Footprints and Thumbprints: Robert Rauschenberg in DC July 7, 2008

Robert Rauschenberg's Reservoir

With the recent death of seminal artist Robert Rauschenberg, the airwaves and the blogwaves have been filled with stories of the artist, from his childhood in North Dakota to his early days at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, to the heady years in New York City. Rauschenberg also left his footprints in another city that played a significant role in his life: that's right, our very own Washington, D.C.

“I bought a combine in 1957 of Bob’s from Leo Castelli, whose gallery was in his house. The Rauschenberg was in the bathtub,” remembers Alice Denny, a fixture on the Washington, D.C. arts scene since the late 1950s. After buying that first Rauschenberg, she became friends with the artist and his partner Jasper Johns. In 1962, Denny founded the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and curated a show called The Popular Image. “Bob was in that show and Jim Dine did the cover for the catalogue. We brought the Judson dancers from New York and I listed Bob as a dancer in the catalogue, though Bob said he wasn’t a dancer. He did his wonderful work called Pelican, held at a roller skating rink. He couldn’t skate so he took lessons back in Brooklyn. The piece had him rollerskating with a parachute on his back.” You can get a glimpse of what Rauschenberg looked like with a parachute on his back if you take a look at his work Autobiography, on view in the lobby of the McEvoy Auditorium at SAAM.

Rauschenberg also performed Pelican the following year in the Pop Festival that Denny organized.  “Bob was very connected to Washington. He loved it, and felt very responsible here," Denny adds. "He wasn’t frivolous about it at all. He would do anything here and he came back to help me with the NOW Festival, and did a new piece called Linoleum." The work was inspired by the painting Miss Amelia Van Buren by Thomas Eakins that he saw when they visited the Phillips Collection. Linoleum featured a huge American flag with images of Washington on it. There were also fifteen white chickens in a cage as well as dancer Simone Forti wearing Denny's wedding dress. "All this came from Miss Van Buren," Denny remembered. "‘Oh now I know what I’m going to do,’ Bob said while looking at the Eakins at the Phillips."

In 1976, Rauschenberg had a major retrospective at SAAM, curated by Walter Hopps and designed by Val Lewton. Hopps was known for his brilliance and his slightly off-kilter behavior. "Hopps's main idea for the exhibition was that the show would be installed backwards," Lewton tells me over the phone the other day. "The reason he did this was that he didn't think the later work was as strong. He wanted to have people leave with the strongest impression of Rauschenberg's work." Hopps apparently had the habit of working at extremely odd hours, including four in the morning, leading the then-director of the museum to say in frustration, "I'd fire Walter if only I could find him."

Rauschenberg had lots of people coming in to the exhibition space while the show was still being installed, Lewton recalled, which is not how museums usually  operate. These days you have to be signed in by a guard, and only after he or she can find your name on the "approved" list. Those were the days, I guess. Apparently, a desk that had been converted into a workstation for the exhibit preparers was reconverted into a kind of portable bar. I can't imagine you'd see much of that these days, either.

Lewton recalled one other story that showed how the staff at SAAM pitched in to help Rauschenberg. "There was one piece in the exhibition that Rauschenberg had done for Merce Cunningham," Lewton said. "It was a set but also a piece of art. Cunningham needed it for a performance on TV, but it was during the exhibition, so it couldn't be in two places at once. Walter came up with the idea of our staff doing a facsimile. We produced our own Rauschenberg and that one was used for the TV show."

Thirty years after that important show at SAAM, Rauschenberg created a lithograph for the museum's reopening. Marie Elena Amatangelo, exhibition coordinator for SAAM, worked with Rauschenberg before joining the Smithsonian in 2004. She was a consultant hired by the Guggenheim to oversee Rauschenberg's  The 1/4 Mile or Two Furlong Piece. The work is indeed what it sounds like: the length of nearly five city blocks filled with all types of Rauschenberg's work in various media. "I worked with Bob and his studio," Amatangelo recalled. "I would spend my days in the gallery with Bob talking about the installation. He had a wonderful sense of humor and always told jokes. He could walk into a space and alleviate any tension and make people laugh and bring things down to earth. I found it very calming and relaxing to have a conversation with him. We brought The 1/4 Mile to New York, to Bilbao, Spain, and to Mass MOCA."

When SAAM was reopening, Amatangelo called Rauschenberg's New York curator and proposed the idea of his doing a limited edition commemorative print. "He wanted to use images from works that are in the collection that would signify the historical reference of the building," Amatangelo said, "That's why you have the image of the first telegraph, one of the first patents that was issued when the building was the U.S. Patent Office. He also wanted people who were important to the building, like Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman. We sent him over 500 images to work with. Then he had a stroke and he was not able to sign the prints. He was left handed. He used his thumbprint instead. There's an orange thumbprint on the bottom of each print."

Now that I've heard these stories I'll always think of the artist with a parachute at his back, or chickens at his side, or too frail to sign his name, but pushing a little further to leave his mark.

• Robert Rauschenberg, Alice Denning, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum