Robert Rauschenberg and Moderna Museet

Contacts between the American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) and the Moderna Museet began around 1960. Pontus Hultén (1924–2006), the newly appointed director of the museum, had been introduced to Rauschenberg’s art in Paris and included works by him in the celebrated exhibition Movement in Art (1961). The following year, in 1962, the museum presented the exhibition 4 Americans: Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Stankiewicz. This screen shows a small selection of the around thirty works on paper by Rauschenberg in the Moderna Museet Collection, that are associated with the museum’s history with the artist.

Rauschenberg returned to Stockholm in 1964 when Moderna Museet, together with Fylkingen, organised 5 New York Evenings – a programme of ballet, concerts and happenings. Invited guests included the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, musicians John Cage and David Tudor, dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer and artist Robert Morris. Rauschenberg travelled with the dance company on its world tour, working on costume, lighting and set design. By this time he had become interested in performance, and for the evening of 13 September he created the iconic Elgin Tie, in which the artist slid down a rope from the museum’s ceiling, landed in a barrel of water and then followed a live cow out of the gallery. The performance has only been staged this time. Rauschenberg designed the collage-like poster for 5 New York Evenings. The musem’s collection includes the original, which comes from the Pontus Hultén collection, donated to the museum in 2005.

In connection with the exhibition The New York Collection for Stockholm (1973), Rauschenberg visited Stockholm again. The project, which was initiated in 1971, was a collaboration between Pontus Hultén and his friend from his student days, the New York-based engineer Billy Klüver (1927–2004). Together with a number of artists, Klüver had founded the organisation Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), which worked to bring art and science together. The idea behind The New York Collection was to build a collection of significant pieces by artists working in New York in the 1960s. A portfolio of lithographs by thirty artists, in an edition of three hundred, was compiled and sold in aid of the project. The museum was also successful in obtaining funding from the Swedish Ministry of Education and Research, and as a result twenty-eight works were added to the Moderna Museet Collection, among them Rauschenberg’s Mud Muse (1968–71). Rauschenberg also created the poster for this exhibition, and the original collage is in the Pontus Hultén Collection.

In the spring of 1982, an exhibition of photographs by Robert Frank, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol was presented, and the poster for Rauschenberg’s photographs is displayed on the screen. The exhibition was organised by Fotografiska Museet (Museum of Photography), which had been a department of Moderna Museet since the early 1970s. Finally, it should be mentioned that Rauschenberg also designed the cover of the catalogue for the exhibition Moderna Museet de Stockholm à Bruxelles (1981), which was published in Swedish in a slightly revised edition on the occasion of the museum’s 25th anniversary, Moderna Museet 1958–1983, edited by Olle Granath and Monica Nieckels. The Moderna Museet’s logo is taken from this cover, the name in capitals in Robert Rauschenberg’s distictly slanted handwriting.

Filter and sort

Explore screen 21