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There are, of course, dissenting views. In the '60s, Rauschenberg was loathed in formalist quarters and suspected in others. His taste was always facile and omnivorous, a fact somewhat masked by Hopps' careful choice of works in the show. But mainly, it was the man's variety and good humor that jarred. He did not give a fig for the lines of high seriousness imposed by the hardcore New York art world. His reputation would look after itself; he would not tend it. Besides, Rauschenberg was a natural dissipater. The sight of him in his porcupine-quill leather jacket, erect but slightly, marinated with Jack Daniel's, cackling like a Texan loon and trying to get his arm around everyone at once, was too familiar.
Thus Rauschenberg did not always get the credit he deserved—not even for his altruism, which was without recent parallel in New York art circles. It was Rauschenberg who threw his reputation, and much of his time, behind the Artists' Rights movement and its steadily strengthening lobby for artists' royalties on the resale of paintings. It was Rauschenberg who, knowing the ponderousness with which foundations disgorge grants, set up and largely endowed Change, Inc.—a fund from which artists with urgent cash trouble could get small sustaining grants within a matter of days. He could afford to help: his recent Hoarfrost multiples sell for up to $4,000 each; the 1962 silk-screen Barge could well command $500,000 on the market today. "Bob has put more of his money and time back into the art world than any artist alive," says one of his acquaintances. "He needs to believe in an art community. It's straight out of St. Paul—'We must love one another or die.' "
Milton Rauschenberg (he changed his name to Robert as a young man) was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas, a shabby, humid oil-refinery town on the Gulf of Mexico. His father, Ernest Rauschenberg, was the son of an immigrant doctor from Berlin who had drifted to southern Texas and married a Cherokee. Port Arthur was no cultural center. Its symphony orchestra was the jukebox, the comics its museum. The nearest thing to art one could see was the cheap chromo-litho holy cards pinned up in the Rauschenberg living room (the whole family was devoutly active in the local Church of Christ). Decades later Rauschenberg would allude to the gaudy iconic nostalgia of those cards in early combines like Collection, 1953-54, and Charlene, 1954. His education was spotty. He went to public schools in Port Arthur and graduated from high school there in 1942. "I excelled in poor grades," Rauschenberg remembers. He is still an execrable speller. In the fall of 1942 he enrolled in a pharmacy course at the University of Texas in Austin, but Rauschenberg's fondness for animals spoiled that vocation. "I was expelled within six months for refusing to dissect a live frog in anatomy class." By then, however, America was at war and Rauschenberg entered the U.S. Navy. He was shunted off to the Navy hospital-corps school in San Diego as a mental-hospital nurse. Rauschenberg