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Article Excerpt
Should Love Come First? among Robert Rauschenberg's earliest collages, is a Rauschenberg image like no other. First, it exists only as a single photograph, since the actual work, dating from early in 1951, was overpainted by Rauschenberg into one of his celebrated Black Paintings. By that act, we can assume Rauschenberg didn't like the picture enough to keep as it was. Second, it is unique in the artist's oeuvre because it is melodramatic, confessional, and by and large legible according to a singular thematic--the thematic that gives it its title, ripped from the pages of a magazine: "my problem, should love come first?" Many works by Rauschenberg are broadly expressive, but none would ever again so blatantly, even aggressively trumpet an autobiographical theme. Moreover, I suggest, Should Love Come First? can be understood as a textbook example of why, in time, the medium of assemblage would for Rauschenberg prove vastly preferable to simple collage.
That Should Love Come First? is indeed profoundly autobiographical a cursory examination of Rauschenberg's life at the time makes clear. In June of 1950 Rauschenberg married an art-school classmate, Susan Weil. In February of 1951 he met yet another fellow student, Cy Twombly, at the Art Students League in New York, and they became lovers. (1) About three months later, beginning May 14 and ending June 2, 1951, Should Love Come First? was exhibited for the first time in Rauschenberg's first one-person show at the Betty Parsons Gallery. On July 16, 1951, a little more than a month after the Parsons show closed, Rauschenberg and Weil's son, Christopher, was born. That same month, Rauschenberg and Twombly decamped for Black Mountain College--without Susan and without Christopher. When his wife and son rejoined him there a few weeks later, Weil quickly decided to leave and separate from her husband. They divorced the following year. (2)
Should Love Come First? obliquely references these tumultuous changes in Rauschenberg's emotional life and the fraught weighing of eros and paternal responsibility the painting's title signals (3) It prominently features an imprint of Rauschenberg's foot contiguous with a collaged dance studio progressive waltz diagram delineating the male position; together they constitute a male-male waltz. (4) Next to the same-sex waltz is a diagram mapping time changes relative to Washington, DC, a pictorialization of the measurement of difference from a presumed governing standard--a lovely analogue of Rauschenberg's increasingly self-conscious straying from the standard of heteronormativity. (5) The number 8 is repeatedly thematized, both circled on the diagram and written into the maze itself eight times--perhaps like the I/I at the top right corner, a visualization of the conjunction of identical forms, seemingly another oblique pictorialization of the attraction of same to same. Finally, in the lower right, continuing the theme, two postagelike cancellations form a lateral 8, annulling the conjoined pair of identical images, as if by hostile decree.
Obviously, all these materials operate at the level of loose analogy; certainly this picture has never before been interpreted in terms of a same-sex relationship--indeed, it has never been interpreted at all. But it's more than likely that when Weil visited Black Mountain with Christopher, she discovered Twombly and Rauschenberg living together and the talk of the community. We know this latter because of a remarkable exchange of letters between the poet Charles Olson, the director of Black Mountain College, and his friend and fellow poet Robert Creeley. In a dramatic letter dated January 29, 1952, Olson describes seeing Rauschenberg out in the middle of the lake at Black Mountain and Twombly "gently" trying to call him to shore. (6) In a second letter two days later, Olson returned to the incident.
No one still knows know [sic] he came to be out in the lake waters, whether he just ran in (he is such a runner, like, a girl ... ) Whether he--conceivably-- ... went for a swim ... or plain set out to go down (since I wrote you, Con [Olson's wife] picked up that, he is in the black, just now, his marriage smashing, probably over the affair with Twombly, his contract with his gallery not renewed, and--I'd also bet as an added hidden factor--the terrible pressure on him of the clear genius of this lad, Twombly, the success of his year and the total defeat of Bob's.) (7)
Months after it first became a template for that alloy of autobiography and art that has characterized his work ever since, the "problem" stated in Should Love Come First? continued to haunt the artist. Even after electing love and a life with Twombly, Rauschenberg's departure from his family continued to trouble him--or so Olson himself believed. (8) As Rauschenberg famously wrote in 1959,"Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two) " (9) In insisting, as I do, on the literalness of this statement, it follows that Rauschenberg's life will inevitably surface in his art, less as a representation (after all, it cannot be made) than as a profound influence on its material means.
Two circumstances testify to how powerfully life marked the aesthetic choices Rauschenberg made. The first is that Rauschenberg overpainted Should Love Come First?--the sole known instance to my knowledge in which one of the paintings shown at Parsons was so modified. Other images from that exhibition were destroyed--not a single painting sold--but this is the only one conserved, albeit through a paradoxical erasure, exactly the kind of sous rature gesture of citing through negating that Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg's subsequent partner, would make his own through the device of a conspicuous crossing-out of personal content, including his signature. (10)
The second indication is actually not by Rauschenberg at all, but a 1955 Jobns painting called Tango made shortly after he became involved with Rauschenberg. The blue field contains a hidden assemblage element, a working music box with only its turnkey emerging through the canvas. Though the work is entitled Tango, the music box was altered to make simple plinking sounds. (11) Johns's Tango evokes Rauschenberg's earlier waltz in Should Love Come First?, Rauschenberg's original pictorial evocation of his new love for Twombly now fittingly picked up by Johns in reference to his new love for Rauschenberg, as I read it. (12)
But, as I suggested, Should Love Come First? represents a road not taken, in that it stands as a largely coherent entity in which diverse collage materials all serve the titular thematic. Unlike Rauschenberg's later combines, the two-dimensional collage materials Rauschenberg selects quickly lose their identity and history outside the picture plane and come to function more or less exclusively pictorially. In this sense, Should Love Come First? is much more a traditional collage than the combines Rauschenberg would subsequently pioneer. The key, albeit subtle difference between these two modes is that in collage, initially flat materials are very easily domesticated pictorially, willing to be reengineered to serve new pictorial purposes largely severed from their original functions, their formal utility to the composition as a whole easily trumping their object nature. This is not to say that the collage materials do not betray an extrapictorial origin--their autonomous sign quality is rarely so completely circumscribed by the new pictorial context (for example, that timetable from Washington is still clearly a found object)--but they do not insist on their original identity, context, or utility. In short, as already-flat elements easily married to the support and each other, the collage elements in Should Love Come First? barely resist Rauschenberg's pictorial repurposing.
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However, in works like Minutiae (1954), one of Rauschenberg's...
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