Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008

I remember well the first time I saw Robert Rauschenberg, who died yesterday at age 82. It was at a Whitney Museum opening in the early 1990s, and the artist, whom I did not meet, stood in the galleries with a generous smile and a drink in his hand. As a curator informed me that Rauschenberg was the only person allowed into the galleries with a drink, the artist promptly dropped it, breaking the glass and spilling its contents across the floor.

Rauschenberg was always an anarchic, glass-shattering presence on the art scene. Very early on, in 1953, he asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing good enough to be missed, and then famously erased it, eloquently signaling the rising of a new son on the horizon. Yet for all his revelry in creative destruction, Rauschenberg's constructions constructed an entire world, one we've not stopped living in even now. Just how formative his work was became acutely apparent — especially to someone, like me, born far too late to have witnessed the first or second acts in the long drama of his life — during the first months of 2006, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented its magisterial exhibition of the artist's early combines, those mixed-media collage-cum-sculptural paintings, or painterly sculptures, of the '50s and early '60s. For many young and not-so young artists today, the exhibition shattered and then remade the history of postwar art. Fifty years on, the combines still look innovative. Head over to the Whitney Biennial and you'll find the stain from his drink gone but any number of artists working robustly in the spirit of what he once called his "at-home craftsmanship."

His ongoing liveliness was on display this winter, in his final gallery show, which opened at PaceWildenstein in January and featured work created over the previous year. The catalog for that show included a note on painting, written in 1963 while traveling the Southwest with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (reminding us that Rauschenberg did not stop at breaking boundaries within the visual arts; he also crossed over into dance, music, theater, etc.). In the note, Rauschenberg indicates that he's not interested in "a defensible reason" for working as he did. The outcome of a piece is based, he wrote, on the amount of "intensity concentration and joy" put into it. "It is extremely important," he concluded, "that art be unjustifiable." That may be one Rauschenbergian lesson that needs relearning. As his own work demonstrated, intensity and joy justify themselves.