg et la liberté d’indifférence,’ XXe siècle, year 35, no. 40 (‘US Art 1’), June 1973, 125–31. 83 ‘toute responsabilité politique et morale,’ ‘ne se soucient plus de la liberté que pour la refuser (à soi-même et aux autres),’ ‘justification à l’inactivité collective, au wait and see de ceux qui ont oublié de changer le monde,’ Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘“Réponse à Charles Estienne,” France Observateur, 28 juillet 1960,’ Lebel and

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Michaël, Happenings de Jean-Jacques Lebel, 270. His target was the widely broadcast programme that I return to in my eighth chapter: ‘“Transform the world,” Marx said; “change life,” Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us,’ André Breton, ‘Speech to the Congress of Writers’ [1935], Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972, 234–41, 241. 84 ‘révolutionnaires de café,’ Jouffroy, ‘En voilà une question!’ 16. 85 Lebel, The Epic Story of a Painting by Erró, 7. 86 ‘la rue, de ses habitants et du climat même de notre époque,’ José Pierre, ‘Ou va l’art abstrait?’ Combat-Art, no. 79, 5 June 1961, 2.

Chapter 6 1

Along with the current Jasper Johns show, the forthcoming Rauschenberg events were publicized in an advertisement for Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery at the back of Édouard Jaguer’s review Phases when it was moving increasingly in the direction of Surrealism: Phases, no. 8, January 1963, n. p. 2 Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2010, 19, 54–5. 3 ‘une image de l’inconnu,’ ‘[j]usqu’à ce moment, je croyais que la poésie était seule capable d’explorer ce qui demeure inaccessible dans l’homme: Yves Tanguy me persuada contraire de la fonction exploratrice de la peinture, et du rapport fondamental qui la lie ainsi à la poésie. Depuis, tout tableau, toute sculpture propose à mes yeux un poème dans l’espace. La poésie englobant toute forme extrémiste d’expression, s’identifiant à elle chaque fois qu’elle atteint un degré d’intensité remarquable, la peinture n’est qu’un cas particulier de son langage . . . , ’ Alain Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard [1964], Paris: Gallimard, 2008, 9. 4 Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 21. 5 Alain Jouffroy, ‘Carnet de Bord,’ NÉON, no. 2, February 1948, n. p. 6 The exclusion of the painters and the ‘Brauner faction’ was made public in two separate, very brief announcements on the back cover of NÉON, no. 4, November 1948, n. p.: see The Surrealist Group, ‘[Exclusion de Matta]’ [1948] and ‘[Exclusion de Brauner]’ [1948], José Pierre (ed.), Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, 1922–1969, tome 2: 1940–1969, Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1982, 41–2 and 42–3. Also see Philippe Sergeant, Alain Jouffroy: L’Instant et les mots, Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1986, 76. For further details, see Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, revised and updated, Boston: Black Widow Press, 2009, 502–3. 7 See the poetic text: Alain Jouffroy, ‘Double envol,’ Le Surréalisme, même, no. 5, spring 1959, 49–51. 8 See André Breton, ‘Dernière heure,’ Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme, 1959– 1960, Paris: Galerie Daniel Cordier, 1959, 143. Jouffroy gave his own version of events via brief glimpses in his poems telling of Breton and the Surrealists’ dissatisfaction over his politics at some point and his physical treatment at their hands in 1948: Alain Jouffroy, ‘Déclaration d’indépendance’ [1959] and ‘Ose oser’ [1960], C’est, partout, ici: poèmes, Paris: Gallimard, 2001, 15–37, 23 and 39–51, 47.

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9 Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 554–5. 10 Sergeant, Alain Jouffroy, 119–21. See particularly the special numbers he edited of Opus international, nos. 19/20 (‘Surréalisme international’), October 1970 and Opus international, nos. 123/124 (‘André Breton et le surréalisme international’), April–May 1991. Jouffroy’s new closeness to Aragon and the French Communist Party brought about the end of his friendship with Lebel in 1968, which had already been strained by Jouffroy’s hostility to Happenings: author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15 December 2020. 11 See Roni Feinstein’s report of her interview with Jouffroy on 19 June 1982: Roni Feinstein, Random Order: The First Fifteen Years of Robert Rauschenberg’s Art, 1949–1964, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1990, 183–4 n. 10. The 1954 interview with Duchamp was the first Jouffroy carried out with anyone, arranged by Jean-Jacques’s father Robert Lebel whom he had known since 1948: Alain Jouffroy, ‘Interview exclusive, Marcel Duchamp: l’idée de jugement devrait disparaître,’ Arts, no. 491, 24–30 November 1954, 13; Sergeant, Alain Jouffroy, 117. Rauschenberg had met Duchamp at the joint show with Cy Twombly at the Stable Gallery, New York, in September–October 1953, which seems to have been the first Rauschenberg exhibition Duchamp attended, but a friendship only began after Duchamp’s visit to his studio in January 1959: see Barbara Rose, Rauschenberg, New York: Vintage, 1987, 63. ­12 Amy Jo Dempsey, The Friendship of America and France: A New Internationalism, unpublished Ph.D. diss-ertation, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1999, 54. 13 ‘Observant ce qui se passait autour de moi à Paris, et dans quelques villes d’Europe, j’ai été frappé d’abord par l’attitude de détachement adoptée par certains artistes à l’égard de leur oeuvre ou du besoin d’expression qui est censé lui correspondre. Les problèmes esthétiques posés par la plupart des peintres abstraits ont perdu de leur actualité et de leur virulence. La vie nous a rappelés à l’ordre: la quotidienneté, les incidents de la rue, les journaux, les événements politiques, les faits divers. C’est devant un tableau de Rauschenberg, Le Talisman [sic], exposé à la première Biennale de Paris, en octobre 1959, que je pris soudain conscience de ce retournement. L’atmosphère de danger, particulière à notre temps et à notre mode de vie, m’y a semblé miraculeusement captée, et je me souviens être resté de longues minutes, en compagnie de mon ami Jean-Jacques Lebel, devant ce tableau. Il nous faisait signe – un signe d’étrange complicité – à travers l’océan. L’expérience quotidenne la moins déchiffrable y était résumée d’un seul coup, à la manière des haïkus de Basho,’ Alain Jouffroy, ‘Pour une révolution du regard’ [1960, 1963, 1964], Une révolution du regard [1964], 185–209, 193. A later, briefer recollection confirming the importance of this episode can be found in Alain Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg et la liberté d’indifférence,’ XXe siècle, year 35, no. 40 (‘US Art 1’), June 1973, 125–31, 126. 14 André Breton, ‘Ascendant Sign’ (1948), Free Rein, trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Amboise, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995, 104–7 106 (first published as André Breton, ‘Signe ascendant’ [1948], NÉON, no. 1, January 1948, 1). The title of The Talisman (1888) by Paul Sérusier, Rauschenberg’s distant predecessor at the Académie Julian, held an obvious appeal for the later Breton who mentioned it several times in the 1950s when his interests had shifted with Surrealism’s towards magic; he first recalled the frequently cited story behind the

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small painting in print in 1951, comparing it with the gouache he owned by Charles Filiger now titled Symbolist Architecture with Two Green Bulls (c. 1900–1914), stating ‘[i]f this title had not already been used, I would give it to this unnamed and hardly larger painting by Filiger,’ André Breton, ‘Alfred Jarry as Precursor and Initiator’ [1951], Free Rein, 247–56, 255. 15 See Jouffroy’s comments in the reviews of Lebel’s work dating from May and June 1960 assembled in Jean-Jacques Lebel, Retour d’exil: peintures, dessins, collages, 1954–1988, Paris: Galerie 1900–2000, 1988, 64. 16 Sergeant, Alain Jouffroy, 119. 17 Sergeant, Alain Jouffroy, 119. 18 See Jean-Paul Ameline, ‘Comment les Combines de Rauschenberg ont conquis l’Europe: essai d’histoire culturelle (1958–1964),’ Paris: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, 2006, 287–306, 289. 19 ‘poésie en action,’ Alain Jouffroy, ‘De la rapidité de Steinberg à la lenteur de Baj’ [1961], Une révolution du regard, 178–84, 181. 20 Alain Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg o la guerra de Nueva York,’ Revista de la Universidad de México, no. 11, July 1962, 24–5, 24. 21 Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg o la guerra de Nueva York,’ 24. 22 Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg o la guerra de Nueva York,’ 24. 23 ‘remarquablement intelligents,’ ‘c’est un plaisir de les voir et de leur parler, d’avoir avec eux un échange,’ Duchamp quoted in Alain Jouffroy, ‘Conversations avec Marcel Duchamp (1954–1961),’ Une révolution du regard, 107–24, 113. 24 ‘Je vous l’ai dit déjà: Rauschenberg en est un en tout cas . . . et Tinguely . . . Mais il n’y en a pas tellement. Déjà je me sens réduit dans mes admirations. Évidemment, l’esprit surréaliste se manifeste aujourd’hui dans de nombreux cas isolés, malheuresement perdus dans la cohue actuelle. Même en peinture, l’individu a perdu ses droits,’ Duchamp quoted in Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 124 (Jouffroy’s ellipses). 25 ‘Sólo superficialmente pueden relacionarse sus obras con el dadaísmo europeo,’ Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg o la guerra de Nueva York,’ 25. 26 ‘un desarrollo inesperado, sobre otras bases, según otros métodos y para otros fines,’ Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg o la guerra de Nueva York,’ 25. 27 ‘idealismo impotento,’ Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg o la guerra de Nueva York,’ 25. 28 Author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15 December 2020. 29 Sergeant, Alain Jouffroy, 119. ‘magnifique initiative américaine,’ ‘qui tentait pour la première fois de situer dans une perspective historique un ensemble monumental d’objets, collages et assemblages,’ Alain Jouffroy, ‘Actualité du Collage,’ Paris: Galerie du Cercle, Collages et objets, 1962, n. p. The title of Jouffroy’s essay might well have been inspired by Rauschenberg’s widely discussed characterisation of his work in interview the year before: ‘[c]’est une actualité,’ André Parinaud, ‘Un “misfit” de la peinture new-yorkaise se confesse,’ Arts, no. 821, 10–16 May 1961, 18. For Jouffroy’s trip from November 1961 till January 1962, see Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 194; Lebel’s trip to New York on 1 November 1961, the seventh anniversary of the beginning of the war in Algeria, is logged by Kristine Stiles, ‘Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Phoenix and Ash,’ Jean-Jacques Lebel: Works from 1960–1965, London: The Mayor Gallery, 2003, 3–12, 9. 30 Sidney Janis, ‘On the Theme of the Exhibition’ [1962], Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Steven Henry Madoff, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997, 39–40, 39.

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31 Lebel’s absence was entailed by his father’s artistic direction of the gallery and requirement to avoid favouritism: author email correspondence with Jean-Jacques Lebel, 15 December 2020. 32 ‘la réalité brute,’ la réalité quotidienne,’ ‘fragments de réalité,’ ‘la réalité elle-même,’ Jouffroy in Collages et objets, n. p. 33 ‘la réalité sous un nouveau jour,’ ‘il n’y a qu’une lente et irréversible invasion de la réalité par l’art, la reconquête d’un domaine perdu par les chercheurs de formes nouvelles, et comme la volonté de réinvestir un monde qui se dérobait,’ Jouffroy in Collages et objets, n. p. 34 ‘On peut considérer toute cette junk culture, tout ce nouveau réalisme, comme une critique de la civilisation de l’objet: les collages politico-érotiques d’un Boris Lurie ou d’un Jean-Jacques Lebel expriment ouvertement ce que la “junk culture” suggère par énigmes. Ils affirment que l’homme est aliéné par son entourage, et tentent désespérément, par une insulte à cet entourage, d’opérer le miracle de la désaliénation. Tandis qu’un Rauschenberg, un Johns, un Dine, un Claes Oldenburg, mettent les objets et leur pouvoir à nu, sans jamais avoir recours au discours ni à la protestation explicite. Ils restituent le monde en vrac. Du même coup, le réalité industrielle et mécanique tout entière, vouée à l’exécration des esthètes depuis qu’elle existe, risque d’être prise finalement comme exemple du beau et de la poésie naturelle, modèle tellement inimitable qu’on le préfère quelquefois à l’oeuvre, et qu’on l’intronise, sans vêtements d’apparat, dans le royaume de la pure contemplation,’ Jouffroy, ‘Actualité du Collage,’ Collages et objets, n. p. (bold lettering in original). 35 ‘il s’agit de rencontres, d’affinités et de liens qu’une analyse déterministe rationelle ne saurait expliquer,’ Alain Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg ou le déclic mental,’ Aujourd’hui, no. 38, September 1962, 22–3, 22. 36 ‘annexe la réalité immédiate à l’art,’ Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg ou le déclic mental,’ 23. 37 ‘privés apparemment de tout sens symbolique,’ Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg ou le déclic mental,’ 23. 38 ‘la vision poétique d’un grand peintre,’ Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg ou le déclic mental,’ 23. The phrase was repeated in the longer consideration in the following year: Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 198. 39 Jouffroy stated categorically the importance of Duchamp’s pronouncement to his own way of understanding art in his introduction to Une révolution du regard: ‘“Ce sont les regardeurs qui font la peinture,” cette phrase de Marcel Duchamp reste pour moi la clé de toute “critique d’art,”’ Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 9. The correct quotation – ‘[c]e sont . . . les REGARDEURS qui font les tableaux’ – constitutes Duchamp’s opening edict in the interview of January 1955 with the Surrealist Jean Schuster, ‘Marcel Duchamp, vite,’ Le Surréalisme, même, no. 2, spring 1957, 143–5, 143; it gained greater accessibility when it was reprinted in Marcel Duchamp, Marchand du sel: Écrits de Marcel Duchamp, Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1958, 173. Jouffroy obviously discussed it at length with Lebel who gave the great axiom an even wider audience by misquoting it identically to Jouffroy in the article I mentioned in my fourth chapter that settled his departure from the Surrealist group: Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘Voici comment rêve, pense, joue, écrit, se fâche un jeune surréaliste,’ Arts, no. 768, 30 March–5 April 1960, 2. For word of Lebel’s lifelong devotion to Duchamp’s conception of beholder-made-participant

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and casual suggestion that it might have been invented by Giorgione in the fifteenth century, see Paul B. Franklin, ‘Coming of Age with Marcel: An Interview with Jean-Jacques Lebel,’ Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, no. 7 (‘Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg, Patrick Waldberg’), 2006, 10–29, 25, 29 n. 30. Recently, Lebel seemed to misplace the widely (mis)quoted slogan in Duchamp’s interviews of the 1960s with Pierre Cabanne and traced the word ‘regardeur’ to the late nineteenth century in the journals of Odilon Redon and the Goncourt brothers: Jean-Jacques Lebel and Cécile Bargues, ‘Il faut changer le jeu et non pas les pièces du jeu,’ Nantes: Musée d’Arts de Nantes, Archipel: Fonds de dotation Jean-Jacques Lebel, 2020, 15–35, 28 n. 30. 40 ‘Ce qui se passé en moi, quand je regarde un combine-painting de Robert Rauschenberg ou une sculpture télémagnétique de Takis, c’est une nouvelle ouverture vers l’imaginaire, où la réalité tout entière se décape dans un nouvel éclairage. Il ne s’agit plus de surréalité, mais d’une réinvention de la réalité dans l’imaginaire: les artistes dont je parle ici ne peuvent pas mieux être considérés comme des réalistes que comme des surréalistes. Ils ne sont, ils ne veulent ni réalistes ni surréalistes, ils improvisent leur pensée au-delà de cette contradiction, dans l’instant d’une vérité vécue et pensée. Tous, ils ont en commun de vouloir changer dans notre esprit notre vision du réel, et tous s’adressent pour cela davantage à notre ‘matière grise’ qu’à notre ‘rétine’: pour eux comme pour Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘la découverte de la réalité ne continuera d’aller de l’avant que si l’on abandonne les formes usées.’ La révolution du regard est une révolution mentale, qui bouleverser notre interprétation de l’oeuvre d’art. Le dialogue que les artistes nous proposent aujourd’hui, c’est entre deux consciences, entre deux demi-consciences qu’il peut s’établir. Le tableau a cessé d’être un mur et recommence à devenir transparent; son intentionalité reprend vie. Et cela, contre toute attente, dans la perspective préétablie avec cinquante ans d’avance Marcel Duchamp, dont l’influence, depuis 1954, n’a cessé de grandir. . . . Comme Duchamp, en effet, les jeunes artistes de New York et d’Europe cherchent à se créer des images qui les rendent indépendants du réel comme de l’imaginaire, des images qui créent autour d’elles un vide, des images qui désarçonnent le jugement esthétique ou morale, des images qui ne refusent pas plus le monde qu’elles ne l’acceptent, des images qui abolissent l’antagonisme de l’erreur et de la verité, des images où l’homme puisse se libérer tout entière de ce qu’il est et de ce qu’il n’est pas. La Mariée de Marcel Duchamp reste notre phare, mais son rayon nous atteint aujourd’hui au-delà de ce que l’histoire de l’art moderne nous a enseigné – à l’horizon de l’impossible, là où, comme me l’a dit Robert Rauschenberg, ‘vous ne pouvez rien faire si vous êtes hors de l’art et vous ne pouvez rien faire si vous êtes dans l’art.’ Rauschenberg réussit ce tour de force d’ouvrir toute grande une porte sur la réalité d’aujourd’hui sans pour autant fermer celle de l’art. Comme s’il avait signé un pacte de poète avec quelque chose d’indicible là, dans l’air, devant nous,’ Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 195–6. 41 André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ [1924], Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972, 1–47, 26; André Breton, ‘Lighthouse of The Bride’ [1934], Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor, London and New York: Harper & Row, 1972, 85–99.

