Migration

Some of Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines—a term the artist came up with to describe his combinations of painting, collage, and construction—are more three-dimensional than others, including taxidermied chickens, light bulbs, architectural components like doors and windows, books, quilts and pillows, baseballs, umbrellas and brooms, chairs and ladders. They come in a range of sizes, from as small as a book to almost the size of a room, approximately one hundred and seventy works that straddle the boundary between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg worked in this vein for a decade, from about 1954 to 1964, although he had begun incorporating newsprint and photographs into his work earlier and continued to use everyday objects and urban debris throughout his artistic life. In 2005, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, organized the first exhibition that exclusively examined this period of Rauschenberg’s oeuvre. Robert Rauschenberg: Combines traveled from Los Angeles to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and included the Johnson’s Migration.

In 1959, the American Federation of Arts established the Museum Donor Program to fund the acquisition of “works of art by younger, less well-known American artists” by selected museums, particularly at colleges and universities. The donors behind the program, Audrey Bruce Currier and Stephen Richard Currier, remained anonymous until their death in a plane crash in 1967. Cornell’s A. D. White Museum was one of the thirty-five institutions selected for the program, under the leadership of legendary art historian and curator Alan R. Solomon, the first director of the White Museum. The three works acquired—by Lee Bontecou (59.140), Rauschenberg (59.141), and Michael Goldberg (59.142)—are among the most significant works in our permanent collection of contemporary art.

After a decade at Cornell that included the directorship of its first art museum, Alan Solomon would move on to become the director of the Jewish Museum in New York, where he organized Rauschenberg’s first solo museum show in 1963. Solomon’s interest in the new and the experimental proved controversial, however, and he resigned from the Jewish Museum in 1964 after only two years at its helm. But he was credited by one of his colleagues with having “one of the extraordinary eyes in this country for contemporary art while being in tune with art of the past as an art historian.”

Solomon noted in his catalogue for the Jewish Museum that Rauschenberg was a particularly appropriate subject for his first exhibition there, since Rauschenberg “stands as the major link between the new art and the preceding generation of abstract expressionists, as well as with the more remote roots of the contemporary style in certain aspects of Picasso’s cubism.” Both are involved, Solomon continues, “in the tension between the illusionism of paint and the impinging presence of fragments of reality.” It is in this practice of drawing the artist’s life and time itself into his art, that Rauschenberg’s work continues to be significant for new generations of artists and viewers.

(Andrea Inselmann, A Handbook of the Collections, 2018)