The Most Living Artist

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as artists. Johns' work was oblique, carefully thought out, exquisitely modulated (the encaustic surfaces of his flags and targets and maps are among the loveliest pieces of pure painting done in the 20th century); the product of a high and guarded intelligence, it bristled with irony and paradox. It was all about indirection: the difficulty of seeing anything clearly, of naming anything right. The formal enigmas of Johns' art were wholly unlike the sunny, ebullient appetites of Rauschenberg. Johns made one look and think; Rauschenberg made one look and look. Rauschenberg breathed out, Johns in. This came to work against Rauschenberg, for what the higher '60s criticism most liked in art was to discern internal systems in a work. As Art Critic Brian O'Doherty remarked, "Johns provided everything the New York critical intelligence requires to requite its own narcissism."

The main audience Rauschenberg found in the '50s lay among his fellow artists, the younger ones who would diversely shape the "look" of the '60s: James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, Jean Tinguely—the happening makers, the creators of Pop art. Says Rauschenberg: "We were relieved of the responsibility the abstract expressionists had. They had fought the battle of showing there was such a thing as American art; we didn't have that problem. We were undistracted by things we couldn't imagine, like art collectors and taxes. There was a very strong sense of just getting up and doing something."

Nothing could be farther from the truth than the often-raised notion that Rauschenberg was engaged in some Oedipal battle against abstract expressionism. This idea was fostered by one of his best-known gestures, that of erasing a de Kooning pencil drawing. Actually, de Kooning gave Rauschenberg the drawing for that purpose; as far as the younger artist was concerned, it was an act of homage to de Kooning. Indeed, the painted areas of Rauschenberg's combines, with their spattering bravado of touch, are a meditation on the abstract expressionist legacy: they extend rather than reject it.

The surfaces of Rauschenberg's combines were meant to seem unselective: each was a rendezvous where the common images of the day could display themselves without having to listen to judgments from an artist on their relative "importance." In that sense, they contained no junk: all the stuffed birds and tires were, so to speak, in Paradise. But could the same hospitable casualness of images be rendered without those objects? In 1959-60 Rauschenberg made a set of illustrations to Dante's Inferno. He found that newsprint, wetted with lighter fluid and then rubbed, will transfer a grey ghost of itself to paper. This opened his work to a stream of image-quotation, cold from the press. In the "Dante drawings," Virgil, the Guide, appears alternately as Adlai Stevenson and a baseball umpire; Dante is a nondescript figure in a towel, which Rauschenberg found in a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED ad; centaurs turn into racing cars, and demons into gas-masked soldiers.

The next step was to print large images on canvas with silk screens. The silk-screen paintings that Rauschenberg made between 1962 and '65 had a brilliantly heightened documentary flavor. The canvas trapped images, accumulating them. One was reminded of the shuttle and