The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has launched the freely available digital catalogue raisonné Robert Rauschenberg: Paintings and Sculptures 1948–1953 on its website today. The digital edition will be complemented by a print version, to be published in winter 2027 by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Gregory R. Miller & Co.
The project incorporates comprehensive documentation, new research, and critical perspectives on Rauschenberg’s paintings and sculptures made during one of the least-known periods of his career, when he was moving between Kansas City, Paris, Black Mountain in North Carolina, New York City, Italy, and Morocco.
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“He was absorbing influences while resisting the idea that he should follow an established artistic model,” Jackie Foster, the project manager, told ArtNews. “You can see him beginning to develop the independent, experimental approach that would define his career.”
The publication gives the chronology for 122 works, including Rauschenberg’s early found-object sculptures, beginning with Greenhouse (1950), as well as his Black Paintings, White Paintings, and Erased de Kooning Drawing, all from the early 1950s. One third of the works featured in the book have been lost or destroyed, and are represented only through photographs taken by Rauschenberg and others.
Edited by Eric Banks, Julia Blaut, and Susan Davidson, the catalogue includes entries on individual works and essays by Catherine Craft, Giorgio Di Domenico, Leah Dickerman, Darby English, Helen Molesworth, Jennifer L. Roberts, and Terry Winters on Rauschenberg’s early life, his experiences at Black Mountain College and in New York, his time in Morocco and Italy, and the artistic and personal networks that shaped these years.
“This is a period in which Rauschenberg’s imagination and ambition are developing at an extraordinary speed,” Courtney J. Martin, executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation,said in a press release. “The first installment of this expansive project allows us to see these works together, to understand the environments and relationships in which they were shaped, and to recognize how many of the ideas that would define his career were already present.”
Foster estimates that cataloguing the next five decades of Rauschenberg’s output will take some twenty years.