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42 See Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘From Realism to Reality’ [1955 and 1963], For a New Novel [1963], trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989, 157–68, 158. 43 ‘Depuis l’avènement de l’impressionnisme, les productions visuelles s’arrêtent à la rétine. Impressionnisme, fauvisme, cubisme, abstraction, c’est toujours de la peinture rétinienne. Leurs préoccupations physiques: les réactions de couleurs, etc., mettent au second plan les réactions de la matière grise. Cela ne s’applique pas à tous les protagonistes de ces mouvements. Certains d’entre eux ont dépassé la rétine. Le grand mérite du surréalisme, c’est d’avoir tenté de se débarraser d’un contentement rétinien, de l’‘arrêt à la rétine,’’ Duchamp quoted in Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 110–11 (I cited this interview earlier under its first publication: Alain Jouffroy, ‘Interview exclusive, Marcel Duchamp: l’idée de jugement devrait disparaître,’ Arts, no. 491, 24–30 November 1954, 13). 44 In a letter sent from New York in 1945 to Brauner, Breton wrote of leafing through Cahiers d’Art with Duchamp before concluding to Brauner: ‘all works of art which make the slightest concession to the physical, to the physical aspect of things, to models nude or dressed, landscapes, still-lives, etc. and whatever distortion to which they may give rise, must be pitilessly shunned. All of that smacks of the vainest sort of Impressionism. Today, this must be the sole measure of judgement,’ letter of 27 October 1945, quoted by Didier Semin, ‘Victor Brauner and the Surrealist Movement,’ Houston: The Menil Collection (ed.), Victor Brauner: Surrealist Hieroglyphs, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001, 23–41, 34 (translation slightly modified). The following year, Duchamp was quoted making early mention of ‘the “retinal”/“grey matter” idea’ without using the actual terms: ‘I was interested in ideas – not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind. And my painting was, of course, at once regarded as “intellectual” “literary” painting,’ Marcel Duchamp, ‘Marcel Duchamp,’ The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 13, no. 4/5 (‘Eleven Europeans in America’), 1946, 19–21, 20. Then on 6 February 1950, he wrote to Michel Carrouges in response to a query and theory about the Large Glass: ‘I am indebted to Raymond Roussel for having enabled me, as early as 1912, to think of something other than retinal painting. (André Breton will enlighten you on this term as we discussed it together.),’ Marcel Duchamp, Affectt Marcel._ The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, eds. Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk, trans. Jill Taylor, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000, 287–8, 288. For Breton’s affable take up of Duchamp’s terminology immediately after the Jouffroy interview, see André Breton, ‘The Presence of the Gauls’ [1955], Surrealism and Painting, 333–6, 336; and again, later, in André Breton, ‘Concerning Symbolism’ [1958], Surrealism and Painting, 357–62, 360–1. The famous term was still making the rounds in Surrealism in the second half of the 1960s: see Gérard Legrand, Gauguin, Paris: Club d’Art Bordas, 1966, 52. 45 Alain Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ L’Oeil, no. 113, May 1964, 28–34 and 68–9. 46 Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 32–3, 34. 47 Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 30, 33. 48 Roger Cranshaw and Adrian Lewis, ‘Re-reading Rauschenberg,’ Artscribe, no. 29, June 1981, 44–51, 49. Brian O’Doherty has been the main adherent of the notion of Rauschenberg as an ‘American Adam’ and although he opposed his better-known, carefully articulated notion of the ‘vernacular glance’ – the Cagean, levelling gaze, which ‘doesn’t recognize categories of the beautiful and ugly. It’s just interested

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in what’s there’ – to ‘the pastoral nineteenth-century “walk,” where habitual curiosity provoked wonder,’ he made no direct link between the contemporary idea and that of the flâneur of early modernity: Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth, New York: Random House, 1973, 201. Also see Brian O’Doherty, ‘Rauschenberg and the Vernacular Glance,’ Art in America, vol. 61, no. 5, September–October 1973, 82–7. For a critique of and alternative to the O’Doherty/Cage glance that, by contrast, treats several Combines of the mid-fifties to the ‘full contemplative regard,’ see Graham Smith, ‘Contemplating Photographs in Rauschenberg’s Early Work,’ History of Photography, vol. 38, no. 2, May 2014, 113–36, 134. 49 ‘le Constantin Guys de l’ère atomique,’ Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 34. 50 See https://vault.si.com/vault/1958/08/04/41425#&gid=ci0258c0b6b001278a&p id=41425—017—image (accessed 25 February 2022). Thank you to Ed Krčma for directing me to this source. 51 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ [1859–63], The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays [1964], ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, London: Phaidon, 1995, 1–41, 12. 52 Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 6, 9. ­53 Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 9. 54 ‘Rauschenberg paraissait fidèle à l’esprit des grands écrivains américains qui, tous, d’une manière ou d’une autre, ont su montrer leur opposition personelle à la civilisation dans laquelle ils s’inscrivaient, fidèle en particulier à l’esprit de la Beat Generation, à celui d’Allen Ginsberg, l’auteur de “Howl” et d’‘America’: la société industrielle des Etats-Unis, pour la première fois, se trouvait magistralement éclairée, comme sur une scène où les objets-symboles de l’‘American Way of Life,’ la morale de l’optimisme et du sourire obligatoire, prenaient tout à coup pour les yeux de l’amateur d’art leur signification tragique. Une première, une géniale leçon de poésie était ainsi donnée par un peintre d’avant-garde américaine,’ Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 33. 55 Sergeant, Alain Jouffroy, 134; ‘Y a-t-il un rapport entre votre démarche et celle de la Beat génération?’/‘Pas consciemment,’ André Parinaud, ‘Un “misfit” de la peinture new-yorkaise se confesse,’ 18. 56 For an enlightening and extended if sometimes heavily inferential foray into an interpretation of the work of the 1950s informed by the urban history of that part of the city, see Robert S. Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, 41–104. There is some fascinating detail about the urban renewal that surrounded Rauschenberg in Lower Manhattan from the late 1950s through the 1960s, under a meta-argument about the stakes of interpretation in the oeuvre, in Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009, 109–26. 57 ‘Sa poétique dépassé le cadre étouffant dans lequel elle a surgi, et ce qui m’a touché moi-même à New York lorsque j’ai vu les oeuvres de Rauschenberg dans leur contexte visuel, c’est la puissance offensive de toutes les sociétés industrielles dont l’implacable défi à l’individu nous est ainsi restitué,’ Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 33. 58 ‘l’oeuvre de Rauschenberg est particulièrement représentative de la mondialisation de toute forme d’expression,’ ‘[l]’art de demain sera planétaire ou ne sera pas,’ Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 34. ‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all,’ André Breton, Nadja [1928], trans. Richard Howard, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1960, 160.

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59 Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 34, 68. 60 ‘et même l’onirisme des surréalistes,’ Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 68. 61 Carole Reynaud Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes 1919–1969 [2001], Paris: CNRS, 2010, 276. Revel had published in Le Surréalisme, même as early as 1958 and later contributed to the catalogue of L’Écart absolu: Jean-François Revel, ‘Jesus Bond contre Docteur Yes,’ Paris: Galerie de l’Oeil, L’Écart absolu, 1965, n. p. 62 Jean-François Revel, ‘XXXIIe Biennale de Venise: Triomphe du “Réalisme Nationaliste,”’ L’Oeil, no. 115/116, August 1964, 2–11, 2. Johns came in for the same treatment from the author because his maps of the United States were ‘moins troublantes que l’Europe après la pluie [1940–2] de Max Ernst,’ even though he agreed that the glory days of the École de Paris were over: Revel, ‘XXXIIe Biennale de Venise,’ 6, 10. That object by Miró has come in for comparison or contrast with Rauschenberg’s Combines a few times: called on one occasion ‘a mélange of bright unreconciled bits,’ we are told it ‘is not in the least like Rauschenberg, whose divergent bits are unanimously reconciled, for all their heterogeneity, by the patina of paint and wear,’ by Lawrence Alloway, ‘Rauschenberg’s Development,’ Washington: National Collection of Fine Arts, Robert Rauschenberg, 1976, 3–23, 6; elsewhere, it bears mild comparison but is said to lack ‘the scale, presence, and abundance (both of form and content) of the more contemporary artist’s work,’ Feinstein, Random Order, 201. Rauschenberg saw Miró’s object alongside others by Surrealists at The Art of Assemblage and although it was not, in fact, positioned next to Bicycle Wheel (1913) he might have been referring to that occasion when he recalled his first encounter with Duchamp’s readymade at MOMA ‘by a – a Miró. And – and they both looked equally interesting to me,’ quoted in Robert Rauschenberg, video interview by David A. Ross, Walter Hopps, Gary Garrels and Peter Samis, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 6 May 1999, unpublished transcript at the SFMOMA Research Library and Archives, N 6537.R27 A35 1999a, 48. Another object by Miró, owned by Breton and titled by him L’Objet du couchant (1935–6), can be seen to the right foreground of the frequently reproduced installation photograph of EROS where it faced Bed at the far end of the corridor; as Pierre put it later, Bed was ‘totalement inconnu de la critique d’art parisienne,’ but the apathetic, unimaginative linking of the two works in the review of the show by René Dazy in Libération – ‘[u]n lit peinturluré s’intitule tout simplement The Bed. Voici Le tronc d’arbre, et c’est vraiment un tronc d’arbre . . . ’ – met with a combination of hilarity, disappointment and incredulity from Robert Benayoun who scripted the riposte to the idle critics of the exhibition, published in BIEF: Jonction surréaliste in February 1960 and signed by The Surrealist Group, ‘Des biscuits pour la route’ [1960], Pierre (ed.), Tracts, tome 2, 185–91, 188, 383. 63 ‘compensée par une forte inclination à considérer l’objet comme une somme de significations indéchiffrables,’ Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 68. 64 André Breton, Mad Love [1937], trans. Mary Ann Caws, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987, 16. 65 ‘ce surréalisme de l’objet errant: sa fonction et la destination semblent définitivement perdues,’ Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 68. 66 ‘mais parce que la poésie, et la poésie seul, y est présente,’ ‘plus clairement le génie poétique de Rauschenberg,’ Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 68. 67 ‘caractère mystérieusement accusateur de l’oeuvre,’ Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 68.

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68 ‘Tournée vers la totalité du monde actuel . . . se présente donc comme un hommage à cette totalité, et non pas comme une critique,’ Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 69. 69 ‘le désir individual est détourné par l’organsation générale de la société,’ Jouffroy, ‘Rauschenberg et la liberté d’indifférence,’ 128. ­70 Quoted in oral history interview with Robert Rauschenberg, 21 December 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, n. p. 71 Quoted in Ikegami, The Great Migrator, 62, 63. 72 Laurie J. Monahan, ‘Cultural Cartography: American Designs at the 1964 Venice Biennale,’ Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945– 1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1990, 369–416, 382. 73 Alan R. Solomon, XXXII Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d’Arte, Venezia 1964/XXXII International Biennial Exhibition of Art, Venice 1964: Stati Uniti d’America/USA, New York: The Jewish Museum, 1964, n. p. 74 Monahan in Guilbaut (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism, 388, 394. 75 Ikegami, The Great Migrator, 71. 76 Monahan in Guilbaut (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism, 388, 405. For an interpretation of Rauschenberg’s eagles, politicians and military imagery at the Biennale and elsewhere as readably nationalistic, see Christin J. Mamiya, ‘We the People: The Art of Robert Rauschenberg and the Construction of American National Identity,’ American Art, vol. 7, no. 3, summer 1993, 40–63. 77 ‘ils renvoient aux palissades terrifiantes du petit matin, en banlieue, à l’anarchie tragique des terrains vagues, à la déréliction de l’homme englouti de la cité,’ Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 191. 78 More than other media or the passage of night and day, the monochromatic colour scheme of Barge seems chiefly determined by black and white television – the artist became famously devoted to the medium from the 1960s and the making of Barge was filmed by CBS and screened in 1962: Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1980, 201. For Rauschenberg’s recollection that Barge was completed in a single forty-eight hour session, propelled by the excitement of viewing a work by Dine, see John Gruen, ‘Robert Rauschenberg: An Audience of One,’ ARTnews, vol. 76, no. 2, February 1977, 44–8, 48. ­79 ‘Pas de jugement dans Barge, pas d’attitude morale et donc ni optimisme, ni pessimisme, mais l’accueil de tout ce que le présent voile et nous dévoile, comme s’il s’agissait pour l’artiste de capter le filigrane des événements, leur texture secrète, leur apparition-disparition continuelle, dans le libre jeu d’une histoire errante qui est autant la sienne que la nôtre, Ainsi l’instant, capté comme dans un immense filet, se mue-t-il en substance immémoriale où le passé et l’avenir s’interpénètrent et s’évanouissent l’un dans l’autre. . . . on peut aussi bien y découvrir, comme le fait le musicien John Cage, “une fête pour célébrer la non-fixité,” c’est-à-dire la saisie contemplative de tout ce qui, dans le réel, nous fuit, se dérobe en tout cas à nos analyses et à nos raisonnements. . . . Tout se passé en effet comme si Rauschenberg voulait . . . nous confronter profondément avec ce que nous “voyons” tous les jours et que nous ne savons précisément pas dépasser: rendre voyante, clairvoyante, en tout cas plus aimante que ne le permet la hâte, notre perception quotidienne du monde,’ Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 197. See John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’ [1961], Silence: Lectures and Writings [1961], London: Marion Boyars, 1968, 98–108, 98.

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80 John Cage, ‘Experimental Music’ [1961], Silence, 7–13, 12. 81 Alain Jouffroy and Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Barge,’ Quadrum, no. 15, 1963, 99–106 and 182. For a shortened version, see Alain Jouffroy, ‘Barge’ [1963], C’est, partout, ici, 53–5. 82 In the 1964 article in L’Oeil, Jouffroy characterized the scope that Barge introduced into the visual field of art by way of the vocabulary of film, calling it a ‘un immense travelling’ [‘a vast travelling shot’]: Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ 68. 83 Breton, Free Rein, 106. 84 ‘souvenir d’un monde,’ Jouffroy, ‘Barge,’ 106. 85 ‘le train va le bateau va le camion va le passant va le regardeur va la bombe va,’ Jouffroy, ‘Barge,’ 105. 86 It was originally published in a limited edition with nine etchings by Wifredo Lam: Alain Jouffroy, L’Antichambre de la nature, Paris: Odette Lazar-Vernet, 1966. 87 Breton, Mad Love, 21. ­88 Alain Jouffroy, ‘L’antichambre de la nature’ [1964], C’est aujourd’hui toujours (1947–1998), Paris: Gallimard, 1999, 81–91, 86. 89 ‘Rauschenberg n’a rien d’un sociologue, tout d’un poète. Sa transparence à l’instant présent est totale. Il poursuit à mes yeux la quête d’un réalisme ouvert commencée par Matta,’ Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 261. On this issue of the dual significance of the two artists for Jouffroy, it is worth noting that in 1953, Rauschenberg had exchanged one of his Black Paintings (1951–3) with Cage for a drawing by Matta, which he seems to have then used as the support for a preliminary study for Minutiae (1954), yet his artistic relationship with the Surrealist artist is more distant (or is at least currently less assessable) than the one with Willem de Kooning, whose drawing he had erased the same year: Charles Stuckey, ‘Minutiae and Rauschenberg’s Combine Mode,’ Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, 2005, 199–209, 206. 90 ‘Rauschenberg est-il surréaliste? Réaliste?’ Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 198. 91 ‘révision de tous les concepts esthétiques et philosophiques,’ Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 198. 92 ‘Rauschenberg se situe au-delà du surréalisme, au-delà du réalisme,’ Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 198. 93 ‘Si grand qu’ait été le surréalisme, si omniprésente son action sur les développements de la création artistique, et tout pariculièrement sur la peinture, il n’en est pas moins devenu le background devant lequel se profile aujourd’hui au premier plan la silhouette de ceux qui participent à l’invention d’un nouvel art. Robert Rauschenberg, qui a accepté d’envoyer des oeuvres à une exposition organisée par Marcel Duchamp et André Breton, mais aussi à l’Anti-procès où le surréalisme n’était pas le dénominateur commun, n’appartient en vérité à aucun groupe, pas même à ce Pop art auquel il prête aujourd’hui sa fièvre et son intelligence. Telle doit être la singularité du peintre ou du poète qu’elle ne s’intègre jamais à aucune morale, à aucune politique de groupe, de parti ou d’État,’ Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 198–9. ­94 ‘ne tend pas à imposer de vision surréelle,’ ‘prennent le pas sur le culte du merveilleux,’ Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 199. 95 Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 199; Cage, Silence, 98; Paris: Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Rauschenberg, 1963, n. p. For the ominous but enigmatic poster and sign, see Breton, Nadja, 27–9, 129–30, 134.

248 96 97 98 99 100

101

102 103 104 105

106 107

Notes ‘Tout surréalisme, tout réalisme sont des sphinx,’ Jouffroy, Une révolution du regard, 199. For more on the ‘scandal,’ see Ikegami, Great Migrator, 51–101. For notice of Ernst’s dismissal, see The Surrealist Group, ‘A son gré,’ Médium: Communication surréaliste, no. 4, January 1955, 36. ‘Par définition le surréalisme ne saurait s’inscrire, quelque forme qu’elle prenne, contre aucune nouvelle expression de la révolte,’ André Breton, ‘Entretien avec Guy Dumur’ [1964], Perspective Cavalière, Paris: Gallimard, 1970, 227–37, 231. ‘De par ses constitutions poétiques mêmes, le surréalisme répugne à tout ce qui, dans l’oeuvre plastique, peut faire appel aux déchets et résidus. . . . Le “happening,” progéniture d’Hellzapoppin, me semble frôler un des pires écueils, celui de la promiscuité sexuelle. Par ailleurs, j’ai déjà trop fait état de mon peu d’appétit devant les oeuvres de fiction pour qu’on attende de moi, sur le “nouveau roman,” un jugement pleinement averti. Cela dit, rien me m’empêchera de porter intérêt à ce que signent Rauschenberg ou Télémaque, ni Jouffroy, en dépit de nos vives dissensions, non plus que Robbe-Grillet, Sollers ou Butor,’ Breton, Perspective Cavalière, 232. Lebel took the remarks in Le Nouvel observateur to be directed partly at himself because, as he testified later, while in New York during the war, Breton had taken his daughter Aube and Lebel as children to see the comedy musical Hellzapoppin’ and it had effected Lebel greatly; his response to Breton was to stage the Happening 120 Minutes Dedicated to the Divine Marquis (1966) at the Théâtre de la Chimère, which was located in the same building as Breton’s apartment at 42 rue Fontaine: JeanJacques Lebel and Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, Poésie directe: Happenings, Interventions, Paris: Opus International Edition, 1994, 72–3; Jean-Jacques Lebel and Androula Michaël, Happenings de Jean-Jacques Lebel ou l’insoumission radicale, Paris: Hazan, 2009, 176–209. Various, ‘Les 10 plus grands artistes révéles depuis 20 ans,’ Arts, no. 1011, 23 June– 6 July 1965, 2–11. ‘pape,’ ‘entouré de ses grands prêtres, Johns, Oldenburg, Dine, Stella,’ Pierre Cabanne, ‘L’Amérique proclame la fin de l’École de Paris et lance le Pop’Art pour coloniser l’Europe,’ Arts, no. 968, 24–30 June 1964, 16. The contrast between the scorn shown towards Rauschenberg in 1964 and the enthusiasm of 1965 was noted at the time by Dorothy Gees Seckler, ‘The Artist Speaks: Robert Rauschenberg,’ Art in America, vol. 54, May-June 1966, 73–84, 73. Breton’s choices were listed alphabetically in the review (two were misspelt, possibly confirming their relative obscurity to the editors of Arts): Pierre Alechinsky, Enrico Baj, Jean Benoît, Jorge Camacho, Jean Degottex, Alberto Gironella, Konrad Klapheck, Robert Rauschenberg, Max Walter Svanberg, Hervé Télémaque: Various, ‘Les 10 plus grands artistes révéles depuis 20 ans,’ 5. Breton made a point of declaring their nationalities in his correspondence with Arts: see http://www.andrebreton.fr/ work/56600100250980 (accessed 14 October 2015). Robert Benayoun, ‘Où rien n’arrive,’ La Brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 6, June 1964, 12–21, 12; Dore Ashton quoted in Various, ‘A Symposium on Pop Art’ [1963], Madoff (ed.), Pop Art, 65–81, 69–73, 70. André Breton, ‘René Magritte’s Breadth of Vision’ [1964], Surrealism and Painting, 401–3, 401–2 n. 1. Pierre had referred warmly to Ashton’s statement while mildly absolving several Pop artists from the accusation of literalism and rejecting the

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charge entirely for Rauschenberg and Rosenquist: José Pierre, ‘POP! POP! POP! D’une esthétique des lieux communs II,’ Combat-Art, no. 103, 7 October 1963, 2; then again the following year in his contribution to the outcry at Rauschenberg’s success at the Venice Biennale and the spectacle of Pop there (neither of which he was prepared to condemn) where he also referred to Benayoun’s ‘remarquable article’ on Pop in La Brèche the previous month and to Ernst’s award at Venice ten years earlier: José Pierre, ‘Les Ravaudeuses contre le pop, ’ Combat, no, 6249, 27 July 1964, 7. 108 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ghosts in the Mirror [1984], trans. Jo Levy, London: John Calder, 1988, 135. See Michel Butor, ‘Heptaèdre Héliotrope,’ La Nouvelle Revue française, year 15, no. 172 (‘André Breton et le mouvement surréaliste’), 1 April 1967, 750–79. Robbe-Grillet’s self-confessed closeness to Surrealism is a big topic that cannot be discussed here: ‘[i]t would be difficult for me to say in a precise way what elements in my films might be considered surrealistic. I feel strongly that I am a descendant of Surrealism,’ Anthony N. Fragola and Roch C. Smith, The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992, 134. For more on the subject, see Jean Roudaut, ‘Deux éléments surréalistes dans les écrits de Robbe-Grillet,’ Obliques, no. 16/17, 1978, 141–5; John J. Michalczyk, ‘Neo-Surrealist Elements in Robbe-Grillet’s Glissements progressifs du plaisir,’ The French Review, vol. 56, no. 1, October 1982, 87–92; Anthony Fragola, ‘Surrealism Revisited: Style and Technique in Robbe-Grillet’s La Belle Captive and Eden and After,’ Symposium, vol. 43, no. 4, winter 1989–90, 260–73. Claude Simon admired certain Surrealist artists but his ‘ambivalent’ attitude towards Surrealism rested mainly on his own insistence on the ‘aesthetic unity’ that he believed automatic writing could not guarantee: see Jean H. Duffy, Reading between the Lines: Claude Simon and the Visual Arts, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998, 158. This is borne out by the contents of Breton’s library: although he received signed copies of Butor’s L’Emploi du temps (1956), La Modification (1957), Le Génie du lieu (1958), Répertoire II (1964) and Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie (1957), he neither received from nor owned anything by Simon, see https://www.andrebreton.fr/en/person/16816 (accessed 17 August 2021).

