Robert Rauschenberg's Augusta connection

Robert Rauschenberg, who died Monday at age 82, was undeniably one of the great figures in American art. New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman called him “the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20^th century.”

We are quite fortunate to have some of his work here in the collection of the Morris Museum of Art, and particularly fortunate to have a major work that is specific to our city. Here’s how it came about:

In 1995, the museum presented a Rauschenberg print exhibition, working with the artist and his longtime collaborator Bill Goldman of Universal Limited Art Editions of New York. It was a major undertaking, and the exhibition catalog was a tabloid newspaper section, for which he created the cover. Although Mr. Rauschenberg was not very open to making public appearances at the time, he agreed to make a quick detour on his road trip from New York to his studio in Captiva, Fla., and he would see the show just as the museum was closing on a Sunday afternoon. Of course we quickly arranged for the museum staff and a small group of board members, artists and art teachers to just casually happen to be in the galleries at closing time that day. He was most gracious to our assembled group of admirers.

Over dinner that night, he agreed to consider a commissioned work, and in the summer of 1996, accompanied by his partner Darryl Pottorf, and working with Rick Gruber, who was then museum deputy director, he spent three days exploring and photographing the Augusta area. Early in 1997 he used those images to create “August Allegory (Anagrams)” for the Morris Museum.

At his Florida studio, he worked with a vegetable dye transfer process he had developed, using paper measuring about five feet high and 12 feet wide. The work reflects his response to both the details and spirit of Augusta as he saw it, and elements include several church steeples, Springfield Church, Sacred Heart Cultural Center, a 19^th century textile mill, the Confederate monument, a railroad bridge, an antebellum home, Augusta bricks, the “haunted pillar,” and the feet of the bronze sculpture of Arnold Palmer. A detail of the work-in-progress appeared in the September 1996 issue of Vogue magazine in an article on the artist and his career.

When the framed work arrived in Augusta by truck, it was too large and two heavy to fit into the freight elevator at the museum, so we arranged for company that installs plate glass windows to drive it up the ramp onto Riverwalk, where it was wheeled through the front door on a specially-built dolly.

The work has been exhibited several times at the museum, and Director Kevin Grogan says the staff has been working on plans for an installation next fall.