And Then There Are His Papers: Robert Rauschenberg's Finally Moved to Westchester

Behind that door in Westchester County, N.Y., is an astounding secret: a fluorescent-lit hangar hung with nearly a hundred rusty bicycles; Rubbermaid tubs full of old neckties and scraps of bright, patterned fabric; boxes marked “Polaroids” and “Playing cards from Japan”; dark blue bags labeled “Merce Mannequins” (Merce Cunningham, the dancer and choreographer, was the artist’s friend and collaborator) and file cabinets, some still taped shut, containing folders of ephemera along with correspondence from the likes of Jacqueline Onassis, Jasper Johns and Richard Gere. Rauschenberg purchased the high-security warehouse, which contains areas for art conservation and cold storage facilities, in 2006, to consolidate his art holdings. After the artist’s death at age 82 in 2008, it took four years for his assets to be transferred from the estate to the Rauschenberg Foundation; after that, most of the contents from his properties in Manhattan and on Captiva Island, Fla., were packed up and transported here. Earlier this year, a team of archivists started to unpack the shipment, which includes 269 boxes of paper, 50 boxes of audiovisual data and 45 boxes of “source materials”: the things Rauschenberg kept around him that he might one day have turned into artworks.

There's also archival video here--an interview with Rauschenberg talking about art school in Paris in 1968, and footage of Rauschenberg and his assistants making pieces from the “Hoarfrost” and "Early Egyptian" series--and a slideshow of the warehouse in Westchester. Chiasson remarks on the poetry in there:

AND THEN THERE ARE his papers. In a file cabinet, personal letters from the choreographer Trisha Brown and Al Gore shared folders with a clipped-out New York Times review of a sushi place and a cartoon of a guy taking his pet radish for a walk. The impression is of a life in which making art was, to a remarkable degree, an extension of friendship. Each of these correspondences hints at the wider social and political worlds in which Rauschenberg held a stake; indeed, one of the most unusual things about an archive like Rauschenberg’s is how many items within it could be in someone else’s archive. A “Christmas List” from 1978 includes such names as Woody Allen, Jimmy Carter, William S. Burroughs and Andy Warhol. There is a warm thank-you note from Onassis for an unspecified Christmas gift, alongside the typed application (marked “PLEASE DESTROY”) Burroughs made for a Guggenheim Fellowship, with Rauschenberg’s concise recommendation clipped to its back.

Rauschenberg wrote mainly in pencil, often on a yellow legal pad, in block letters that suggest both how arduous writing was for him — he was dyslexic and, it would appear, self-conscious about it — and how graphic, how attentive to appearance, were even his private jottings and notes to himself. You can see his brilliance for arrangement even when he’s writing a postcard. Other papers show him experimenting with puns, homespun adages, epigrams: “A STORY OF SURELOCK HOMES,” “I WANT TO MEET A RICH ROACH,” “SUNSETS AND STRAWBERRYS NEVER APEAR THE SAME.” For Rauschenberg, titles were of extreme importance, not to limit or clarify the work but to add to it another layer of poetry and complexity. He was, apparently, virtually a non-reader, but his instincts about language, concision and metaphor are, in fact, a poet’s instincts.

When I was getting ready to pack up, we made a discovery: in a folder, a cache of color copies with Rauschenberg’s name and the Captiva address in green at the top, and the title, all in bold, “RR Key Lime Pie Recipe.”

OK, that's where we're made sad: no pie recipe for us dear readers? Ah well; all rest here. Oh wait! We found it.