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4 5 6

Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘Samuel Beckett, or Presence on the Stage’ [1953 and 1957], For a New Novel [1963], trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989, 111–25, 115. Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory,’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, autumn 2001, 1–22, 2–3. Brown, ‘Thing Theory,’ 4. Brown, ‘Thing Theory,’ 2 n. 2, 3, 6. Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘Nature, Humanism, Tragedy’ [1958], For a New Novel, 49–75, 69. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ghosts in the Mirror [1984], trans. Jo Levy, London: John Calder, 1988, 137.

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Robert Rauschenberg and Alain Robbe-Grillet, Traces suspectes en surface, West Islip NY: Universal Limited Art Editions, 1978. For further evidence of RobbeGrillet’s interest in both Johns and Rauschenberg, see Alain Robbe-Grillet, Topology of a Phantom City [1976], trans. J. A. Underwood, New York: Grove Press, 1977; Bruce Morrissette, ‘Generative Techniques in Robbe-Grillet and Ricardou’ and Alain Robbe-Grillet ‘Images and Texts: A Dialogue,’ Generative Literature and Generative Art, ed. David Leach, Fredericton, NB: York Press, 1983, 25–34 and 38–47; Marguerite Kathleen Garstin, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Visual Techniques, 1949–1970: Affinities with Metaphysical Painting, Surrealism, and Pop Art, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alberta, 1985. For the limited commentary on Robbe-Grillet’s art writings, see Bruce Morrissette, Intertextual Assemblage in Robbe-Grillet from Topology to the Golden Triangle, Fredericton, NB: York Press, 1979; Anthony Fragola, ‘Art as a Source of Imagistic Generator for Narrative,’ Journal of Film and Video, vol. 42, no. 3, fall 1990, 41–50; Ben Stoltzfus, ‘Introduction’ and ‘The Elusive Heroine: An Interarts Essay,’ Alain Robbe-grilxlet, La Belle Captive: A Novel [1975], trans. Ben Stoltzfus, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996, 1–9, 161–213; Ben Stoltzfus, ‘Jasper Johns and Alain Robbe-Grillet: An Interarts Essay,’ Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jasper Johns, The Target [1978], trans. Ben Stoltzfus, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006, 75–108. For evidence of a close interest in Rauschenberg and Johns by other Nouveaux Romanciers, see Claude Simon, Conducting Bodies [1971], trans. Helen R. Lane, New York: Grove Press, 1974; Claud Duverlie and Claude Simon, ‘Interview: the Crossing of the Image,’ Diacritics, vol. 7, no. 4, winter 1977, 47–58; Claud Duverlie, ‘Pictures for Writing: Premises for a Graphopictology,’ Orion Blinded: Essays on Claude Simon, ed. Randi Birn and Karen Gould, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981, 200–18; Claude Simon, ‘Fiction Word by Word’ [1972], Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 5, no. 1, spring 1985, 34–46; Jean H. Duffy, Reading Between the Lines: Claude Simon and the Visual Arts, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998, 59–141; Jean H. Duffy, ‘Cultural Legacy and American National Identity in Michel Butor’s Mobile,’ The Modern Language Review, vol. 98, no. 1, January 2003, 44–64, 52–3; Jean H. Duffy, Signs and Designs: Art and Architecture in the Work of Michel Butor, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003; Michel Butor, How to Write for Jasper Johns, trans. Christina Oberstebrink and Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, Geneva: Éditions Notari, 2007; T. Tilden Daniels, ‘Michel Butor’s Mobile: Modernism, Postmodernism, and American Art,’ Symposium, vol. 62, no. 2, summer 2008, 99–112. 8 Brown, ‘Thing Theory,’ 14. 9 ‘Mes toiles ont la valeur de la réalité,’ Rauschenberg quoted in André Parinaud, ‘Un “misfit” de la peinture new-yorkaise se confesse,’ Arts, no. 821, 10–16 May 1961, 18. 10 For the prompt Surrealist dismissal following one of the very first performances of Beckett’s play, see A. D. [Ado Kyrou], ‘Nous n’attendons pas Godot,’ Médium: Informations surréalistes, no. 4, February 1953, n. p. 11 ‘principal protagoniste,’ Françoise Choay, ‘Dada, Néo-Dada, et Rauschenberg,’ Art International, vol. 5, no. 8, 20 October 1961, 82–4 and 88, 83. 12 ‘fut assimilée non seulement à Dada, mais au surréalisme et finalement au récent néoréalisme parisien,’ Choay, ‘Dada, Néo-Dada et Rauschenberg,’ 83. 7

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13 Choay, ‘Dada, Néo-Dada et Rauschenberg,’ 83. 14 ‘dont Rauschenberg n’adopte ni le misérabilisme ni l’intention polémique,’ Choay, ‘Dada, Néo-Dada et Rauschenberg,’ 83. 15 Choay, ‘Dada, Néo-Dada et Rauschenberg,’ 84; Marcel Duchamp, Marchand du sel: Écrits de Marcel Duchamp, Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1958, 174; Jean Schuster, ‘Marcel Duchamp, vite,’ Le Surréalisme, même, no. 2, spring 1957, 143–5, 145 (Schuster’s glosses and discursive interventions, turning this text into a polemic that sides with Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Jacques Vaché against Tristan Tzara’s variety of Dada, are absent from the version published in Marchand du sel). 16 André Breton, ‘Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality’ [1924], Break of Day [1934], trans. Mark Polizzotti and Mary Ann Caws, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999, 3–20, 17. 17 See, for instance, Roberta Bernstein, ‘René Magritte and Jasper Johns: Making Thoughts Visible,’ Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, 2006, 109–23, 109–10. 18 ‘L’esthétique surréaliste peut se définir par la fameuse phrase de Lautréamont: “Beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d’une machine à coudre et d’une [sic] parapluie.” C’est dire le rôle qu’y tiennent la cocasserie et l’insolite comme générateurs d’associations, révélateurs de symbolisme. L’objet introduit à un monde mental subjectif dont précisément Rauschenberg se désintéresse,’ Choay, ‘Dada, Néo-Dada et Rauschenberg,’ 84. The revered phrase can be found in Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror and Poems [1869 and 1870], trans. Paul Knight, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988, 217. 19 ‘travaillée, choisie, ironisée,’ Choay, ‘Dada, Néo-Dada et Rauschenberg,’ 84. 20 For Breton, miserabilism denoted ‘the depreciation of reality in place of its exaltation,’ André Breton, ‘Away with Miserabilism!’ [1956], Surrealism and Painting [1965], trans. Simon Watson Taylor, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, 347–8, 348. This text first appeared in Arts with three others on the subject; all four have been reprinted together: André Breton, ‘Sus au misérabilisme!’ Robert Benayoun, ‘Le cinémacroûton,’ Charles Estienne, ‘À Messieurs de la biennale de Venise,’ José Pierre, ‘L’Araignée et le Papillon’ [1956], José Pierre (ed.), Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, 1922–1969, tome 2: 1940–1969, Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1982, 146–7; 147–8; 148–51; 151–3. 21 ‘plus disponibles aussi à la tentation surréalisante, ceux qu’on appelle déjà les “néodadas” américains sont en train de reconstituer un fétichisme moderne de l’objet,’ Pierre Restany, ‘La réalité dépasse la fiction’ [1961], Un manifeste de la nouvelle peinture: Les nouveaux réalistes, Paris: Éditions Planète, 1968, 212–14, 213. 22 ‘un dialogue de sourds,’ Marcelin Pleynet, ‘La peinture de Robert Rauschenberg et l’actualité,’ Tel Quel, no. 13, spring 1963, 68–9, 68. 23 ‘on trouve alors intégrés à la peinture les objets les plus quotidiens, les plus divers (bouteilles de Coca-cola [sic], cravates, chaise, échelle, etc.); l’objet ayant la triple fonction de faire rêver, de tuer le rêve et d’introduire à un univers nu, partout également habité et désert. Les leçons du Surréalisme ont bien entendu ici encore porté leurs fruits: ‘Le beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas’ dont Rauschenberg pourrait faire: ‘Le monde sera convulsif ou ne sera pas.’ Cage ne dit-il pas à son propos: ‘Maintenant la beauté est à nos pieds partout où nous prenons peine de la voir,’ Pleynet, ‘La peinture de Robert Rauschenberg et l’actualité,’ 68–9.

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24 Pleynet, ‘La peinture de Robert Rauschenberg et l’actualité,’ 68 n. 3. ‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all,’ André Breton, Nadja [1928], trans. Richard Howard, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1960, 160. Pleynet did not cite Nadja as his source, footnoting instead a part of the development of the idea of ‘convulsive beauty’ in Breton’s later book Mad Love: ‘[t]he word “convulsive,” which I use to describe the only beauty which should concern us, would lose any meaning in my eyes were it to be conceived in motion and not at the exact expiration of this motion,’ André Breton, Mad Love [1937], trans. Mary Ann Caws, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987, 10. 25 ‘L’art de demain sera planétaire ou ne sera pas,’ Alain Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ L’Oeil, no. 113, May 1964, 28–34 and 68–9, 34. 26 The quotation by Cage – edited to omit the ‘American Adam’ reference in the sentence immediately following: ‘(This is an American discovery)’ – was taken by Pleynet from the extract from Cage’s 1961 essay on Rauschenberg, translated into French by Michael Sonnabend and Jean-Jacques Lebel for the exhibition catalogue: Paris: Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Rauschenberg, 1963, n. p. See John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’ [1961], Silence: Lectures and Writings [1961], London: Marion Boyars, 1968, 98–108, 98. 27 See the unexpected comparison between Surrealism and Robbe-Grillet’s new film L’Immortelle (1963), to which Pleynet also referred in his Rauschenberg review in Tel Quel, drawing on ‘Surrealist Situation of the Object,’ Philippe Sollers, ‘Le Rêve en Plein Jour,’ La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française, year 11, no. 125, 1 May 1963, 904–11, 910. 28 Quoted in Niilo Kauppi, The Making of an Avant-Garde: Tel Quel, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994, 28. 29 http://www.pileface.com/sollers/article.php3?id_article=515 (accessed 1 September 2018). It is possible that Breton’s reluctance to enter into dialogue with what Sollers called ‘notre petit revue’ (or even respond to the letters by the look of it) was due to the reviled ex-Surrealist Stalinist Louis Aragon’s favourable remarks on the ‘young bourgeois’ Sollers’ first novel Une curieuse solitude (1958), complete with nostalgic commentary on his Surrealist youth, published that year in Les Lettres Françaises and reprinted in Louis Aragon, J’abats mon jeu, Paris: Les Éditeurs Français Réunis, 1959, 13–44, 38. For the uncompromising Surrealist response to Aragon, see Jean Schuster, ‘Au printemps les yeux fermés,’ BIEF: Jonction surréaliste, no. 2, 15 December 1958, n. p. 30 ‘génie de Breton,’ Philippe Sollers and Jean Thibaudeau, ‘André Breton à la radio,’ Tel Quel, no. 13, spring 1963, 61–3, 61. 31 Various, ‘Premières réponses à l’enquête sur les représentations érotiques,’ La Brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 7, December 1964, 83–102, 99. Also see the book review from this period of Tel Quel slating Jean-Louis Bédouin’s Vingt ans du surréalisme, 1939–1959 (1961), while redirecting the reader towards the earlier writings of the movement: Fernand de Jacquelot du Boisrouvray, ‘Le surréalisme quand même,’ Tel Quel, no. 10, summer 1962, 69–70. 32 Michel Foucault, ‘Distance, Aspect, Origin’ [1963], The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick ffrench and Roland François-Lack, trans. Patrick ffrench, London: Routledge, 1998, 97–108, 97. See the early, positive response to Robbe-Grillet’s novel In the Labyrinth (1959), largely steered by a phrase of Ponge’s, by Philippe Sollers, ‘Sept propositions sur Alain Robbe-Grillet,’ Tel Quel, no. 2, summer 1960, 49–53.

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33 Danielle Marx-Scouras, The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, 54. For Gracq, see Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement [1997], trans. Alison Anderson, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002, 518; for Ponge, see Ian Higgins, Francis Ponge, London: The Athlone Press, 1979, 5. 34 The special issue of Critique marking the death of Bataille the previous year appeared concurrently, with contributions from Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Jean Bruno, Foucault, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Leiris, André Masson, Raymond Queneau, Sollers and others: Critique, no. 195/196, August–September 1963. 35 Michel Foucault, ‘The Debate on the Novel’ [1964], Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette, trans, Elizabeth Ezra, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, 72–4, 72–3.This is a fragment of the text that appeared as Michel Foucault and others, ‘Débat sur le roman,’ Tel Quel, no. 17, spring 1964, 12–54. Foucault was responding to the paper from the previous day at the colloquium in which Sollers had quoted Breton affirming the primacy of the poetic image in the context of automatism from the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), published as Philippe Sollers, ‘Logique de la Fiction,’ Tel Quel, no. 15, autumn 1963, 3–29, 12. See André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ [1924], Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972, 1–47, 39. Soon after the event, in the November 1963 issue of Critique, presumably prompted by the colloquium, Foucault explored further the fiction of Sollers and the Tel Quel writers, initially in comparison with Robbe-Grillet, in the text I quoted from above: Foucault, ‘Distance, Aspect, Origin,’ ffrench and François-Lack (eds.), Tel Quel Reader, 97–101. 36 Foucault, Religion and Culture, 73. 37 Irving Sandler, American Art of the 1960s, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, 60, 61. 38 ‘dualités séculaires,’ ‘une alarmante régression vers un nominalisme désenchanté,’ Philippe Audoin, ‘Nouvelle Histoire de l’Œil ou le merveilleux préféré,’ La Brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 5, October 1963, 91–6, 91. 39 ‘sous le nom de nouveau roman, ces curieux romans en zinc,’ ‘éternelles exigences de correspondance et de signification,’ Julian Gracq, ‘Pourquoi la littérature respire mal’ [1960], Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, Gallimard, Paris: 1989, 857–81, 859, 877. Nicolas Calas also referred to Gracq’s text in his essay ‘Games’, Nicolas Calas and Elena Calas, Icons and Images of the Sixties, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1971, 316–23, 322. 40 ‘regard myope,’ ‘“chosifiés,”’ Audoin, ‘Nouvelle Histoire de l’Œil,’ 92, 94. Audoin was referring to Breton’s proverbial statement made as early as 1926 (though repeated subsequently) that ‘[p]ainters share responsibility with all others to whose formidable lot it has fallen to make full use of their particular means of expression to prevent the domination by the sign of the thing signified. . . . The revolutionary significance of a work, or quite simply its significance, should never be subordinated to the choice of elements that the work brings into play,’ André Breton, ‘Surrealism and Painting’ [1925–8], Surrealism and Painting, 1–48, 8 (translation modified). Also see André Breton, ‘Political Position of Today’s Art’ [1935] and ‘On Surrealism in Its Living Works’ [1955], Manifestoes, 212–33, 216 and 295–304, 299. The latter version of the quotation has been advanced in a preliminary effort to assess the ‘semiotic significance’ of Surrealism: Paul Bouissac, ‘Semiotics and Surrealism,’ Semiotica, vol. 25, no. 1/2, 1979, 45–58, 58.

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41 ‘“ce sont – prononce-t-il – les regardeurs qui font le tableau,”’ Audoin, ‘Nouvelle Histoire de l’Œil,’ 93; ‘[c]e sont . . . les REGARDEURS qui font les tableaux,’ Duchamp quoted in Schuster, ‘Marcel Duchamp, vite,’ 143. 42 Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘Anti-Humanism in Art: Alain Robbe-Grillet in an Interview with Paul Schwartz,’ Studio International, vol. 175, no. 899, April 1968, 168–9, 168, 169. 43 Barthes’s study helped form the generation of Nouveau Romanciers and those who followed, but is concerned more with anti-literary, Symbolist, modernist and ‘experimental’ writers who followed Gustave Flaubert, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Queneau and even the Surrealists themselves: Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero [1953], trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, New York: Hill and Wang, 1968, 61. 44 Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Rauschenberg, n. p.; ‘Not ideas but facts,’ Cage, Silence, 108. 45 See John Cage, ‘Mouvement, son, changement de lumière,’ Tel Quel, no. 18, summer 1964, 77–8. It is followed by a brief manifesto on his practice by Merce Cunningham, ‘L’Art impermanent,’ Tel Quel, no. 18, summer 1964, 78–80. Notice of the sharpening debate on metaphor in France, largely by acknowledging the impetus of RobbeGrillet’s ‘Nature, Humanism, Tragedy,’ is given in the same issue, where Breton’s writings from the 1920s to the 1950s serve as chief means in an attempt at a new categorization of metaphor: Jean Ricardou, ‘La querelle de la métaphore,’ Tel Quel, no. 18, summer 1964, 56–67. 46 Julia Kristeva, ‘Le sujet en procès,’ Tel Quel, no. 52, winter 1972, 12–30; Julia Kristeva, ‘Le sujet en procès, (suite),’ Tel Quel, no. 53, spring 1973, 17–38. See Julia Kristeva, ‘The Subject in Process’ [1973], trans. Patrick ffrench, ffrench and François-Lack (eds.), Tel Quel Reader, 133–78. 47 ‘la figuration de l’objet n’a plus recours à la présence de l’objet mais à son image,’ Pleynet, ‘La peinture de Robert Rauschenberg et l’actualité,’ 69. 48 Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 2; Brown, ‘Thing Theory,’ 4. 49 Lena Hoff, Nicolas Calas and the Challenge of Surrealism, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2014, 383 n. 65. 50 Robert Benayoun, ‘Letter to Chicago’ [1963], Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, ed. Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009, 169–71, 170; Hoff, Nicolas Calas, 228, 238. For Calas’s spirited dialogue with US Surrealists in the period, see Abigail Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021, 191–4, 199, 219. 51 Calas wrote monographic texts on Johns, too, from as early as 1964, sometimes making comparison with Magritte, notably in ‘Jasper Johns: And/Or,’ which appeared in Calas and Calas, Icons and Images of the Sixties, 72–82. 52 Nicolas Calas, ‘Robert Rauschenberg,’ Kulchur, vol. 4, no. 15, autumn 1964, 16–31. 53 Nicolas Calas, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’ [1964], Art in the Age of Risk and Other Essays, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968, 169–93, 170. 54 José Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ L’Oeil, no. 172, April 1969, 42–50, 46. 55 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 170. 56 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 173.

