Pop Art Pioneer Enjoys Resurgence Here and Overseas

Robert Rauschenberg, a man who many consider a pioneer of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s and ’70s, is being rediscovered on the centennial of his birth with exhibits in museums around the globe. He’s best known for his famous “Combines,” artworks that blend painting with physical objects. Rauschenberg is being honored this fall with several shows in New York.

NYU’s Grey Art Museum kicked off its celebration in September with a tightly focused show devoted to the artist’s environmentally themed prints, aptly titled Handle with Care.

This month, the Guggenheim is marking the occasion with Life Can’t Be Stopped, another small exhibit with works drawn from its permanent collection, alongside loans from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Its biggest draw, literally and figuratively, is the return to the city of the artist’s epic, 32-feet-wide silkscreen, Barge (1962-63), the largest in his Silkscreen Painting series, mostly completed in 24 hours.

Meanwhile, Sean Corcoran, senior curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), has gone “all in” on Rauschenberg’s black-and-white photographs of NYC. His show, Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World, centers on a photography project begun around 1979 on the heels of the city’s brush with bankruptcy.

Corcoran became intrigued by the artist’s use of the camera while organizing This Is New York in 2023, a show celebrating MCNY’s 100th year. He had reached out to the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation for material because Rauschenberg was such an important part of the postwar New York art scene. He migrated to the city in 1949, living and working continuously here until he moved his primary residence and studio in 1970 to Captiva Island, Fla., where he died in 2008 at age 82. He maintained a New York base at 381 Lafayette St., which is now home to the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

As Corcoran told Straus News in a recent interview, “There was a selection of photographs, and me, as the photography curator, said, ‘These are really interesting. These really have an artist’s eye and a very different perspective on the city.’ So basically I went back to them and said, ‘Do you have more? Can we see what’s there?’ And I found them to be completely compelling and also to be an aspect of his artistic output that is not really well known. So the idea of bringing something forward to the public that has not received much attention was really interesting to us.”

Indeed, the pictures draw you in and grow on you, illuminating the oft-overlooked, grittier side of town. The works in the main room were mostly drawn from Rauschenberg’s “In + Out City Limits” series (1979-81), a survey of half a dozen cities across America that evolved from an earlier, more ambitious plan, hatched when he was a student at Black Mountain College, N.C., to photograph the entire country “inch by inch.”

The closely cropped New York images are largely devoid of people (though there are people) and demonstrate a fascination instead with the city’s physical architecture and everyday, tangible, “real” things that caught his eye—buildings, windows, curtains, hydrants, lamp posts, signage, a food cart, a lightbulb and tchotchkes on offer in the shops and on the street. They have a distinctly downtown vibe.

When his camera was stolen around 1965, Rauschenberg quit taking his own photographs and relied on imagery sourced from magazines and newspapers to integrate into his larger art-making practice. But he returned to the camera in the late 1970s because he wasn’t finding the pictures he needed in media outlets, Corcoran said.

“When he goes out around 1979 for the ‘In + Out City Limits’ works in the main gallery, he’s out there looking at the world, and I like to compare it to the late ‘50s, when he would walk out of his studio and around the block finding objects that he would put into his ‘Combine’ paintings. With the camera he brings back still photos he found interesting in the real world and incorporated them into his art. He exhibited the photos as stand-alone art, but he also used them in his wider art-making practice—incorporated them into painting and other mixed media he was working on,” creating new juxtapositions and discovering new meanings in the pictures.

The exhibit’s signature visual is a picture of a waiter in an unidentified restaurant climbing a staircase with a tray full of cheeseburgers. An image of the head of the Statue of Liberty looms large through the window in the background.

“I kind of feel that it’s almost like a photographic version of his collages. It’s really almost two different images put together. It’s the poster of the Statue of Liberty, and this other scene of the waiter with the tray,” Corcoran said. “For me, it’s a very American picture. It’s a waiter with a tray full of cheeseburgers—how more American can you get than that?—and then the Statue of Liberty. It becomes a collage in one frame through his camera lens. In a lot of ways, it’s symbolic not just of his photography but his whole art-making practice.”

In a handwritten statement on photography, drafted in 1981, Rauschenberg declared his “need to be where it will always never be the same again . . . forcing one to see what ever [sic] the light or the darkness touches, and care.”

”Handle with Care: Robert Rauschenberg’s Ecological Conscience,” Grey Art Museum / New York University, 18 Cooper Square; through April 11, 2026.

“Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World,” Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Ave. (at 103rd Street); through April 19, 2026.

“Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped,” Guggenheim New York, 1071 Fifth Ave. (at 88th Street); Oct. 10 through May 3, 2026.