Lot Essay
At the end of the 1950s, Rauschenberg feared he was thought capable of making only abstract art and set out to explore new visual territory. In 1959 he began to make drawings based upon Dante's Inferno. He bought several translations of the poem and worked his way through it, creating one drawing for each of the thirty-four cantos. He made it a rule to begin a new drawing only when he had completed the previous cantos's illustration. The project took eighteen months to finish and was ready for the 700th anniversary of Dante's birth in 1965. The complete set of drawings was donated anonymously to The Museum of Modern Art.
Regarding this project, John Cage wrote in 1961, "Dante is an incentive, providing multiplicity, as useful as a chicken or an old shirt" (J. Cage, "On Robert Rauschenberg," Metro, May 1961). What critics found extraordinary was Rauschenberg's ability to translate Dantean iconography into imagery that was insistently of the present. He used photography and graphics from magazines and other sources; as Mary Lynn Kootz has explained:
For Dante himself Rauschenberg chose an average looking fellow wrapped in a towel from a Sports Illustrated ad for ProFit golf clubs; Adlai Stevenson serves as Virgil, Dante's mentor; Italian racing cars are the centaurs; gas masked Africans are the demon squads fig. 1; uniformed policemen are the clergy; rockets are Dante's hell-fires; Wall Street businessmen are corrupt Florentine politicians; and athletes from the pages of Sports Illustrated are the brave warriors. (M. L. Kootz, Rauschenberg/Art & Life, New York, 1990, p. 99)
In 1965 Life magazine commissioned Rauschenberg to make a design for a fold-out to celebrate Dante's 700th birthday. Based on his Inferno drawings, Rauschenberg produced the two panels here. They were reproduced in the December 17, 1965 issue of the magazine. Roni Feinstein describes the politically-charged panels as follows:
[T]he drawings consist largely of images of contemporary evils derived from Life and similar magazines: John F. Kennedy's assassination, a concentration camp, members of the Ku Klux Klan, an atomic bomb explosion, soldiers, and other images of violence, oppression, and pain. A ray of hope is found in the second drawing in the form of the astronaut silhouetted in yellow and accompanied by a comic strip balloon filled with rainbow colors. He is a heavenly messenger bearing a message of promise amidst the gloom. (R. Feinstein, "Rauschenberg: The Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, and Prints," in ed. M. FitzGerald, Victor and Sally Ganz: A Life of Collecting, New York, 1997, p. 126)
Regarding this project, John Cage wrote in 1961, "Dante is an incentive, providing multiplicity, as useful as a chicken or an old shirt" (J. Cage, "On Robert Rauschenberg," Metro, May 1961). What critics found extraordinary was Rauschenberg's ability to translate Dantean iconography into imagery that was insistently of the present. He used photography and graphics from magazines and other sources; as Mary Lynn Kootz has explained:
For Dante himself Rauschenberg chose an average looking fellow wrapped in a towel from a Sports Illustrated ad for ProFit golf clubs; Adlai Stevenson serves as Virgil, Dante's mentor; Italian racing cars are the centaurs; gas masked Africans are the demon squads fig. 1; uniformed policemen are the clergy; rockets are Dante's hell-fires; Wall Street businessmen are corrupt Florentine politicians; and athletes from the pages of Sports Illustrated are the brave warriors. (M. L. Kootz, Rauschenberg/Art & Life, New York, 1990, p. 99)
In 1965 Life magazine commissioned Rauschenberg to make a design for a fold-out to celebrate Dante's 700th birthday. Based on his Inferno drawings, Rauschenberg produced the two panels here. They were reproduced in the December 17, 1965 issue of the magazine. Roni Feinstein describes the politically-charged panels as follows:
[T]he drawings consist largely of images of contemporary evils derived from Life and similar magazines: John F. Kennedy's assassination, a concentration camp, members of the Ku Klux Klan, an atomic bomb explosion, soldiers, and other images of violence, oppression, and pain. A ray of hope is found in the second drawing in the form of the astronaut silhouetted in yellow and accompanied by a comic strip balloon filled with rainbow colors. He is a heavenly messenger bearing a message of promise amidst the gloom. (R. Feinstein, "Rauschenberg: The Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, and Prints," in ed. M. FitzGerald, Victor and Sally Ganz: A Life of Collecting, New York, 1997, p. 126)