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57 Calas continued with the recycling in his later writing on the artist, using passages from this essay in Kulchur for his ‘Robert Rauschenberg at the Controls,’ where Surrealism is barely mentioned, true to the art history that by the early 1970s had found a unique, post-Surrealist pre-Pop niche for the artist: Calas and Calas, Icons and Images of the Sixties, 65–71. 58 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 176–9. 59 For evidence that Calas read La Brèche as it came out, see the eyewitness account recorded by Penelope Rosemont, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields, San Francisco: City Lights, 2019, 15. 60 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 189. 61 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 191. 62 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 192. 63 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 191. Calas quotes from Cage, Silence, 101–2. 64 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 174. 65 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 174. 66 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 173. 67 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 174. Calas’s intuition is lent support by a later commentary on Hymnal positioning its ‘thematics of urban anonymity broken only by crime and police surveillance’ in the vicinity of Norman Mailer (and detached from Cage): Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture [1996], New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998, 181. 68 See Alain Robbe-Grillet, ‘A Future for the Novel’ [1956], For a New Novel, 15–24, 22–3. Also see, among others, Michael Holquist, ‘Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction,’ New Literary History, vol. 3, no. 1, autumn 1971, 135–56; Michel Sirvent, ‘Reader-Investigators in the Post-Nouveau Roman,’ Jeanne C. Ewert, ‘“A Thousand Other Mysteries”: Metaphysical Detection, Ontological Quests’ and Raylene Ramsay, Postmodernism and the Monstrous Criminal: In Robbe-Grillet’s Investigative Cell,’ Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, 158–78, 179–98 and 199–214. 69 Nicolas Calas, ‘Why Not Pop Art?’ [1965], Art in the Age of Risk, 41–9, 48–9; Leonard B. Meyer ‘The End of the Renaissance? Notes on the Radical Empiricism of the Avant-Garde,’ The Hudson Review, vol. 16, no. 2, summer 1963, 169–86, 177; Barney Childs, ‘The Beginning of the Apocalypse?’ Kulchur, vol. 4, no. 15, autumn 1964, 48–56. 70 Nicolas Calas, ‘The Image and Poetry’ [1965], Art in the Age of Risk, 79–99, 98. 71 Nicolas Calas, ‘Surrealist Perspective’ [1966], Art in the Age of Risk, 143–9, 147. 72 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 45, 43, 44. 73 See the remarks and quotations in Hoff, Nicolas Calas, 252–3. Correspondence with Surrealists in France late in 1971 demonstrates that by then he saw Surrealism as strictly opposed to the Robbe-Grillet novel: Nicolas Calas, ‘D’une lettre de Nicolas Calas,’ Bulletin de liaison surréaliste, no. 44, December 1971, 14. 74 Nicolas Calas, ‘And Now the Sphinx’ [1966], Art in the Age of Risk, 66–76, 69. 75 I discuss this in my Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008, 106–7, 165–6, 172–4, 190, 195. 76 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 72.

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77 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 72–3. Duprey’s protest and its repercussions have been recounted several times; see, for instance, Jean-Paul Clébert, Dictionnaire du surréalisme, Paris: Seuil, 1996, 221. 78 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 145. 79 Quoted in Hoff, Nicolas Calas, 252. 80 Calas, Art in the Age of Risk, 148. 81 James Helgeson, ‘What Cannot Be Said: Notes on Early French Wittgenstein Reception,’ Paragraph, vol. 34, no. 3, 2011, 338–57, 341, 346, 347. For two attempts to make common ground with, respectively, Surrealist poetry/prose (though the emphasis ends up on the latter and not fully on Surrealism) and painting/collage (with comparison between ‘hypothetical language games’ and the Greek poet Odysseas Elytis’s collages), see Alison James, ‘The Surrealism of the Habitual: From Poetic Language to the Prose of Life,’ Paragraph, vol. 34, no. 3, 2011, 406–22; and Chrysoula Gitsoulis, ‘Wittgenstein and Surrealism,’ Essays in Philosophy, vol. 13, no. 1, January 2012, 74–84. 82 Breton, Manifestoes, 6. 83 Clement Greenberg, ‘T. S. Eliot: The Criticism, The Poetry’ [1950], The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3, Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956, ed. John O’Brian, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993, 66–71, 67. Calas made his point about Pop (again including Rauschenberg) and positivism rather crudely in his best known essay on the subject: ‘Pop artists, by forgetting even the immediate past, focus their attention on the “positivism” of the present,’ Nicolas Calas, ‘Pop Icons’ [1966], Art in the Age of Risk, 50–9, 54. 84 Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, 105; Nancy Jachec, ‘Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg,’ Oxford Art Journal, vol. 21, no. 2, 1998, 121–32, 126. Also see my article on the art historical debate on positivism at mid-century: ‘Positivism, Impressionism and Magic: Modifying the Modern Canon in America and France from the 1940s,’ Journal of Art Historiography, no. 17, December 2017, n. p. 85 Irving Sandler, American Art of the 1960s, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, 78. 86 Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974, New York: Soho Press, Inc., 2000, 173. 87 I cited in my first chapter Greenberg’s attack on Surrealism in 1944, which grudgingly salvaged for formalism only the artists indebted to automatism; less well known is the view given exactly simultaneously in a lecture and published a few months after in a review both antagonistic towards and indebted to Surrealism: ‘[w]hat we love best in the Surrealist artists is not their programme. The strength of Duchamp and Ernst has been their Dada disrespect for traditional uses of the painter’s medium, with its accompanying technical innovations. The strength of [Jean/Hans] Arp, Masson, Miró and Pablo Picasso lies in the great humanity of their formalism. . . . Even where the Surrealists have succeeded, it has been on technical grounds,’ Robert Motherwell, ‘The Modern Painter’s World,’ Dyn, no. 6, November 1944, 9–14, 14. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983, 81–2, 223.

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88 Scott Rothkopf, ‘Paul Thek and the Sixties Surreal,’ Elisabeth Sussman (ed.), Paul Thek, Diver: A Retrospective, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2010, 46–53, 47. See, for instance, William Rubin, ‘Notes on Masson and Pollock,’ Arts, vol. 34, no. 2, November 1959, 36–43. 89 Rothkopf in Whitney Museum of American Art, Paul Thek, 47–9 and 52–3 n. 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. Swenson thought the work and attitudes of Dalí, Duchamp, Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist, an odd and exclusive litany for the time, were particularly representative of the ‘other’ tradition, about which he wrote: ‘[t]he other tradition is non-formal. It is less easily appreciated with the familiar critical tool known as formal analysis. Its major importance lies outside or beyond “significant form,” and its application [sic] is useful chiefly to non-abstract art: that is, in general it deals more with the movements known as Dada, Surrealism and Pop art than with those known as Cubism, Early Abstraction ([Piet] Mondrian and [Wassily] Kandinsky) and abstract expressionism,’ then he went on to indicate some of the formalist ‘bias’ against Surrealism in recent publications while, it should be added, rejecting the idea of Surrealism ‘as literary or in terms of visual poetry (the theory of ut pictura poesis),’ G. R. Swenson, ‘The Other Tradition,’ The Other Tradition, Philadelphia, PA: The Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1966, vi–41, viii, 12–13, 17. Lippard felt compelled to make connections with Surrealism throughout her text on ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ because the work she showed by Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Gary Kuehn, Bruce Nauman, Don Potts, Keith Sonnier and Frank Lincoln Viner ‘that unites image, shape, metaphor, and association’ seemed so dissimilar to Minimalist art; however, she denied the work any of the ‘arbitrariness’ of Surrealism and said it resisted through formal understatement ‘[t]oo much free association on the viewer’s part’, and within five years she regretted foregrounding Surrealism at all as the discussion of theory and of the uses of materials (especially those of Robert Morris) had developed: Lucy Lippard, ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ [1966], Changing: Essays in Art and Criticism, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1971, 98–111, 110–11. Surrealism also offered the main point of comparison in her unconvinced appraisal of the fashion for erotic art in New York galleries in the following year: Lucy Lippard, ‘Eros Presumptive,’ The Hudson Review, vol. 20, no. 1, spring 1967, 91–9. 90 Annette Michelson’s first long article for Artforum promised the most, going straight to the heart of the matter by asking the key question of the day: ‘[w]hat . . . is the place of Surrealism as Metaphor – and of its metaphors – in a time when Metaphor is stripped of cognitive value and exiled to the expressive peripheries of language?’ Annette Michelson, ‘Breton’s Surrealism: The Peripeties of a Metaphor, or A Journey through Impossibility,’ Artforum, vol. 9, no. 1, September 1966, 72–7, 73. Unfortunately, Michelson never got around to answering the question; instead, her unusually wide knowledge of the movement gained from about fifteen years spent in Paris got buried in a disastrous set of erudite, overconfident digressions, opaque yet superficial, which is probably what Leider was referring to when he recalled that his own feeling about the special issue at the time was of ‘high hopes . . . dashed by mediocre quality,’ then in retrospect, more accurately, as ‘terrible . . . I didn’t see anything new in it. I still don’t,’ and, even more to the point, as ‘really shit,’ Leider quoted in Newman, Challenging Art, 158, 191, 493–4 n. 31.

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91 William Rubin, ‘Toward a Critical Framework,’ Artforum, vol. 9, no. 1, September 1966, 36–55, 37, 40. 92 William S. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968, 58–9 and 29. The emphasis laid on the ‘Neo-Dada’ Duchamp over the ‘Surrealist’ Duchamp in the catalogue of the MOMA show is noted by James Boaden, ‘Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage? The North American Reception of Dada and Surrealism,’ A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, ed. David Hopkins, Malden, MA, Oxford, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016, 400–15, 407. Rauschenberg’s Bed appears immediately above Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts in the section titled ‘An Album of Post-Surrealism,’ which closes the ‘documentary illustrations’ in the major volume that came out of the 1968 exhibition: William S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, 451 (the installation view of EROS showing Bed is the last image of the ‘documentary illustrations,’ Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, 443). 93 Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 177. 94 Boaden in Hopkins (ed.), Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 404. 95 Sandra Zalman, Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism, Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015, 107–33; Boaden in Hopkins (ed.), Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 400–3. Also see Gavin Grindon, ‘Poetry Written in Gasoline: Black Mask and Up against the Wall Motherfucker,’ Art History, vol. 38, no. 1, February 2015, 170–209, 171–3; and Sandra Zalman, ‘“Down with Art, Up with Revolution,”’ Elliott H. King and Abigail Susik (eds.), Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022, 30–42. 96 Max Kozloff, ‘The Sixties Look at Dada and Surrealism’ [1968], Cultivated Impasses: Essays on the Waning of the Avant-Garde 1964–1975, Venice: Marsilio Publishers, 1999, 341–6, 342. 97 Philip Leider, ‘Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage: 1. A Beautiful Exhibition,’ Artforum, vol. 6, no. 9, May 1968, 22–5, 22. For the denunciation of the exhibition as a ‘reprehensible fraud’, see The Chicago Surrealist Group, ‘The Heritage We Reject’ [1968], The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States, 1966–1976, ed. Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont and Paul Garon, Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1997, 44–5; reprinted in the Paris Surrealists’ review L’archibras, no. 6, December 1968, 47. Leider did not conceal his surprise at the quality of the paintings on view at Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage (they had survived, he said, ‘the claptrap about the Unconscious’), a surprise caused in the first place probably by the attitude of artists and critics close to Artforum dictating that ‘the extent to which a painting is contaminated by the Surrealist sensibility is the extent of its failure’, Leider, ‘Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage,’ 22, 23. Italicized again, the word and the judgement that accompanied it were inspired by Fried’s recent censure of ‘literalist’ or Minimalist art in which Surrealism was similarly implicated, as were Rauschenberg and Cage, in ‘the sensibility or mode of being that I have characterized as corrupted or perverted by theatre’, while Sontag was for Fried the ringleader in the crime against modernism that is the confusion of the arts and the word ‘sensibility’ is used unreflexively to the point of numbness, whether ‘literalist sensibility’, ‘antiliteralist and antitheatrical sensibility’, ‘modernist sensibility’ or ‘Surrealist sensibility’, Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ [1967], Minimal Art: A

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Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968, 116–47, 117, 125, 130 n. 8, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 141 n. 17, 142, 145 n. 19, 147. Rubin and his supporters seemed to think that they were doing Surrealism a favour by demonstrating the extent to which it had ‘participated in the crucial inventions in modern form’, and although ‘the important role that associational elements play in Surrealist art’ was understood, any expression they achieved was due to ‘an equivalent in the realm of form’, while the ‘forms reflected [the Surrealists’] sensibility’ and automatism ‘was not merely a technical device, but a formal equivalent for a poetic sensibility’, and so it was that a movement that was concerned with politics and a poetics of art that had its source in the unconscious was turned into an aesthetic by formalism through the alluring yet loosely understood properties of the term ‘sensibility’, Ellen Mandelbaum, ‘Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage: 3. Surrealist Composition: Surprise Syntax,’ Artforum, vol. 6, no. 9, May 1968, 32–5, 33. 98 Kozloff, Cultivated Impasses, 341. One otherwise invaluable historical account places Alechinsky’s work also at Surrealist Intrusion, but this is incorrect to my knowledge: Susan L. Power, ‘Surrealist Intrusion and Disenchantment on Madison Avenue, 1960,’ Networking Surrealism in the USA: Agents, Artists, and the Market, ed. Julia Drost, Fabrice Flahutez, Anne Helmreich and Martin Schieder, Heidelberg: Arthistoricum. net, 2019, 428–47, 440. 99 Max Kozloff, ‘American Painting during the Cold Warr,’ Artforum, vol. 11, no. 9, May 1973, 43–54, 49, 51.

Chapter 8 André Breton, ‘Salvador Dalí: The Dalí “Case”’ [1936], Surrealism and Painting [1965], trans. Simon Watson Taylor, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, 130–5, 131. For the opinions that placed Dalí at variance with Breton and Surrealism, culminating in the ‘trial’ of 5 February 1934, see Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, London: Faber and Faber, 1997, 320–5. ­2 Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 135. 3 ‘thuriféraires,’ José Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ L’Oeil, no. 172, April 1969, 42–50, 43. 4 Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 43. 5 For his later summary of the abbreviated ‘Surrealist’ careers of de Chirico, Alberto Giacometti, René Magritte and Francis Picabia as a historian of Surrealist art, see José Pierre, André Breton et la peinture, Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1987, 184. 6 ‘positivisme narquois,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 45. 7 ‘Si l’on se souvient que cette “Action Painting,” tout en en récusant les fins (“découvrir le fonctionnement réel de la pensée”), avait reçu du surréalisme ses moyens, à savoir l’automatisme, le tournant est significatif . . . il s’agissait . . . de régresser d’une certaine générosité lyrique vers une avarice dubitative, en somme du surréalisme vers Dada. Tel est le décor devant lequel Robert Rauschenberg fait son apparition . . . ,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 45. Pierre was referring to, while misquoting, the famous passage from the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), defining Surrealism in absolute accordance with automatism: ‘Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the 1

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Notes written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought,’ André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ [1924], Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972, 1–47, 26. ‘géniale intuition du devenir de la peinture americaine (ou, ce qui revient au même, par un pari sur ce devenir),’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 45. ‘l’objet quotidian, voire du déchet,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 45. ‘pingrerie,’ ‘savante discrimination,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 46. ‘un esprit d’investigation assez sévère semble conduire ses assemblages,’ Robert Benayoun and José Pierre, ‘Alchimie de l’objet, cabotinage du déchet,’ La Brèche: Action surréaliste, no. 2, May 1962, 49–54, 53. ‘usurier,’ ‘adhère moins à ce qu’il fait, s’y engage plus f­ aiblement,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 46. ‘confiné, introverti, claustrophilique’ ‘obsédantes obliques,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 46. ‘dynamique créatrice,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 46. ‘“La travail de Rauschenberg procède de manière intuitive, par la juxtaposition d’éléments qui à leur tour en suggèrent d’autres. Il ne fait pas d’études préliminaires et sait rarement quelle va être la forme finale de la piece,” ce que John Cage confirme à sa manière en écrivant: “Nous sommes fiers de ne pas savoir ce que nous faisons,”’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 46. See Alan R. Solomon, ‘Robert Rauschenberg,’ Robert Rauschenberg, New York: The Jewish Museum, 1963, n. p. The quotation from Cage appears in parentheses in John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’ [1961], Silence: Lectures and Writings [1961], London: Marion Boyars, 1968, 98–108, 101. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures [1970], trans. Chris Turner, London: Sage, 2012, 119. Solomon was part of Leo Castelli’s team before he became director of the Jewish Museum and placed Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns at the heart of the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1964: Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2010, 25. ‘On peut en conclure que c’est un processus automatique, de caractère surréaliste, qui donne naissance aux “combine-paintings,”’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 46. As I showed in my third chapter, the link Pierre perceived between automatism and Rauschenberg’s spontaneous activity in the studio had been hinted at in his writings of the early 1960s and he would assert it more explicitly in later years: Pierre, André Breton et la peinture, 154. He could not have been seeking an intentional conformity with specifically Surrealist automatism, but was identifying a particular mental state, discussion of which has cropped up a few times around the artist: when for example, Rauschenberg himself avowed: ‘[o]ften, I have to start off attempting to do something by slipping into another consciousness that allows me to be the spectator while I’m working,’ quoted in John Gruen, ‘Robert Rauschenberg: An Audience of One,’ ARTnews, vol. 76, no. 2, February 1977, 44–8, 46; it was affirmed by one author after conversation with the artist: ‘[h]e empties his mind before . . . beginning a painting,’ Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990, 266; then Rauschenberg concurred when it was put to him elsewhere: ‘[t]here’s nothing in my mind before I start a work,’ ‘I don’t think while I’m making,’

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Julia Brown Turrell, ‘Talking to Robert Rauschenberg: An Interview with Julia Brown Turrell,’ Rauschenberg Sculpture, eds. Marjorie Welish, Julia Brown Turrell and Pontus Hultén, Fort Worth, TX: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 1995, 49–82, 51, 76. 17 Solomon in Robert Rauschenberg, n. p.; Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 46. 18 Solomon in Robert Rauschenberg, n. p. 19 Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory,’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, autumn 2001, 1–22, 4. 20 Solomon in Robert Rauschenberg, n. p. 21 Solomon in Robert Rauschenberg, n. p. 22 André Breton, Mad Love [1937], trans. Mary Ann Caws, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987, 38. Jean-Jacques Lebel’s statement made much later overlaps with Breton’s: ‘Eros leads us to be obsessively fascinated with an enigma that keeps escaping us but that can still overwhelm us to the point of transforming us from voyeurs into seers [voyants] . . . . We must, leaving behind all moral prejudices, dare to venture into the opacity of Eros and literally “lose our bearings,”’ Jean-Jacques Lebel, ‘Art as Upheaval: An Interview with Jean-Jacques Lebel by Jean de Loisy’ [2009], Axel Heil, Robert Fleck and Alyce Mahon, JeanJacques Lebel: Barricades, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2014, 225–42, 236. 23 Although her iconographic account of Rauschenberg’s work is quite different to the readings proffered by the Surrealists, see Lisa Wainwright, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Fabrics: Reconstructing Domestic Space,’ Christopher Reed (ed.), Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1996, 193–205, 194; also, see the complaint against Solomon and his descendants in art history who ‘denounce the prospect of traditionally conceived meanings encoded or otherwise secreted in Rauschenberg’s work’, by Jonathan Katz, ‘“Committing the Perfect Crime”: Sexuality, Assemblage and the Postmodern Turn in American Art,’ Art Journal, vol. 67, no. 1, spring 2008, 38–53, 52; and Ikegami, Great Migrator, 71–5. 24 It should be added that a contradiction exists in Solomon’s own text, which in spite of its denial of ‘private symbolism’ later concedes that ‘[t]he absence of any conscious symbolic or literary purpose does not of course exclude the possibility of unconscious direction in his selection of images,’ suggesting that there might indeed be a discernible narrative and therefore opening the door to the Surrealist reading: Solomon in Robert Rauschenberg, n. p. 25 Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 20 (Breton’s italics). 26 It was republished as Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Öyvind Fahlström’ [pub. 1964, dated ‘October 1961’], John Russell and Suzi Gablik (eds.), Pop Art Redefined, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, 71–2, 71. 27 Rauschenberg in Russell and Gablik (eds.), Pop Art Redefined, 71; Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 46. 28 ‘un aveu d’impuissance, une démission de la part de l’artiste qui renonce définitivement à agir sur le monde tel qu’il est et se cantonne dans le rôle brillant et vain du fabricant d’images?’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 46. 29 ‘formule rimbaldienne: “Il faut changer la vie,”’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 46. 30 André Breton, ‘Speech to the Congress of Writers’ [1935], Manifestoes, 234–41, 241; Alain Jouffroy, ‘Pour un dépassement de l’Anti-Procès par lui-même,’ Milan: Galleria Brera, Anti-Procès 3, 1961, n. p. The motto is generally believed to derive from the

