Robert Rauschenberg’s Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno from the edition of 300 published by Harry Abrams 1965
at A&D Gallery 20th August -28th September
Although Leo Castelli was Rauschenberg’s dealer and prime supporter, it was Castelli’s ex wife Ileana, and her new husband Michael Sonnabend, who encouraged his major step forward. The series of 34 works, illustrating each canto of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, would occupy the artist from 1958 -1960.
Rauschenberg said:
“When I started the Dante illustrations, I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn’t work any other way, or whether I was doing it out of choice. So I really welcomed, insisted, on the challenge of being restricted by a particular subject, which meant that I would have to be involved in symbolism. I mean the illustration has to be read. It has to relate to something that already is in existence. Well, I spent two and a half years deciding yes, I could do that. But it’s so easy to be undisciplined. And to be disciplined is so against my character, my general nature anyway, that I have to strain a little bit to keep on the right track.”
During this period Rauschenberg developed his transfer technique, dissolving printed images with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a stylus. This process “created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secret.”
The process allowed the artist to introduce autobiographical elements into his work. The oil derricks of his home town appear in Dis the capital of Hell. and for the canto where Dante explains that sodomites are sentenced to run forever barefoot over hot sand, Rauschenberg has outlined his foot in red.
Roberta Smith writing in the New York Times said “These drawings may actually be the artist’s best work. They distill Rauschenberg to his essence and yet show him at his most profound.”
Jaspers Johns described Rauschenberg as the most inventive artist of the 20th century since Picasso.
Art historian Leo Steinberg wrote, “what he invented above all was… a pictorial surface that let the world in again.”
