Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg is the Museum of Modern Art’s catalogue for a retrospective of the artist, built from sixteen short essays that each take up one moment in his career.

Leah Dickerman, curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, and Achim Borchardt-Hume, director of exhibitions at Tate Modern, edited the volume and contributed text. The essayists include Yve-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, Branden Joseph, Michelle Kuo, Pamela Lee and Helen Molesworth. They revisit the Combines (1954–64) and the silkscreen paintings (1962–64) and also cover the early 1950s and the years from the late 1960s onward, drawing on new scholarship, documentary imagery and archival material. The D.A.P. listing gives a December 2016 publication date for the hardcover, with 392 pages and 475 color illustrations.

Rauschenberg (1925–2008) worked for six decades in painting, sculpture, prints, photography and performance, alone and with other artists, dancers, musicians and writers. He began his career in the early 1950s, when gestural Abstract Expressionist painting held the field. D.A.P. describes his work as a break with that tradition and a source of new intermedia forms.