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phrase ‘Does he have perhaps secrets for changing life,’ spoken by the compagnon d’enfer of ‘The Demon’ in Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Délires I’ in ‘A Season in Hell’ [1873], Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1966, 187–93, 189. For one account of the crisis of 1969 in Paris Surrealism, see Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement [1997], trans. Alison Anderson, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, 642–4. 31 ‘l’oeuvre qui se refuse à assumer une signification, même très vague, est une manière de déposer les armes de l’esprit,’ ‘[n]ous sommes alors dans l’esthétique et nulle part ailleurs,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 48. 32 Clémence Bigel, Le Pop’Art à Paris: Une histoire de la réception critique des avantgardes américaines entre 1959 et 1978, vol. 1, unpublished MA thesis, Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, 2013, 149, 161, 173, 176, 177, 202. Sonnabend had featured Rauschenberg’s work in no less than seven exhibitions (five of them monographic) between 1962 and 1968: Bigel, Le Pop’Art à Paris, 178. 33 ‘charme,’ ‘raffinement,’ ‘puissance explosive,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 48. 34 ‘un lit vertical, somnambulique, tout poisseux de déjections picturales. Je doute qu’en le revoyant maintenant, je serais plus sensible à l’exquise qualité du coloris qu’à la provocante agressivité de l’object. Car, dans ce cas précis, l’intention subversive ne fait aucun doute et son efficacité non plus, chacun se sentant mis en cause jusque dans son sommeil et dans sa vie amoureuse, atteint au centre même de sa vie privée,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 48. 35 ‘galante boutade,’ ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 48. The facts of Rauschenberg’s response to a request for a portrait of the gallery owner Iris Clert with the telegram relaying those words are given in Nicolas Calas, ‘Why Not Pop Art?’ [1965], Art in the Age of Risk and Other Essays, New York: E. F. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968, 41–9, 41. But in one of the stranger twists that accompany the historiography of Rauschenberg and Surrealism, Calas was reported in 1977 as crediting Rauschenberg’s gesture to Breton, which might betray Calas’s intuition of common ground between the US artist and Surrealism: see Lena Hoff, Nicolas Calas and the Challenge of Surrealism, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2014, 390 n. 22. 36 Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 49. See David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings, ed. Stephen Buckle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 15. 37 ‘toutes choses sont égales si l’esprit ne les prend pas au sérieux; nous sommes dans un jeu dont le ressort ludique lui-même s’affaiblit, jusqu’à disparaître,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 49. 38 ‘le hasard lui-même est désamorcé puisque dépouillé dés le départ toute importance, de toute signification éventuelle, de toute chance d’échapper au hasard,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 49. 39 Breton, Mad Love, 21. 40 ‘prisonnier d’une conception philosophique,’ ‘l’éloigne de son véritable génie,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 49. 41 For a categorical restatement by a Surrealist of that era that ‘[l]e mot-clé pour le surréalisme est l’analogie. Toute réflexion surréaliste découle de l’analogie,’ see: Claire Boustani, ‘Entretien avec Alain Joubert’ [2009], Fabrice Flahutez and Thierry Dufrêne (eds), Art et mythe, Nanterre: Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2021, 149-59 (accessed online at https://books.openedition.org/pupo/2007?lang=en, 23 August 2022). 42 ‘spectaculaire offensive,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 49.

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43 ‘celle de 1961, au cours de laquelle l’inventeur des “combine-paintings” s’abandonne au lyrisme le plus véhément. Lequel lyrisme s’affirme dans l’écart maximum avec la toile et ses deux dimensions, s’evade par conséquent de la discipline perpendiculaire et se refuse la couleur, mais pour choyer les solutions du délire, de l’irrationnel et de la provocation,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 49. On this question of ‘delirium’, no comparison has yet been made between the conception of Surrealism as it was initially formed by Breton’s spell as a nurse at the neuropsychiatric centre at Saint-Dizier in the second half of 1916 and the ways that Rauschenberg’s work was shaped by his experiences as a ‘neuropsychiatric technician’ in 1945; in fact, little has been said at all of Rauschenberg’s time in the wards, of which he recalled: ‘I learned how little difference there is between sanity and insanity and realized that a combination is essential,’ quoted in Washington: National Collection of Fine Arts, Robert Rauschenberg, 1976, 25 (italics in original). 44 Leo Steinberg, ‘Other Criteria’ [1968, 1972], Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, 55–91, 87, 82. A surprisingly similar way of understanding art, made apparently without knowledge of Steinberg’s essay, was expressed by Nouveau Romancier Claude Simon who perceived ‘the common desire to return to the source, to the basic, to the concrete’ in the work of Miró, Dubuffet and Rauschenberg, but linked it specifically to the modern, stating that the ‘dropping of the gaze and the narrowing of the visual field’ that he associated with these artists can induce us to ‘define the meaning of modern’, Claud Duverlie and Claude Simon. ‘Interview: the Crossing of the Image,’ Diacritics, vol. 7, no. 4, winter 1977, 47–58, 48, 54. 45 Rauschenberg said a few years later in an interview published in French that this was, indeed, a found sheet (‘drap’): quoted in Raphael Sorin, ‘Entretien avec Robert Rauschenberg,’ La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 60, 1–15 November 1968, 17–18, 17. 46 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ [1960], The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993, 85–93. 47 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 91; Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 86. The argument for ‘purity’ in the arts began much earlier in Clement Greenberg, ‘AvantGarde and Kitsch’ [1939], The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgements, 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986, 5–22. For some commentary on the term including a refutation of Steinberg’s alleged accusation of Greenberg’s ‘mechanistic reduction to purity’, see Donald B. Kuspit, Clement Greenberg: Art Critic, Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1979, 45–51, 46. 48 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 91. 49 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 84. 50 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 88. 51 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 88. 52 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 84. 53 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 88–9. One Rauschenberg scholar recently argued for a panoply of new ‘metaphorical resonances’ of Combines as a whole in the wake of Steinberg and by way of Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’, whereby ‘[t]hey play, variously or simultaneously, at being painting, sculpture, objects, ­projection screens, flatbed pictorial supports, folding screens,’ and so on: Branden W. Joseph, ‘“Disparate Visual Facts”: Early Combines,’ Achim Borchardt-Hume (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg, London and New York: Tate Modern and The Museum of Modern Art, 2016, 138–45, 142–3.

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54 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 82, 90. 55 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 88. 56 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 82. 57 For a comparable reading given soon after that was less to do with angulation than depth, which asserts: ‘Rauschenberg’s images are all literal; symbol and metaphor are not their mode of existence,’ before continuing, ‘[t]hings shuttle in and out of the picture, break the surface, poke over the edge, drop onto the floor, as if the picture plane were a kind of flophouse, in its evocations of drawer, window, closet, cupboard, door. . . . In the midst of the unceasing literal images, the picture plane is the only rhetorical presence. It is the only metaphor – an extremely powerful one – in all of Rauschenberg’s literal universe,’ see Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth, New York: Random House, 1973, 225. However, O’Doherty underplayed it here: the picture plane is indeed a powerful metaphor because such openings and containers cannot be isolated, they have the effect of metaphorizing everything they fictively ‘frame’, ‘look out onto’, ‘support’ or ‘enclose’. 58 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 88, 84. 59 Dore Ashton quoted in Various, ‘A Symposium on Pop Art’ [1963], Steven Henry Madoff (ed.), Pop Art: A Critical History, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997, 65–81, 69–73, 70 (see my discussions in Chapters 1 and 6). 60 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 89, 86. 61 ‘théâtrale fenêtre,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 49. 62 Quoted in interview with Barbara Rose, Rauschenberg, New York: Vintage, 1987, 96. 63 Anonymous, ‘Trend to the “Anti-Art,”’ Newsweek, 31 March 1958, 94. 64 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 82. 65 The year before Pierre’s text appeared, Rauschenberg had identified the frame as a doorframe or ‘un encadrement de porte,’ quoted in Sorin, ‘Entretien avec Robert Rauschenberg,’ 17. 66 Oral history interview with Robert Rauschenberg, 21 December 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, n. p. 67 Françoise Choay, ‘Dada, Néo-Dada, et Rauschenberg,’ Art International, vol. 5, no. 8, 20 October 1961, 82–4 and 88, 84. 68 Benayoun and Pierre, ‘Alchimie de l’objet,’ 53. 69 ‘ce surréalisme de l’objet errant,’ Alain Jouffroy, ‘R. Rauschenberg,’ L’Oeil, no. 113, May 1964, 28–34 and 68–9, 68; ‘incroyables chariots de clochards, instables équilibres de ferraille et de vieilles planches,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 49. 70 One author has seen an alternative dialectical function in Coexistence that is relevant to this book, in ‘tensions between materiality and metaphor . . . its endless animation of a never-synthesized dialectic between possible readings on the one hand and a plenitude of incommensurable material fact on the other,’ further suggesting, less plausibly, that its title might ‘signal the work’s figuration of an escape from readings of art as either metaphoric or literal,’ Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009, 107, 208 n. 27. 71 Years later, Steinberg wrote as follows about the Erased de Kooning Drawing: ‘Rauschenberg’s logic makes sense only on the level of metaphor, as a symbolic gesture to mark a personal rite of passage,’ but he did not entertain a link with the poetics of seeing of Surrealism; indeed, in a later footnote where he recalled Breton’s

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‘ritual erasing’ with a wet sponge of a ‘chalk painting’ (sic) by Picabia at the first Dada manifestation in Paris at the Palais des Fêtes on 23 January 1920, he tartly concluded the opposite: ‘Breton’s performance bears no more relation to Rauschenberg’s than a tantrum does to a tantra,’ Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg: A Lavishly Illustrated Lecture, Houston, Chicago and London: The Menil Collection and The University of Chicago Press, 2000, 21, 72 n. 14. 72 ‘Que s’est-il passé dans l’esprit de Rauschenberg à ce tournant décisif de 1961–1962 où il allait renoncer à ses plus folles tentations?’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 49–50. 73 ‘rééducation,’ ‘se purge . . . de ses derniers accents de romantisme,’ ‘enfin débarrassé de cette vieille manie de communiquer à l’oeuvre ses transes profondes,’ ‘philosophie conformiste,’ ‘les dernières velléités de révolte,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 50. 74 ‘Au terme de tant de laborieux efforts, le zombie-Rauschenberg est devenu prêt à répondre aux grandes espérances qu’on a fondées sur lui. Il s’agit ni plus ni moins de jeter le plus grand discrédit possible sur toute subjectivité, et en même temps de démontrer (corollairement) que la technologie est en mesure de se substituter efficacement à l’imagination individuelle,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 50. 75 ‘mettre l’imagination créatrice au service du conformisme économique, politique et social,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 50. 76 Breton, Manifestoes, 4. 77 For the rise of consumerism in France in the 1950s, interpreted in the context of the colonial war in Algeria, see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1995, 71–122. 78 The Surrealist Group, ‘Let’s Get to the Point’ [1965], Surrealism against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, eds. and trans. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001, 55–8, 57. The reference was to the article by Gabriel Veraldi, ‘Qu-est-ce que le matérialisme?’ Planète, no. 23, July–August 1965, 31–7. For more on Veraldi’s equation of technology and material wealth with compassion and progress-as-happiness, along with Surrealism’s critique of technology in general, see my Futures of Surrealism: Myth, Science Fiction and Fantastic Art in France 1936–1969, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015, 177–82. 79 Dore Ashton, ‘L’expérience américaine: “Les arts ne doivent jamais servir la technologie,”’ Opus international, no. 5 (‘Le pouvoir des techniques’), February 1968, 73–5, 73. 80 ‘éminemment imaginatifs,’ Ashton, ‘L’expérience américaine,’ 74, 75. Rauschenberg’s association with Javits went back at least as far as the one and only performance of The Construction of Boston he starred in on 5 May 1962, which the Senator and his wife Marion attended; that was the year Javits’s portrait appeared in the transfer drawing Headline (1962) and also the one in which Javits stated privately in a letter in November that ‘the visual and performing arts are not a luxury but a necessity in the defense of our free society against the backdrop of the Cold War,’ quoted by Laurie J. Monahan, ‘Cultural Cartography: American Designs at the 1964 Venice Biennale,’ Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1990, 369–416, 378. Javits and Rauschenberg had campaigned for a federal arts programme in the United States: see Jacob K. Javits, ‘The National Arts Program,’ Art in America, vol.

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82 83 84 85

Notes 49, no. 4, October–December 1961, 86–7. Its implementation in 1965 by way of the National Endowment for the Arts had been furthered by Rauschenberg’s success in Venice in 1964, for which Javits had pulled some strings if Solomon’s discreet reports to him are anything to go by: Amy Jo Dempsey, The Friendship of America and France: A New Internationalism, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1999, 147, 169; Monahan in Guilbaut (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism, 414 n. 94. Rauschenberg’s increasing entanglement in webs of sponsorship, patronage and influence that were potentially politically tainted is further suggested by his concurrent creation of the lithograph Autobiography (1968) at Broadside Art, Inc., the press he cofounded with graphic designer Milton Glaser, publisher Clay Felker and Marion Javits who sponsored it: Emily Liebert, ‘“Looking Also Had to Happen in Time”: The Printed Trace,’ Robert Rauschenberg, 360–8, 368 n. 28. The relationship with Javits led to an invitation to Israel in 1972 through contact with Abba Eban, the Israeli Foreign Minister in 1966–74: Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, 155, 194. ‘“L’honneur de ces poètes consiste à cesser d’être des poètes pour devenir des agents de publicité,”’ Ashton, ‘L’expérience américaine,’ 74. Péret was attacking L’Honneur des poètes (1943), the pamphlet of patriotic, religious Resistance poetry first published in Paris under the Occupation, which included contributions from ex-Surrealists Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard; the passage might be rendered more accurately as follows: ‘All said, the honour of these “poets” consists in ceasing to be poets in order to become agents of advertising,’ Benjamin Péret, ‘The Dishonour of the Poets’ [1945], Death to the Pigs: Selected Writings, trans. Rachel Stella, London: Atlas Press, 1988, 200–6, 204 (translation modified). Ashton demonstrated her sympathy towards Surrealism again a few weeks after this article appeared, in her review of the mainly Surrealist, Duchamp-inspired exhibition Doors at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, which ran from 19 March to 20 April 1968, ending with the words: ‘[t]he fusion of poetry and painting, which was the avowed ideal of many Surrealist artists, and is still a respected goal for many younger artists, is a legitimate ideal,’ Dore Ashton, ‘An Open and Shut Case: Allusions to Specific, Sensuous Experiences of Space,’ Arts Magazine, vol. 42, no. 6, April 1968, 28–30, 30. ‘[d]es toiles anciennes, encombrées de déchets lyriques, à la piece toute récente en plexiglass et aluminium, traités industriellement,’ Sorin, ‘Entretien avec Robert Rauschenberg,’ 17. ‘les arts ne doivent jamais, jamais, jamais servir la technologie,’ Ashton, ‘L’expérience américaine,’ 75. André Parinaud, ‘Un “misfit” de la peinture new-yorkaise se confesse,’ Arts, no. 821, 10–16 May 1961, 18. ‘Quand Dore Ashton m’accuse de servir les intérêts de la compagnie Bell du téléphone, elle oublie qu’elle utilise tout le temps le téléphone. Ceux qui se contentent de contester ne se rendent pas compte qu’ils ne peuvent rien changer au système qu’ils critiquent parce que le système a besoin d’eux qu’il ne peut pas fonctionner sans leurs critiques. S’ils renoncent à participer, ils peuvent aussi bien aller vivre dans les bois, loin du monde technologique qu’ils refusent. Tout peut être changé par chacun de nous. Il faut accepter les choses comme un continuum qui peut être changé et qui le sera quand on aura des moyens techniques suffisants, quand chacun sera informé de tout ce qui se passe dans le monde. Nous sommes au milieu de la politique et nous

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devons voir que tout est politique. Celui qui injurie les politiciens est lui-même un politicien. ‘Les artistes ont besoin des industriels comme les industriels ont besoin d’eux. Notre tâche consiste à montrer à ceux qui ont de l’argent qu’ils ont une responsabilité envers la societé. Auparavant l’artiste portait tout seul le polds des misères sociales, nous pouvons, si nous obtenons les moyens, réaliser des spectacles gigantesques qui réjouiront toute une ville,’ quoted in Sorin, ‘Entretien avec Robert Rauschenberg,’ 17–18. 86 See Billy Klüver, ‘The Pavilion’ and Calvin Tomkins ‘Outside Art,’ Pavilion: Experiments in Science and Technology, ed. Billy Klüver, Julie Martin and Barbara Rose, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972, ix–xvi and 105–65. 87 See the avowal in Littérature in October 1922 that ‘even before its completion, the most fabulous legends are being woven’ about the Large Glass: André Breton, ‘Marcel Duchamp’ [1922], The Lost Steps [1924], trans. Mark Polizzotti, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, 85–8, 88; Steinberg, Other Criteria, 85. 88 ‘le spectateur passé de l’autre côté du miroir,’ Sorin, ‘Entretien avec Robert Rauschenberg,’ 18. 89 Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 6. 90 ‘a cessé de compter dès lors que toutes les associations d’images, ou de mots, se valent,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 50. 91 ‘impuissance puisque les superpositions d’images n’ont pas d’autre fin ici que de captiver le regard pour mieux assoupir l’esprit,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 50. 92 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 81 (now in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the installation is referred to as ‘Chairs’ here and not titled at all in Pierre’s essay). For a detailed account of the operation of Soundings given by an old friend of the artist’s when it was exhibited for the first time from 22 October 1968 till 3 February 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, see Suzi Gablik, ‘Light Conversation,’ Art News, vol. 67, no. 7, November 1968, 58–60. 93 Warhol’s Dance Diagrams and Do-It-Yourself paintings of the early 1960s, Buchloh argues, ‘seem to have been conceived in direct response to the idea (and the impossibility) of renewing the concept of participatory aesthetics’ present in Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s early paintings and Allan Kaprow’s writings of the late 1950s: Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art, 1956– 1966’ [1989], Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2000, 461– 529, 482, 485; Branden W. Joseph, ‘Rauschenberg’s Refusal,’ Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, 257–83, 267–8. Another objection states that works such as Solstice and Revolvers ‘really represent the destruction of the deeper tensions of his earlier work by the glamour of a technological toy’, Roger Cranshaw and Adrian Lewis, ‘Re-reading Rauschenberg,’ Artscribe, no. 29, June 1981, 44–51, 49. Rauschenberg’s efforts at interactivity were characterized as follows, two years after Pierre, in response to the 1971 exhibition Art and Technology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: ‘The idea of using a human being as a power source and/or switch, which is about all that Rauschenberg is doing, is if considered seriously quite possibly humiliating. . . . It is not possible to get away with using the ideas of Cage in a half-baked manner,’ David Antin, ‘Art and the Corporations’ [1971], Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

