Robert Rauschenberg, the tirelessly experimental and collaborative American artist who died in 2008, would have turned 100 this 12 months on 22 October. In honour of his centenary, the New York-based Robert Rauschenberg Basis is spearheading a globe-spanning programme of exhibitions, publications, performances and extra, starting this spring and persevering with effectively into 2026.
The primary main present below the auspices of the programme, opening on 10 April, is 5 Associates: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschen-berg, Cy Twombly, co-organised by Museum Brandhorst in Munich and Museum Ludwig in Cologne. It brings collectively greater than 150 objects together with artistic endeavors, archival materials, costumes, stage props, scores and a efficiency programme.
John Cage and Merce Cunningham had collaborated earlier than assembly Rauschenberg, “however the three of them collectively created one thing completely completely different than what the 2 of them had accomplished earlier than,” says Courtney J. Martin, the manager director of the Rauschen-berg Basis. “And equally for Rauschenberg, working with Cy Twombly actually helped him develop his small-scale sculptures in new methods.” Martin provides: “Rauschenberg is the linchpin with all of them and I feel we’d come away from this present considering radically various things about all of them.”
Everybody on the desk
The present will make in depth use of the co-organising establishments’ everlasting holdings: Museum Brandhorst has a big assortment of Twombly’s work, whereas Museum Ludwig has the largest assortment of Pop artwork outdoors the US, together with textbook examples by Rausch-enberg and Jasper Johns. “Everybody has actually come to the desk for this present—the museums, the estates and Johns himself,” Martin says. “There are objects which have by no means been proven earlier than; there are collectors which have beforehand been very, very cautious about exhibiting a few of the items from their collections.”
Cy Twombly’s 1952 picture of Robert Rauschenberg is in Museum Brandhorst’s assortment © Cy Twombly Basis
The centennial celebrations are extending to the business sector, too. This month, the Miart truthful in Milan is taking inspiration from the “elementary ideas” of Rauschenberg’s work to tell its total 2025 version (4-6 April). The truthful’s creative director, Nicola Ricciardi, “advised me he needed the truthful to make use of Rauschenberg as an concept due to collaboration”, Martin says. Consequently, Rauschenberg works from the storied Luigi and Peppino Agrati Assortment can be on view on the truthful and within the Gallerie d’Italia in Piazza della Scala, whereas the Museo del Novecento will open an exhibition with eight of his works in dialogue with Trendy Italian works. Martin provides: “That little kernel of curiosity on Nicola’s half has now given us one other present.”
In the meantime, in Could, Gladstone Gallery is organising what it describes as “the primary survey of Rauschenberg’s sculptural follow in 30 years” to coincide with Frieze New York, with objects spanning the Nineteen Fifties to the Nineties.
Though he was born in Texas and spent a lot of the later years of his life on the island of Captiva on Florida’s gulf coast—the place his basis runs an artist-in-residence programme that can reopen this spring after taking a direct hit from Hurricane Milton in October 2024—the second large museum exhibition within the Rauschenberg centennial programme will spotlight his decades-long relationship along with his adoptive hometown of New York. Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Photos from the Actual World on the Museum of the Metropolis of New York in September, will give attention to photographs from two eras of the artist’s life: images he took within the Nineteen Fifties when he first arrived in Manhattan and was seeing the town as a newcomer, and images from the Nineteen Eighties, when he returned and chronicled its accelerating modifications.
“The issues he’s desirous about, within the Nineteen Fifties, is the grittiness of the town, the commercials, the issues which are uncanny concerning the metropolis,” Martin says. “Then he takes a break [from photography] and in that break he turns into not solely a recognized artist, but in addition a New Yorker. Then he begins spending a number of time in Florida, so when he will get the brand new digicam and comes again, it’s virtually as if he’s like, ‘Oh, that is what’s occurring within the metropolis after I’m not right here.’”
Past the exhibitions
The centennial celebrations is not going to solely take the type of particular exhibitions. The Rauschenberg Basis has so far awarded greater than 20 grants to museums from Madrid and Stockholm to Honolulu and Toronto to organise shows of Rauschenberg works of their everlasting collections. The primary quantity of a digital catalogue raisonné, protecting works made between 1948 and 1953, can even be launched this 12 months.
The identical month because the artist’s one hundredth birthday, the Yale College Press will publish I Don’t Assume About Being Nice: Choose Statements and Writings, a e-book accumulating 100 passages from Rauschenberg’s not often seen writings. In a single letter from the Nineteen Seventies that’s in his basis’s archives, considering the artist’s position in occasions of disaster, Rauschenberg concluded: “Artwork has at all times been a vital ally to justice and freedom.”
Around the world with Rauschenberg
• Rauschenberg and the Novecento, Museo del Novecento, Milan, 5 April-29 June
• 5 Associates: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombl, Museum Brandhorst, Munich, 10 April-17 August; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 3 October-11 January 2026
• Robert Rauschenberg, Gladstone Gallery, New York, 1 Could-14 June
• Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Photos from the Actual World, Museum of the Metropolis of New York, 13 September-22 March 2026
• Robert Rauschenberg: Material Works of the Nineteen Seventies, Menil Assortment, Houston, 19 September-1 March 2026
• Robert Rauschenberg: the Use of Photos, Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 3 October-18 January 2026
• Robert Rauschenberg and Asia, M+, Hong Kong, 22 November-April 2026
• Robert Rauschenberg: Picture and Gesture, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria, March-October 2026