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2011, 61–77, 67. The exhibition, Rauschenberg’s contribution to it, which was the ‘glorified music box’ Mud Muse (1968–71), and the ‘quack theories’ of Cage that helped bring it to life, were taken apart in the lately politicized Artforum in two articles, the second particularly merciless in calling out the purely promotional purpose of Art and Technology, the feebleness of its art and the eagerness of artists ‘to freeload at the trough’ of the ‘violence industries’, Jack Burnham, ‘Corporate Art’ and Max Kozloff, ‘The Multimillion Dollar Art Boondoggle,’ Artforum, vol. 10, no. 2, October 1971, 66–71, 70 and 72–6, 74, 76. 94 See the messianic remarks on the potential of a marvellous positivism to eclipse the marvellous in poetry by Ernest Renan, The Future of Science: Ideas of 1848 [1890], trans. Albert D. Vandam and C. B. Pitman, London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1891, 86. 95 The Surrealist Group in Richardson and Fijalkowski (eds.), Surrealism against the Current, 57. 96 ‘combien Rauschenberg se montre timoré depuis qu’il s’appuie sur les ressources illimitées de la technologie moderne,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 50. 97 ‘Fahlström electrifiés et sa machine à faire voir les chaises, ce n’est qu’une “accumulation” d’Arman devenue électronique!’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 50. Pierre was less critical of Rauschenberg’s turn towards technology in a subsequent, much briefer assessment of the mid-1970s, that situated the decline in the quality of the work a few years later on Captiva Island, regretting ‘the modesty of his contribution in paper and cardboard packages since 1971 which is only the pale shadow of his adventurous exploits of old,’ José Pierre, Pop Art: An Illustrated Dictionary [1975], trans. W. J. Strachan, London: Eyre Methuen, 1977, 130. 98 ‘“conseiller artistique” de l’industrie,’ ‘l’empirisme analytique dès l’instant,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 50. There is more detailed technical discussion of the making of Solstice and Soundings than I can go into here in Billy Klüver with Julie Martin, ‘Working with Rauschenberg,’ Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, ed. Walter Hopps, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997, 310–27. 99 ‘s’arrachera aux toiles d’araignée d’une philosophie conformiste,’ ‘déchaînera à nouveau dans l’enfer morose de l’art contemporaine ses troupeaux de chèvres folles et ses convois de brouettes ivres,’ Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ 50. 100 Breton, Manifestoes, 26–7; André Breton, ‘What Is Surrealism?’ [1934], What Is Surrealism? ed. Franklin Rosemont, London: Pluto Press, 1978, 112–41, 122. 101 ‘dans l’arithmétique,’ ‘dans l’ironie (quand il n’écoute pas John Cage),’ André Parinaud and Jean-Jacques Lévèque with José Pierre, Jean-Claude Silbermann and Hervé Télémaque, ‘Le surréalisme aujourd’hui,’ La Galerie des arts, no. 66, March 1969, 11–13, 13. 102 Jérôme Duwa, ‘Le pop art dans le miroir du surréalisme (1959–1965),’ Pleine marge, no. 38, December 2003, 57–70, 65 n. 38. For a view from an insider that the larger break between Jaguer and the Surrealists issued not from disagreement over Pop but from a combination of longstanding intellectual differences and Jaguer’s café etiquette, see: Boustani, ‘Entretien avec Alain Joubert,’ (accessed online at https://books.openedition.org/pupo/2007?lang=en, 23 August 2022). Pierre’s view of Pop art can be found mainly in three essays and a shorter comment, the last made in defence of Rauschenberg and Pop after the Venice Biennale of 1964: José Pierre, ‘POP! POP! POP! D’une esthétique des lieux communs,’ Combat-Art, no. 102, 1 July 1963, 2; José Pierre, ‘POP! POP! POP! D’une esthétique des lieux

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communs II,’ Combat-Art, no. 103, 7 October 1963, 2; José Pierre, ‘Longue vie au “Pop,”’ Combat-Art, no. 105, 9 December 1963, 2; José Pierre, ‘Les Ravaudeuses contre le pop,’ Combat, no. 6249, 27 July 1964, 7. Christian Bernard and Jean-Claude Wallior, ‘Ce qui est surréaliste (???),’ Phases, Second Series, no. 1, May 1969, 84; Breton, Manifestoes, 189–94. Rauschenberg quoted in Bernard and Wallior, ‘Ce qui est surréaliste (???),’ 84. Parinaud and Lévèque with Pierre, Silbermann and Télémaque, ‘Le surréalisme aujourd’hui,’ 11. See the assessment of the contemporary woes of Surrealism in Paris: Édouard Jaguer, ‘61ième minute,’ Phases, Second Series, no. 1, May 1969, 85.

Concluding remarks 1 Neither Bed nor Jasper Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts (1955) was even discussed in terms of eroticism until the 1990s: see Jeffrey Weiss, ‘Painting Bitten by a Man,’ Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965, Washington: National Gallery of Art and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, 2–56, 20–1 (and see the essays by Kenneth Silver and Katz that I referred to in my second chapter). 2 ‘cette conception de l’artiste le représentant comme un matador existentiel, tout seul dans les arènes de sa toile,’ José Pierre, ‘Le “cas” Rauschenberg,’ L’Oeil, no. 172, April 1969, 42–50, 45. ‘ . . . the notion of the artist as existential matador alone in the “arena” of his canvas,’ Barbara Rose, American Art Since 1900: A Critical History, London: Thames and Hudson, 1967, 210. 3 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters,’ Art News, vol. 51, no. 8, December 1952, 22–3 and 48–50, 22, 23. 4 William Rubin, ‘Notes on Masson and Pollock,’ Arts, vol. 34, no. 2, November 1959, 36–43, 40. 5 Leo Steinberg, ‘Other Criteria’ [1968, 1972], Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, 55–91, 61–2. 6 Steinberg, Other Criteria, 91. 7 Barbara Rose, ‘ABC Art’ [1965], Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968, 274–97, 278, 290. 8 Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters,’ 48. 9 Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 4. For the ways the separation of art and politics by abstract artists served US propaganda in the Cold War, see Eva Cockroft, ‘Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,’ Artforum, vol. 12, no. 10, June 1974, 39–41. 10 Valerie Hellstein, ‘The Cage-iness of Abstract Expressionism,’ American Art, vol. 28, no. 1, spring 2014, 56–77, 58–9, 59, 62, 63; Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters,’ 23, 48–9. 11 Hellstein, ‘The Cage-iness of Abstract Expressionism,’ 66. 12 Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1996, 201. 13 De Duve, Kant After Duchamp, 202, 204, 217, 220, 231. De Duve spends many pages in his loyal mission to preserve the rationalism of Greenberg’s theory of modernism,

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Notes but that theory was often driven, in fact, by personal, extra-theoretical issues; see the recollections, for instance, of Robert Rosenblum and Rose, for whom Greenberg’s dislike of Stella’s art turned on his dislike of Stella, an explanation that is more economical and plausible than de Duve’s circuitous effort: Amy Newman, Challenging Art: ­Artforum 1962–1974, New York: Soho Press, Inc., 2000, 197–8. Quoted in Newman, Challenging Art, 167, 199. Quoted in Newman, Challenging Art, 205. See the cautious, self-avowedly ‘positivist’ assessment of Newman, Rothko, Still and Adolph Gottlieb in The Nation, querying their so-called ‘symbolism’ and appeals to the unconscious by stating: ‘I myself would question the importance this school attributes to the symbolical or “metaphysical” content of its art,’ calling such opinions ‘half-baked and revivalist, in a familiar American way,’ and concluding that the ‘test is in the art, not in the program,’ Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb’ [1947], The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, ed. John O’Brian, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986, 187–9, 188, 189. Newman’s rebuttal in an unpublished letter meant for The Nation, maintaining that the ‘American artists under discussion create a truly abstract world which can be discussed only in metaphysical terms,’ is evidently indebted to Friedrich Nietzsche and Wassily Kandinsky, stating further that the ‘American painters under discussion . . . start with the chaos of pure fantasy and feeling, with nothing that has any known physical, visual, or mathematical counterpart, and they bring out of this chaos of emotion images that give these intangibles reality . . . .,’ Barnett Newman, ‘Response to Clement Greenberg’ [1947], Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992, 161–4, 163. Still, it is reported elsewhere, rejected the whole formalist programme: ‘I never wanted colour to be colour. I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse into a living spirit,’ Still quoted by Katharine Kuh, ‘Clyfford Still,’ New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Clyfford Still, 1979, 9–13, 11. For an account of all three artists’ own respective interpretations of their painting through philosophical, religious and/or spiritual notions of ‘the sublime,’ ‘transcendental experience’ and ‘exaltation,’ see New York: C & M Arts, Newman, Rothko, Still: Search for the Sublime, 1994, n. p. One art historian glimpsed these in ‘an oscillation in the response invited by a Brancusi sculpture between seeing it as a highly formalized art object and as an object of fantasy,’ Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 142. However, the chance to amplify this dichotomy into an art historical tendency was not taken, while the later study attempting to challenge the same putative historical break I am disputing here, by perceiving a ‘realist’ lineage extending from Jackson Pollock’s paintings through Rauschenberg’s Combines, Pop, Happenings, Nouveau Réalisme, the art of Joseph Beuys and Asger Jorn, is hampered as reliable history by the lack of notice it gives to the lingering impact of Cubism and still-recent memory of Surrealism from the 1940s (in spite of the attention given Matta), and most importantly to the late reception of Marcel Duchamp’s work from the 1950s and the contemporaneous counsel of Cage, while the complete absence of the post-war Surrealist movement from the record is more than expected: Alex Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013.

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18 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures [1970], trans. Chris Turner, London: Sage, 2012, 117. 19 Baudrillard, Consumer Society, 118. 20 Baudrillard, Consumer Society, 117 (translation slightly modified). 21 Annette Michelson, ‘Robert Morris – An Aesthetics of Transgression’ [1969], Robert Morris, ed. Julia Bryan-Wilson, London and Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2013, 7–49, 15, 19. Although her term ‘presentnesss’ was drawn from the well-known essay by Michael Fried that was already proving highly disputable, Fried’s rejection of the ‘theatricality’ of the ‘literalist sensibility’ of Morris and the others made precisely the opposite critique of Surrealism, viewing the ‘Surrealist sensibility’ as an earlier version – ‘manifested, for example, as expectation, dread, anxiety, presentiment, memory, nostalgia, stasis’ – of the temporality that doomed minimalism as art and that he contrasted with the ‘presentness’ of modernist art: Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ [1967], Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art, 116–47, 145 n. 19. 22 Mario Amaya, Pop as Art: A Survey of the New Super Realism, London: Studio Vista, 1965, 29–30; Leonard B. Meyer ‘The End of the Renaissance? Notes on the Radical Empiricism of the Avant-Garde,’ The Hudson Review, vol. 16, no. 2, summer 1963, 169–86, 174, 176; John Cage, ‘Experimental Music’ [1961], Silence: Lectures and Writings [1961], London: Marion Boyars, 1968, 7–13, 12, 10. 23 Baudrillard, Consumer Society, 117–18. 24 ‘une sorte d’empirio-mysticisme,’ Marcelin Pleynet, ‘Cage et la modernité’ (book review), La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 107, 1–15 December 1970, 3–4, 4. 25 Baudrillard, Consumer Society, 118. The full story of the relationship between Tel Quel and Surrealism along with its descent into rancour from the late 1960s and intensification after May ’68 is too lengthy to go into here. The final, negative collective appraisal of Bretonian Surrealism in Tel Quel is usually given by historians as the well-known revisionist special number, published as issue forty-six in summer 1971, but exchanges between the two parties would continue afterwards outside the journal. Hot on its heels came an approving Marxian-psychoanalytic gloss of the Tel Quel critique of the ‘idealism’ of ‘neo-surrealism’ (or even ‘surreo-mysticism’), agreeing with the journal that Surrealism was not relevant outside of its interwar historical moment (even though the relevance of Marxism and psychoanalysis continued outside of their nineteenth-century one, apparently): Robert W. Hefner, ‘The Tel Quel Ideology: Material Practice upon Material Practice,’ SubStance, vol. 3, no. 8, winter 1973–4, 127–38, 127, 134. A defence of Surrealism from within a few years later viewed Tel Quel and structuralism historically as the main ‘doctrinaires du langage’ fostering an academic discourse in the post-war period that insistently proclaimed the failure of Surrealism, given initial momentum by the tone set by JeanPaul Sartre in ‘Situation of the Writer in 1947’ (1948): Robert Lebel, ‘Les machines langagières,’ Vincent Bounoure (ed.), La civilization surréaliste, Paris: Payot, 1976, 73–8, 77. For a comparison given in the language of Tel Quel and sixties theory that regards Surrealism critically as ‘a transcendent vision of the space beyond the limit’ and considers the movement as uncomplicatedly an instance of the avant-garde, see Patrick ffrench, ‘Tel Quel and Surrealism: A Re-Evaluation. Has the Avant-Garde Become a Theory?’ Romanic Review, vol. 88, no. 1, January 1997, 189–96, 192. ‘Neo-surrealism’ gained some currency in the polemics of 1970 in the unsigned text ‘Le Breton du pauvre,’ Tel Quel, no. 42, summer 1970, 101–3; it

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was used a bit differently, without a critical slant, to spot a cultural trend by Ihab Hassan, ‘POSTmodernISM,’ New Literary History, vol. 3, no. 1 (‘Modernism and Postmodernism: Inquiries, Reflections, and Speculations’), autumn 1971, 5–30, 23; and restored to its critical function in the later Tel Quel, used reluctantly this time, to both relate and distance the theatre of Robert Wilson from historical Surrealism, by Guy Scarpetta, ‘The American Body: Notes on the New Experimental Theatre’ [1977], trans. Michael Temple, Patrick ffrench and Roland François-Lack (eds.), The Tel Quel Reader, London: Routledge, 1998, 214–37, 228; see Guy Scarpetta, ‘Le corps américain,’ Tel Quel, no. 71–3, autumn 1977, 247–70, 261. In US art criticism in the 1960s, the label ‘neo-surrealism’ had some rare usage: see, for instance, Lucy Lippard, ‘Eros Presumptive,’ The Hudson Review, vol. 20, no. 1, spring 1967, 91–9, 91, 94. Unlike ‘Neo-Dada,’ however, it never really stuck and is notable here mainly for the curiosity of its historical particularity and current irrelevance, even though it has had some informal usage (without justification) in historical writing on the 1960s for artists such as Lee Bontecou, Yayoi Kusama, Walter de Maria, Claes Oldenburg and Lucas Samaras: James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001, 45, 135, 279–80 n. 23; and Arman, Jim Dine, Öyvind Fahlström, Marisol Escobar, Oldenburg again and George Segal: Scott Rothkopf, ‘Paul Thek and the Sixties Surreal,’ Elisabeth Sussman (ed.), Paul Thek, Diver: A Retrospective, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2010, 46–53, 47. One art historian has pointed out that ‘no argument is made for neo-surrealism’ by William Rubin in the catalogue of the New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (1968), but does not say what that term might constitute: Helen Molesworth, ‘From Dada to Neo-Dada and Back Again,’ October, no. 105 (‘Dada’), summer 2003, 177–81, 177. 26 Baudrillard, Consumer Society, 117–18. 27 Baudrillard, Consumer Society, 115. 28 Baudrillard, Consumer Society, 119. I used this quotation in my last chapter to elucidate Pierre’s paradoxical strategy of quoting Cage in the services of a Surrealist interpretation of Rauschenberg; the fundamentalist statement clarifying Baudrillard’s position – citing Cubism, Dada, Marcel Duchamp, Surrealism and implying the same about Rauschenberg, as well as the poetry of Francis Ponge – is given as follows: ‘whether poetic or critical, the whole of art, “without which things would merely be what they are,” is fuelled (before Pop) by transcendence,’ Baudrillard, Consumer Society, 199 n. 11 (meaning the literalism of Pop, even as this was both confirmed and undercut by its accompanying rhetoric, had desecularization as its aim). 29 Scarpetta in ffrench and François-Lack (eds.), Tel Quel Reader, 218 (translation modified). 30 Scarpetta in ffrench and François-Lack (eds.), Tel Quel Reader, 228. 31 Scarpetta in ffrench and François-Lack (eds.), Tel Quel Reader, 228, 237 n. 7; Rubin, ‘Notes on Masson and Pollock,’ 42, 43. 32 Marcelin Pleynet, ‘La peinture par l’oreille,’ Tel Quel, no. 67, autumn 1976, 10–24, 24 n. 8. The conservatism of Pleynet’s selections from the scholarship on US art was indicated by Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983, 10. 33 Scarpetta in ffrench and François-Lack (eds.), Tel Quel Reader, 218–19. 34 Scarpetta in ffrench and François-Lack (eds.), Tel Quel Reader, 219–20.

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35 Scarpetta in ffrench and François-Lack (eds.), Tel Quel Reader, 220. 36 Scarpetta in ffrench and François-Lack (eds.), Tel Quel Reader, 226, 227. 37 Roland Barthes, Mythologies [1957], trans. Annette Lavers, London: Jonathan Cape, 1972, 9. 38 Roland Barthes, ‘Literature Today: Answers to a Questionnaire in Tel Quel’ [1961], Critical Essays [1964], trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 151–61, 155. 39 Roland Barthes, ‘Literal Literature’ [1955], Critical Essays, 51–8, 53, 55. 40 Roland Barthes, ‘Objective Literature’ [1954], Critical Essays, 13–24, 14. 41 Roland Barthes, ‘That Old Thing, Art . . . ’ [1980], The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation [1982], trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985, 198–206, 201–2. The famous quotation is slightly misquoted or misrendered: ‘“I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t,” Rauschenberg said. “I want it to look like something it is,”’ Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1980, 87. We are by now accustomed to the very quotable ‘ . . . object is fact, not symbol,’ John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’ [1961], Silence, 98–108, 108. 42 Rose in Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art, 291. 43 I do not mean to run these readings too neatly together, but rather to suggest a tendency that might begin with Zola’s insistence on the ultra-literalism of an art that denied history, the ‘soul,’ ideas or philosophy: Émile Zola, ‘Edouard Manet’ [1867–8], Portrait of Manet by Himself and His Contemporaries [1953], ed. Pierre Courthion and Pierre Callier, trans. Michael Ross, London: Cassell, 1960, 113–43; and Mallarmé’s accolade to Manet’s hand for its ‘impersonal abstraction guided only by the will,’ Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘The Impressionists and Edouard Manet,’ The Art Monthly Review, vol. 1, no. 9, 30 September 1876, 117–22, 118. ­44 Georges Bataille, Manet, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons, New York: Skira, 1955, 67; Barthes, Responsibility of Forms, 202. My insertion of Bataille’s reading into this lineage nudges it away from Surrealism, locating it closer to modernist formalism than was sought by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide [1996], New York: Zone Books, 1997, 13–15, 25. For their brief reading of Rauschenberg under Bataille’s theory of ‘base materialism,’ see Bois and Krauss, Formless, 59. For Bataille’s evaluation of Beckett’s Molloy (1951) using the terms ‘unspeakable’ and ‘unnameable,’ before withdrawing them because they gave form to the character of Molloy who he preferred to consider a ‘silence,’ see Georges Bataille, ‘Georges Bataille in Critique’ [1951], Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (eds.), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, London, Henley and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, 55–64, 56. 45 Barthes, Responsibility of Forms, 202. 46 Barthes, Responsibility of Forms, 202. 47 Quoted in Newman, Challenging Art, 424. The early evidence of a shared programme can be found in the reference in Tel Quel to an article carried in the first issue of October, made by Scarpetta ‘Le corps américain,’ 258 n. 10; Richard Foreman, ‘The Carrot and the Stick,’ October, no. 1, spring 1976, 22–31.

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Index ‘ABC Art’ (Rose) 6, 13, 15, 171, 177 Aen Floga (Rauschenberg) 160–1 Alechinsky, Pierre 149 Alfieri, Bruno 23 Alleg, Henri 95–6, 98–9, 106 allegory 18–20, 26–7, 194 n.76 Alloway, Lawrence 28, 185 n.56, 195 nn.83–4, 197 n.96, 245 n.62 Aloi, Giovanni 221 n.32 Althusser, Louis 56 Amaya, Mario 174 American Art Since 1900 (Cage) 6 The Ancient Incident (Rauschenberg) 85–6 Anderson, Alison 198 n.15 Anderson, Harry 117 Andre, Carl 14, 172 Anti-Procès 10–11, 90–5, 98–9, 101–6, 108, 116, 118, 121, 124, 126–7, 230 n.21, 235 n.62 Anti-Procès 3 94–7, 99–100, 105, 110, 154–5 Aragon, Louis 2, 24, 54, 109, 127, 192 n.62, 208 n.16 Arcane 17 (Duchamp) 45–6 Arendt, Hanna 72 Arman 58, 63, 112, 126, 134, 146–8, 167 Arp, Jean 14, 112 Art and Literature 218–19 n.20 Artaud, Antonin 5, 92–3, 136, 139, 228 n.8 Artforum 5, 14, 18, 143, 145–6, 149, 171, 257 n.90, 258–9 n.97 Articulated Cloud (Paalen) 85, 142 Art in the Age of Risk (Calas) 140, 205 n.71 Art News (Rauschenberg) 7, 32, 34, 66, 97, 111, 140, 175, 233 n.49 The Art of Assemblage 61–2, 64–5, 102, 112, 160 Art of This Century (Guggenheim) 41, 228 n.13 Arts (newspaper) 51, 58–9, 65, 116, 133 Artschwager, Richard 146

‘Ascendant Sign’ (Breton) 41, 63, 105, 110, 125 Ashbery, John 7, 149, 182 n.45, 219 n.20 Ashton, Dore 23–4, 26–30, 101, 129, 158, 163–4, 193 n.73, 193–4 n.75, 195 n.84, 196 n.87, 196 n.91, 196 n.93, 196 n.96, 236 n.68, 266 n.81 Audin, Maurice 106 Audoin, Philippe 138 Automobile Tire Print (Rauschenberg) 83, 124, 170, 188 n.34 Axle (Rauschenberg) 101 Baader, Johannes 104 Baj, Enrico 69, 100, 112, 201 n.41 Baker, Steve 221 n.37 Barge (Rauschenberg) 11, 107, 117, 123–6, 246 nn.78–9, 247 n.82 Barr, Alfred H. Jr. 37 Barthes, Roland 2, 5, 14–15, 20, 23, 27, 56, 97, 135, 138–9, 174, 176–8, 186 n.17, 190 n.46, 194 n.78, 254 n.43 Bataille, Georges 2, 34, 56, 136–8, 177–8, 187 n.28, 210 n.37 Baudelaire, Charles 88, 115, 117, 125 Baudrillard, Jean 152, 173–6 Beaujour, Michel 20 Beckett, Samuel 2, 4–5, 14–15, 58, 79, 92, 131, 138, 145 Bed (Rauschenberg) 4, 11, 23, 27, 29, 32–3, 35–9, 41–9, 59, 62, 73–4, 79, 81, 91, 95–101, 106, 110–12, 121–2, 140–1, 146–7, 153, 155, 159–60, 162, 184 n.55, 199 n.21, 200 nn.30–1, 201 n.39, 201 n.42, 203–4 n.60, 204 n.64, 221 n.34, 224 n.56, 231 n.35, 232–3 n.48, 234 n.60, 245 n.62, 258 n.92 Bedouin, Jean-Louis 89 Bellmer, Hans 34, 45, 112 Bellon, Denise 133

296

Index

Benayoun, Robert 10–11, 44, 56, 61–7, 69, 91–2, 106, 120, 126, 128–9, 140–1, 152, 154, 160, 170, 214 n.90, 214 n.92 Benjamin, Walter 18, 187 n.28 Benoît, Jean 27, 89 Berkeley, George ‘Bishop’ 151 Bernard, Christian 168–9 Bernstein, Roberta 225 n.60 Bertillon, Alphonse 159 Biasi, Guido 90 Bicycle Wheel (Duchamp) 83, 245 n.62 BIEF: Jonction surréaliste 69, 93 Black Paintings (Rauschenberg) 16, 247 n.89 Blanchot, Maurice 2, 56, 92, 137 Blaut, Julia 29 Bluhm, Norman 74 Boaden, James 148 Bochner, Mel 14 Bode, Arnold 37 Boiffard, Jacques-André 20, 22 Bonnefoy, Maurice 41–2, 45, 56, 202–3 n.54 Bontecou, Lee 135 Bottlerack (Duchamp) 138 Boupacha, Djamila 99–100, 106, 122 Boyers, Robert 189 n.38 Brauner, Victor 69, 93, 108, 112 Breton, André 1, 3, 5, 11, 14, 16, 20, 21–4, 26–8, 34, 36–7, 40–2, 44–5, 47, 53–6, 58, 63, 68–9, 72, 75, 89, 91, 102–3, 105, 108–10, 115–16, 118, 120, 125–30, 134, 136, 138–9, 142–3, 145, 148, 150–1, 154, 156, 162, 164, 166, 168–70, 177–8, 179 n.3, 192 n.62, 195 n.81, 195–6 n.84, 196 n.87, 202–3 n.54, 203 n.58, 207 n.80, 209–10 n.32, 213 n.77, 232 n.40, 239 n.14, 248 n.105, 263 n.43 The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even or Large Glass (Duchamp) 44, 115, 164–5, 223 n.54 Brown, Bill 131–2, 139, 153 Brown, Norman O. 5, 25–6, 193 n.68, 233 n.48 Bryen, Camille 93

Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. 5, 18–19, 167 Burri, Alberto 59 Butor, Michel 2, 128, 130, 138 Cabanne, Pierre 128 Cage, John 4–10, 15, 23–6, 28–30, 34, 36, 47, 65, 67–8, 88, 91–3, 124–6, 132, 136, 138, 142–5, 149, 151–4, 162–3, 166–7, 169–78, 181 n.24, 182 n.40, 186–7 n.18, 189 n.35, 190 n.52, 192 n.59, 192 n.62, 193 n.67, 193 n.69, 229 n.16, 246 n.79, 252 n.26 Calas, Nicolas 11, 33–8, 40, 95, 110, 139–46, 149, 156, 170, 195 n.84, 199 n.28, 201 n.39, 254 n.51, 255 n.57, 255 n.67, 256 n.83 Camacho, Jorge 93 Canaday, John 13 Cannibal Feast (Oppenheim) 38 Canto XIV: Circle Seven, Round 3, The Violent against God, Nature, and Art (Rauschenberg) 24 Canyon (Rauschenberg) 40, 62–3, 66, 75, 123, 128, 140–1, 153, 204 n.63, 212 n.70, 223 n.54 Cárdenas, Agustín 89, 93 Carnap, Rudolph 144 Castelli, Leo 5, 7, 23, 27, 31–4, 36–7, 44, 47, 101, 191 n.54, 191–2 n.56, 199 n.20, 199 n.23, 200 nn.31–2, 201 n.42, 202 n.54, 207 n.2, 211 n.46 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 53–4 Césaire, Aimé 93 Chagall, Marc 27 Chamberlain, John 62, 122, 135 Chaplin, Charlie 208 n.16 Charlene (Wainwright) 7, 61, 74, 96, 107, 116–17 Charles, Daniel 25 Childs, Barney 143 Choay, Françoise 74, 107, 132–5, 160 choisiste (Rauschenberg) 131–2, 146 Clert, Iris 216 n.9 Coca-Cola Plan 54, 66, 221 n.32 Coexistence (Rauschenberg) 61, 160–1, 264 n.70 Cold War 52–4, 61, 66, 117

Index Collages et objets (Jouffroy) 111–13 Collection (Wainwright) 96 Combat-Art 59, 61–2, 65, 113, 168 A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Hopkins) 205 n.64 The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (Schwarz) 69 Comte de Lautréamont (1846–70) 3, 77, 92, 134 The Construction of Boston 65–6, 265 n.80 The Consumer (Rauschenberg) 47–50, 163 The Consumer Society (Baudrillard) 173 Cordier, Daniel 34, 49, 51, 57–9, 62, 64, 65, 101, 132–3, 199 n.20, 200 n.30, 207 n.2, 211 n.46 Cordier, Raymond 51, 73 Cornell, Joseph 74, 112, 220 n.28 Corso, Gregory 73 Crimp, Douglas 18, 188–9 n.35 Crippa, Roberto 100 Crocus (Rauschenberg) 17–18 Crow, Thomas 7, 29, 81, 223 n.54 Cunningham, Merce 176, 254 n.45 The Cut Glass Bath (Magritte) 79–80 Dada: Kunst und Antikunst (Richter) 37, 200 n.35 The Dada Painters and Poets (Motherwell) 116, 192 n.62, 197 n.8 Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (Rubin) 146–9, 175 ‘The Dalí “Case,”’ (Breton) 150–1 Dalí, Salvador 101, 134, 146, 150–1, 175 Dante, Alighieri 23–30, 185 n.1, 191 n.54, 193–4 n.75, 196 n.93 de Beauvoir, Simone 99 Debout, Simone 201 n.42 Debré, Michel 57 de Chirico, Giorgio 151 Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War or Declaration of the 121 (1960) 10, 56, 74, 89, 94–5, 99–100, 105–6, 118 de Duve, Thierry 172 de Gaulle, Charles 40, 54–7, 99

297

Degottex, Jean 129 Delvaux, Paul 175 Derrida, Jacques 131 de Sade, Marquis 99 Deschamps, Gérard 93 Desnos, Robert 93 Diderot, Denis 73 Diem, Ngo Dien 52 Dine, Jim 28, 62, 110, 112–13, 122, 129, 146, 195–6 n.84 ‘The Dishonour of the Poets’ (Péret) 163 Domínguez, Oscar 133 Dondero, Mario 100 Dorfles, Gillo 65 Double Negative (Heiser) 15 Dova, Gianni 100 Drapeau (Rousseau) 103–4 Dreier, Katherine 124 Dreiss, Joseph 184 n.55 Droite, Rive 51, 135 Drost, Julia 202–3 n.54 Dubnick, Randa 194 n.78 Dubuffet, Jean 34, 74, 157 Ducasse, Isidore 3 Duchamp, Marcel 1, 5, 15, 18, 31–2, 34, 36–7, 42–6, 49–50, 61, 65, 68–9, 75, 79, 83, 89, 91, 109–16, 121, 124, 126, 133–5, 138, 140, 148, 155, 164–6, 176, 197 n.8, 199 n.22, 203 nn.59–60, 204 n.65, 207 n.83, 222–3 n.50, 223 n.54, 227 n.2, 242 n.40 Dufour, Bernard 93 Dufrêne, François 63, 93 Duprey, Jean-Pierre 144 Durozoi, Gérard 198 n.15 Duwa, Jérôme 168 Ehrenzweig, Anton 145 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 101 Empire II (Rauschenberg) 120–1, 160 ‘The End of the Renaissance?’ (Meyer) 4, 115, 143, 173 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume) 156 Entretiens 1913–1952 3, 69

298 Erased de Kooning Drawing (Rauschenberg) 14, 18, 73, 132, 151, 155, 162, 170, 190 n.53, 264 n.71 Ernst, Max 20, 42, 104, 112–13, 128–9, 134–5, 146, 191 n.53, 220 n.28, 256 n.87 eroticism 34–5, 94, 136, 153, 269 n.1 Érro 90, 100 Essays on Assemblage (Leggio) 232–3 n.48 Estienne, Charles 105–6 The Eternally Obvious (Magritte) 45, 226 n.68 Evergreen Review 15, 40, 72–3, 218 n.20 Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) 162–4 Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) 10, 23, 33–9, 49, 51, 69, 93, 108, 132, 148 Fahlström, Öyvind 34, 42, 90–3, 146, 149, 154, 156, 163, 167 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism 3 Feinstein, Roni 30, 184 n.55, 188 n.34, 220 n.28, 221 n.37 Ferrero, Pat 203 n.60 Fijalkowski, Krzysztof 208 n.14 Flag (Johns) 4, 18, 32, 35, 47, 79, 226 n.68 Flahutez, Fabrice 202–3 n.54 Fleck, Robert 216 n.8 Fontana, Lucio 59, 64, 93 For a New Novel (Robbe-Grillet) 15, 115, 138 Foreman, Richard 176 Forge (Rauschenberg) 34 Foster, Hal 220 n.28 Foucault, Michel 2–3, 14, 56, 92, 116, 131, 135, 137–8, 253 n.35 Fourier, Charles 47 France, Anatole 145 Freddie, Wilhelm 89 Fredrickson, Laurel 91 Freedom Is a Vietnamese Word 52 Freud, Sigmund 44, 72, 96 Fried, Michael 12, 18, 145, 149, 175, 271 n.21 Front unique 10, 69–79, 83, 88–91, 94–5, 106, 154, 219 n.22, 230 n.21, 235 n.62, 237 n.79

Index Gablik, Suzi 78–9, 81, 88, 225 n.65, 226 n.68 Gaudibert, Pierre 184 n.55 Gauguin, Paul 125 Gauguin’s Spirit (Lebel) 102 Gautherin, Jean 73 Genauer, Emily 24, 36 Ghea (Saint Phalle) 147 Giacometti, Alberto 37–8, 48, 153, 155 Ginsberg, Allen 117–18 Giorni surrealisti di Milano 69 Glaeser, Henri 39, 45 Godard, Jean-Luc 66 Goldfayn, Georges 3, 232 n.40 Götz, Karl Otto 90 Gracq, Julien 137–8, 253 n.39 Granell, E. F. 37 Greenberg, Clement 12, 14, 16, 18, 36, 40, 46–7, 61, 131, 145–6, 149, 157–8, 171–3, 256 n.87 Gruen, John 187 n.22 Guattari, Félix 56 Guernica (Picasso) 124 Guggenheim, Peggy 41 Guggenheim, Solomon R. 16, 30 Haacke, Hans 36, 169 Haftmann, Werner 36–7, 200 n.35 Hahn, Otto 64–7, 214 n.90, 215 n.97, 215 n.99 Hains, Raymond 63–4, 93, 112, 213 n.82 Hantaï, Simon 232 n.40 Hartigan, Grace 41, 72 Hartung, Hans 111 Hassan, Ihab 189 n.35 Hatching VI (Masson) 112 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 81 Hegel’s Holiday (Magritte) 81, 85 Heiser, Michael 15 Hellstein, Valerie 172 Helmreich, Anne 202 n.54 Hérold, Jacques 93 Hess, Thomas B. 19, 66, 111 History of Madness (Foucault) 92 History of Surrealist Painting (Jean) 41 Ho Chi Minh 52 Hollier, Denis 20, 190 n.46 Hopps, Walter 75, 184 n.55, 220 n.28, 221 n.33

Index Howe, Irving 189 n.38 Hughes, Robert 75, 78, 184 n.55 Hultén, Pontus 8–9, 59, 74, 183–4 nn.50–1, 223 n.54 Hume, David 151, 156, 166 Hundertwasser, Friedensreich 93 Hymnal (Rauschenberg) 142–3, 212 n.61, 255 n.67 Ida Franger (Kienholz) 147 Ikegami, Hiroko 74, 81, 83, 102, 107, 122, 214 n.90 Invisible Object (Giacometti) 37–8, 48, 155 Jachec, Nancy 145 Jaguer, Édouard 42, 89, 168–9, 217 n.12 Jakobson, Roman 194 n.78 Jarry, Alfred 43 Javits, Jacob 163 Jean, Marcel 41 Johns, Jasper 4–5, 10, 14, 18, 31–8, 40–7, 49–51, 68–9, 72, 88, 105, 110–13, 122, 126, 129, 134–5, 139–40, 144, 146–9, 155, 157, 167, 170–2, 174, 179 n.3, 185 n.56, 185 n.2, 186–7 n.18, 197 n.6, 201–2 n.44, 202 n.51, 204 n.62, 219 n.22, 225 n.60, 226 n.70, 260 n.15 Jones, Caroline 145 Jones, Ernest 233 n.46 Joseph, Branden W. 29, 74, 167 Jouffroy, Alain 11, 47, 58, 65, 67–8, 72, 90–1, 93–7, 99–2, 104–30, 136, 139, 154, 158, 160, 163, 166, 170, 191 n.53, 195 n.84, 235 n.61, 241 n.39 Joyce, James 25 Judd, Donald 14–15, 149, 172–3, 176, 188 n.30 Kandinsky, Wassily 270 n.16 Kaprow, Allan 104, 144, 229 n.16 Karp, Ivan C. 5 Katz, Jonathan 170, 204 n.63 Kertész, André 45 Kienholz, Ed 147 Kiesler, Frederick 228 n.13 Kitaj, R. B. 179 n.3 Klein, Yves 59 Klossowski, Pierre 145

299

Klüver, Billy 162–3, 167 Koch, Kenneth 65 Kosuth, Joseph 15, 187 n.18 Kotz, Mary Lynn 101, 183–4 n.55, 224 n.57 Kozloff, Max 61, 74, 149, 236 n.70 Kramer, Hilton 28, 220 n.28 Krauss, Rosalind 14–20, 23, 29–30, 145, 178, 185–6 n.5, 186 n.17, 187 n.22, 187 n.28, 187–8 n.30, 190 n.46, 190 n.51, 190 n.53 Krčma, Ed 191 n.53 Kristeva, Julia 139 Kulchur (Calas) 140–3 La Brèche: Action surréaliste 61, 63, 65, 126, 128–9, 136, 138, 141, 152 Lacan, Jacques 56 Laloy, Yves 37 Lam, Wifredo 69, 93, 247 n.86 Lannoy, Marcel 48–9 La Nouvelle revue française (Artaud) 92 L’antichambre de la nature (Jouffroy) 125–6 Lapoujade, Robert 93 La Question (Matta) 95–6, 98, 232 n.38, 232 n.40 L’arbre fruitier (Lebel) 69 Lautréamont, Comte de 3, 28, 40, 77–8, 83, 92–3, 134 Lebel, Jean-Jacques 10–11, 65, 67–95, 97–106, 108–10, 112–13, 118, 120–1, 128, 170, 191 n.53, 202 n.45, 203 n.54, 210 n.36, 216–17 nn.6–9, 217–18 n.12, 227 n.1, 227 n.73, 228 n.9, 228 n.13, 229 n.16, 230 n.20, 235 n.61, 235 n.62, 241 n.31, 241–2 n.39, 248 n.101, 252 n.26 Lebel, Robert 68–9, 111, 207 n.80, 239 n.11 L’Écart absolu (Rauschenberg) 47–50, 66, 106, 129 Lefebvre, Henri 2 Leggio, James 81, 95, 97, 185 n.55, 232–3 n.48 Legrand, Gérard 3, 56, 69–70 Le Grand tableau anti-fasciste collectif (Lebel, Baj, Crippa, Dova, Recalcati and Érro) 100–2, 235 n.63

300

Index

Leider, Philip 145, 149 Lenk, Elisabeth 91 Le Nouvel observateur 128, 130, 248 n.101 L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely (Fredrickson) 91 Leo Castelli Gallery 5, 7, 23, 31–2, 34, 36, 73, 95, 101, 172, 200 n.30 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 87 Le Surréalisme en 1947 2–3, 52 Le Surréalisme, même 1957 69 Lévèque, Jean-Jacques 167 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 2, 5, 56, 139 Levy, Julien 41 L.H.O.O.Q (Duchamp) 18, 49, 155 Lichtenstein, Roy 110, 126, 155 Lipman, Jean 6 Lippard, Lucy 26, 146, 193 n.73 The Little General (Pinball Machine) (Fahlström) 156 Livingstone, Marco 179 n.3 Locke, John 151 L’Oeil 49, 116, 118, 121, 155, 160 Louis, Morris 122, 172 Lurie, Boris 113 McLuhan, Marshall 5–6, 190 n.52 Mad Love (Breton) 20, 63, 118, 120, 126, 153, 156, 252 n.24, 261 n.22 Magritte, René 11, 27, 45, 78–89, 127, 129, 134, 146, 175, 194–5 n.78, 195 n.84, 220 n.28, 224 n.58, 225 n.60, 226 n.68, 226 n.70 Mahon, Alyce 34, 94, 230 n.25, 235 n.61 Mallarmé, Stéphane 61, 177 Mamiya, Christin J. 236 n.70 Manet, Édouard 125, 177 Manifesto of Surrealism (Breton) 26, 63, 66, 115, 145, 154, 162 Mansour, Joyce 70 Man with a Clarinet (Picasso) 166 Manzoni, Piero 219 n.22 Marcuse, Herbert 205–6 n.72 Marshall Plan 52–4, 162 Martini, Alberto 90 Marx, Karl 72, 154 Marx-Scouras, Danielle 137 Mascolo, Dionys 56 Masson, André 27, 66, 111–13, 171, 175

Matisse, Henri 112 Matta, Roberto 45, 70, 93, 95–6, 99–100, 106–8, 126, 247 n.89 Mattison, Robert S. 236 n.70 Médium: Communication surréaliste (Goldfayn and Legrand) 3, 207 n.80 Menotti, Gian Carlo 36 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 14, 58 Mesens, E. L. T. 42 Messali Hadj 55 metaphor 6–8, 14–16, 19–20, 23, 24, 27–9, 60, 97, 114–15, 117, 125–6, 129–31, 138–9, 159, 171, 177–8, 264 n.71 Metro 23–4, 26–7, 65, 101, 132, 191–2 n.56 Meyer, James 13 Meyer, Leonard B. 4–6, 10, 14, 19, 28, 115, 131, 143, 173–4, 180 nn.19–20 Michaux, Henri 93 Michelson, Annette 15, 45, 131, 174, 178, 257 n.90 Miró, Joan 37, 112, 114, 118–19, 133, 146, 153, 220 n.28, 245 n.62 Mitrani, Nora 234 n.60 Modigliani, Amedeo 90 Molesworth, Helen 233 n.48 Molinier, Pierre 37 Molloy (Beckett) 79, 81, 138 Monahan, Laurie J. 122, 246 n.76 Monogram (Rauschenberg) 10, 29, 35, 41, 62, 70–9, 81–5, 87–90, 107, 141, 219 n.22, 221 nn.32–3, 223 n.54 Moore, Henry 14 Morra, Joanne 29, 196 n.93 Morris, Robert 14–15, 149, 172, 174, 176, 186 n.18 Morrissette, Bruce 4, 132 Motherwell, Robert 116, 192 n.62 The Museum of Modern Art 3, 24, 37, 40, 61, 102–3, 112, 119, 146, 172 Myers, John Bernard 39–47, 70–8, 89, 202 n.45, 218 n.20 Mythologies (Barthes) 176 Nadeau, Maurice 2, 71 Nadja (Breton) 20–1, 23, 127, 136 ‘Nature, Humanism, Tragedy’ (RobbeGrillet) 15, 130–1, 138

Index Neo-Dada 31–2, 34, 37, 40–1, 49–50, 61, 104, 113, 128, 132, 134–5, 148, 151, 167, 170, 218 n.12 NÉON (Jouffroy) 108, 110 Never (Domínguez) 133 Newman, Barnett 123, 173 Nietzsche, Friedrich 5, 270 n.16 Niven, David 214 n.91 Noland, Kenneth 122, 172 Nouveaux Réalistes 59, 61–2, 64, 107, 122, 133–4, 167, 229 n.16 Nude Woman Lying in the Sun on the Beach (Picasso) 100 Object (Breakfast in Fur) (Oppenheim) 75 Object (Miró) 118–19 Object (Oppenheim) 85 Object and Idea (O’Doherty) 179 n.3 Odalisk (Rauschenberg) 18, 35, 74, 81, 85, 118–19, 141, 201 n.37 O’Doherty, Brian 1, 132, 142, 179 n.3, 181 n.24, 184 n.55, 243–4 n.48 Oeuvres complètes (Breton) 3 O’Hara, Frank 7, 36, 132, 163, 182 n.44, 233 n.49 Oldenburg, Claes 113, 122, 129, 146–7, 169, 175 ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility’ (Sontag) 5, 14, 16 One-Dimensional Man (Rauschenberg) 47 One-Ton Prop (Serra) 15 Oppenheim, Matta 93 Oppenheim, Meret 38, 75, 85, 93, 112, 142 Opus International 109, 163 Other Criteria (Steinberg) 103, 157–8, 162, 171, 205 n.67, 235 n.60 Owens, Craig 18, 27, 189 n.43 Paalen, Wolfgang 42, 85, 142 Parinaud, André 3, 58–9, 65–6, 68, 116, 132, 164, 167, 169, 217 n.12 Passages in Modern Sculpture (Krauss) 14–15, 187 n.22 Pauvert, Jean-Jacques 201 n.43, 234 n.60 Pepsi Cola 164 Péret, Benjamin 70, 93, 163 ‘Perpetual Inventory’ (Krauss) 16–23

301

Persimmon (Rauschenberg) 17–18, 140, 188–9 n.35, 222 n.50 Peters, Nancy Joyce 203 n.60 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 145, 151, 186 n.18 Photograph (Rauschenberg) 34 Picabia, Francis 112, 147 Picasso, Pablo 77–8, 87, 99–100, 108, 112, 124, 166 Piero di Cosimo 27 Pierre, José 6, 10–11, 30, 34, 36–7, 42, 48, 56, 59–6, 69, 91, 106, 113–14, 116, 118, 120, 126, 128–9, 138, 141, 149–71, 181 n.37, 199 n.22, 210 n.36, 211 n.56, 215 n.96, 215 n.101, 249 n.107 Pilgrim (Rauschenberg) 59–60, 62, 74, 118, 120, 212 n.61 Plato 141 Pleynet, Marcelin 132, 135–9, 173–5, 178, 252 n.24 Poem-Object (Breton) 102–3 poésie directe 11, 92–5, 99, 110, 229 n.15 Pollock, Jackson 72, 113, 155, 175 Ponge, Francis 131, 137 Pop and Happenings 64–7, 129 Pop art 5, 28, 31–2, 42, 61, 64–5, 110, 112, 118, 126, 128–30, 135, 143–4, 155, 175–7, 215 n.101 Pop as Art (Amaya) 174 Portrait de Rauschenberg (Lebel) 103–5 Power, Susan L. 202 n.54 Pretty Storm (Lebel) 87 Prévert, Pierre 93 The Proper Image IV (Rauschenberg) 88, 225 n.60 Racketeer (Rauschenberg) 85–6 Ragon, Michel 32–4, 51, 59, 61, 65, 107, 132, 198 n.12 Random Order (Rauschenberg) 19–23, 66 Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI) 236 n.70 Rauschenberg, Robert 1–2 allegorist 16–23 dialectical image 78–89 factism and formalism 170–3 and metaphor 26–30

302 and poetry 6–9, 23–6 pope 126–30 portrait of 101–6 positivism 142–6 seer 151–4 semiotic theory 139–2 success and failure 154–7 and Surrealism 9–12 Zombie 162–9 Rauschenberg Sculpture 8 Ray, Man 37, 48, 112 Raysse, Martial 58, 112, 169 Recalcati, Antonio 100 Renan, Ernest 167 Restany, Pierre 51, 59, 122, 134–5, 213 n.82, 229 n.16 Revel, Jean-François 118 Reverdy, Pierre 154 Revolvers (Rauschenberg) 166–7 Reynaud Paligot, Carole 55 Richardson, Michael 208 n.14 Richter, Hans 37, 200 n.35 Ricoeur, Paul 28 Riffaterre, Michael 131 Rimbaud, Arthur 88, 93, 140, 153–5 Rivers, Larry 72 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 2, 4–6, 14–15, 28, 56, 66, 97, 114–15, 128, 130–2, 137–9, 143–5, 176–7, 186 n.14, 186 n.18, 187 n.30, 188 n.34 Robert Rauschenberg: Oeuvres de 1949 à 1968 155 Roger, Philippe 53–4, 208 n.16 Rokeby Venus (Velásquez) 123 Rose, Barbara 1, 5–6, 8–10, 13–15, 19, 91, 131, 138, 145, 151, 159, 170–1, 177–8, 182 n.46, 188 n.30 Rosemont, Franklin 56, 140, 205–6 n.72 Rosenberg, Harold 14, 19, 72, 170–2 Rosenblum, Robert 31 Rosenquist, James 66, 110, 175, 215 n.101 Ross, Kristin 48–9, 56, 97 Rotella, Mimmo 112 Rothko, Mark 72, 155, 173 Rothkopf, Scott 146, 257 n.89 Roussel, Raymond 2, 137 Rubens, Peter Paul 18

Index Rubin, William 3–4, 39–40, 146, 148–9, 171, 175, 183 n.55, 201 n.44, 272 n.25 Russell, Bertrand 151 Saby, Bernard 93 Sagan, Françoise 99 Saint Phalle, Niki de 65, 147, 169 Saint Serapion (Zurbarán) 97–8, 233 n.49 Samaras, Lucas 146 Sandler, Irving 6, 10, 131, 138, 171, 173 Sartre, Jean-Paul 3, 72, 95, 131 Scarpetta, Guy 175–6 Schieder, Martin 202 n.54 Schuster, Jean 56, 134, 207 n.80 Schwarz, Arturo 69, 89 Schwitters, Kurt 1, 32, 61, 79, 111–13, 116, 135, 142, 147, 151–2, 160 Seckler, Dorothy Gees 1, 4, 17, 248 n.104 Second Generation 40 Second Manifesto of Surrealism (Breton) 168 Second World War 2, 31, 35, 52–3, 57, 66, 68, 107–8, 116, 131, 230 n.20 Segalen, Victor 125 Seligmann, Kurt 146 Serra, Richard 14–15 Sérusier, Paul 239 n.14 She Goat (Picasso) 77–8 Sidney Janis Gallery 32, 79, 88, 111–12, 116, 146, 197 n.8 Silbermann, Jean-Claude 47–8, 70, 167 Silence (Cage) 5, 24–6, 174–5 Simon, Claude 63, 212 n.72, 249 n.108 Smith, Graham 29 Smithson, Robert 18 Sollers, Philippe 56, 128, 136–7, 252 n.29 Solomon, Alan R. 65, 96–7, 122, 152–4 Solstice (Rauschenberg) 164–6, 267 n.93 Sonnabend, Ileana 28, 30–1, 37, 58–9, 64–5, 68, 100–1, 107, 113, 127, 132, 135, 138–9, 154, 162, 168, 183 n.55 Sonnabend, Michael 23, 68, 100, 191 nn.54–5, 252 n.26 Sontag, Susan 5–6, 10, 14, 16, 19, 91–2, 122, 131, 171

Index Sorin, Raphael 163 Soundings (Pierre) 167, 267 n.92 Spoerri, Daniel 112, 134, 147 Stankiewicz, Richard 41, 62, 72, 135 State of Grace (Rauschenberg) 88 Steinberg, Leo 14, 18, 28, 36, 38–47, 85, 87, 103, 123, 150, 157–62, 166–7, 171, 190 n.53, 199 n.28, 202 n.50, 205 nn.69–70, 205 n.74, 224 n.56, 225 n.60, 234–5 n.60, 263 n.44 Stein, Gertrude 25 Stella, Frank 13–14, 16, 122, 129, 149, 172–3, 176, 187–8 n.30 Still, Clyfford 173 Strider, Marjorie 146 Surrealism 1–2 and colonialism I 51–5 and colonialism II 55–61 decline 2–6 and Neo-Dada 31–4, 49 Rauschenberg and 9–12 Surrealism and Painting (Breton) 27–8, 63, 128–9 Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain 10, 23, 39–47, 49, 56, 61, 74, 92, 110–11, 149, 154, 181 n.34, 203 n.57 Suspended Ball (Giacometti) 155 Svanberg, Max Walter 38, 51, 58, 61, 69–70 Swenson, Gene 146 Swenson, G. R. 257 n.89 Sylvester, David 17 Talisman (Rauschenberg) 34, 62, 68, 76, 105, 109–10, 112, 117, 120, 142, 239 n.14 Tanguy, Yves 27, 108–9, 115, 133, 146, 220 n.28 Tanning, Dorothea 112 Target with Four Faces (Johns) 14, 32, 199 n.28 Target with Plaster Casts (Johns) 32, 36–8, 40, 42–6, 48, 147–8, 199 n.28, 200 n.30, 204 n.64 Tarnaud, Claude 198 n.14 Télémaque, Hervé 167, 212 n.61

303

Tel Quel (Rauschenberg) 2, 11–12, 92, 129, 132, 135–9, 146, 173–8, 252 n.31, 271–2 n.25 Thek, Paul 146 Thibaudeau, Jean 136 Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (Rauschenberg) 9, 13, 19, 23, 26, 28–30, 81, 101, 163, 183 n.55, 185 n.1 This Is a Portrait of Iris Clert If I Say So (Rauschenberg) 15, 156 Thomas Aquinas (Saint) 145 Thoreau, Henry David 5, 25 Tinguely, Jean 59, 65, 93, 111, 126, 129, 134, 147–8, 150–69, 214 n.91 Tir de barrage (Lebel and Jouffroy) 90, 105–6 Todd, Mike 146 Tomkins, Calvin 36, 58, 214 n.91, 225 n.62 Traces suspectes en surface (Rauschenberg and Robbe-Grillet) 132 Trophy III (for Jean Tinguely) (Rauschenberg) 157–62, 167 Trotsky, Leon 89, 94, 226–7 n.73 Trouille, Clovis 37, 69 Tu m’ (Duchamp) 124 Turrell, Julia Brown 8, 182 n.43, 183 n.51 Twombly, Cy 93, 116, 175 Une révolution du regard (Rauschenberg) 114–23 Untitled (Ale Cans) (Johns) 14 Untitled (de Gaulle) (Rauschenberg) 57 Untitled (Judd) 15 Untitled (Rauschenberg) 103 Urbani, Giovanni 36–7 Valéry, Paul 177 Vardea-Mavromichali, Chryssa 146 Velásquez, Diego 18 Veritable Portrait of Monsieur Ubu (Jarry) 43 Viet Minh 52 Villeglé, Jacques 63, 213 n.82 Virgin (Ray) 37

304 Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Newman) 123 The Vocation (Magritte) 79–80 von Holten, Ragnar 89 Wadsworth Atheneum 6, 98, 233 n.49 Wainwright, Lisa 96 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 2, 4, 14, 58, 131 Waldberg, Patrick 106 Wallior, Jean-Claude 168–9 Warhol, Andy 5, 66, 126, 155, 174–5 Weil, Susan 74 Weinberg, Jonathan 204 n.63 Weiss, Jeffrey 186 n.18 Welish, Marjorie 221 n.32

Index Wesselmann, Tom 174–5 ‘White Paintings’ (Rauschenberg) 14, 24, 36, 192 n.62, 193 n.73, 196–7 n.96 Whitman, Walt 172 Wildenstein, Georges 37 Wilson, Robert 175–6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 5–6, 13–15, 24, 142–6, 151, 186–7 n.18 Wollheim, Richard 145 Writing Degree Zero (Barthes) 14 Zalman, Sandra 3 Zola, Émile 177 Zurbarán, Francisco de 97–8 Zwirner, Rudolf 37

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Plate 1  Robert Rauschenberg,

Persimmon (1964). Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas, 66 × 50 in (167.6 × 127 cm). Collection Jean-Christophe Castelli. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Plate 2  Anonymous, photograph of ‘Cannibal Feast’ showing Jasper Johns’s Target with Plaster

Casts (1955) at Exposition InteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS), Paris (1959–60). © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2020/© Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020/© The Estate of Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris and ADAGP, Paris), licensed in the UK by ACS and DACS, London 2020. Photo: Association Atelier André Breton.

Plate 3  Robert Rauschenberg, Bed (1955). Combine:

oil and graphite on pillow, quilt, and sheet, mounted on wood support, 75.25 in × 31.5 in × 8 in (191.1 cm × 80 cm × 20.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Leo Castelli in honour of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Plate 4  Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts (1955). Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects, 129.4 × 111.8 cm. Collection David Geffen, Los Angeles. © Jasper Johns/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020. Bridgeman Images.

Plate 5 Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled (de Gaulle) (1961). Solvent transfer with gouache, watercolour and graphite on paper, 57.1 × 74.9 cm. Galerie Thaddeus Ropac. London, Paris, Salzburg. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Plate 6  Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon (1959). Oil, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, cardboard box, printed paper, printed reproductions, photograph, wood, paint tube and mirror on canvas with oil on bald eagle, string, and pillow, 207.6 × 177.8 × 61 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of the family of Ileana Sonnabend. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Plate 7 Printed leaflet reproducing the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War or Declaration of the 121 (1960), inserted into Front unique, no. 2, winter 1960 (author’s collection).

Plate 8  Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram (1955–9). Oil, paper, fabric, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber shoe-heel, and tennis ball on two conjoined canvases with oil on taxidermied Angora goat with brass plaque and rubber tire on wood platform, 106.5 × 160.6 × 163.5 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm Purchase 1965 with contribution from Moderna Museets Vänner/ The Friends of Moderna Museet. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Photo © Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Plate 9  René Magritte, Hegel’s Holiday (1958). Oil on canvas, 61 × 50 cm. Private collection. Genève, Galerie Couleurs du Temps. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. © Photothèque R. Magritte/Adagp Images, Paris, 2022.

Plate 10  Robert Rauschenberg, study

for Monogram (1959). Watercolour and graphite on paper, 48.3 × 28.6 cm. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Plate 11 Jean-Jacques Lebel, Enrico Baj, Roberto Crippa, Gianni Dova, Antonio Recalcati

and Érro, Le Grand tableau anti-fasciste collectif (1960). Oil and paper collage on canvas, 400 × 500 cm. Collection Fonds de Dotation Jean-Jacques Lebel, Musée des Beaux Arts de Nantes. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy of Jean-Jacques Lebel.

Plate 12  Jean-Jacques Lebel, Portrait de Rauschenberg (1961). Collage, printed matter, oil paint

and Ripolin on plywood, 127 × 113 cm. Collection of Mme. and M. Crémeiux. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy of Jean-Jacques Lebel.

Plate 13  Robert Rauschenberg,

Talisman (1958). Oil, paper, printed paper, printed reproductions, wood, glass jar on metal chain and fabric on canvas, 107 × 71.1 × 11.4 cm. Des Moines Art Center, Iowa. Purchased with funds from the Coffin Fine Arts Trust; Nathan Emory Coffin. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Plate 14 Robert Rauschenberg, Barge (1962–3). Oil and silkscreened ink on canvas, 203.9 × 980.4 cm. Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. ©  Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Plate 15  Robert Rauschenberg, Trophy III (for Jean Tinguely) (1961). Oil and printed paper on carved wood structure with metal bed springs, metal ladder, cloth, fuse box with fuses, metal dish, eyehook and nails, 243.8 × 167 × 26.7 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Image courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.