14 FEBRUARY 1964, Page 18

Art of the Possible

His latest work, especially, is analogous rather to a piece of filmcraft like Antonioni's L'Eclipse. Here the camera shifts abruptly from small sig- nificant detail to large, producing a continuous collage of surprising visual information and sound seemingly as unpremeditated as Monica Vitti's stream of consciousness, yet unified as a work of art. Anyone who recalls the shot of the aircraft's spinning propeller clicking to a halt with a snook at the sky, or the steep, angular facade with people suddenly waving on top like a plume, will find just such sharpness and delicacy of surprise in Rauschenberg's recent Barge which dominates the end wall. This, in effect, is a long silk screen photo-montage combined with black and white painted abstract motives, in which everything works buoyantly together to produce a complex of the sensations of everyday urban experience. Such use of photographic shadow-play with brushed areas of colour may result in a daydream as mysteriously lovely as a flight of birds across magenta planes and industrial fragments ren- dered as nebulous.

The imagery of his latest screens is now and

then foreshadowed in Rauschenberg's more ob- viously exuberant and painterly products. Kurt Schwitters, as we know, was a principal hinge on which all the activity in diversified collage, `pop' slang and relief assemblages as now practised, swung into view. Much was ready for Rauschen- berg. But more than any other contemporary, this quiet, hurriorous, intensely serious explorer of thirty-eight has extended the Surrealist frontier into our gadget day when art has finally lost its definition. The discretion and essential dignity of the earlier pioneer are his. So it is that the eye accepts the flourish of a stuffed cock surmounting a magical illuminated box as naturally as if it were a chased and plumed helmet.

Some mental reservations there are bound to

be in an output fertile. But before touching on them, the painter's professional elegance must first be stressed. His appreciation of patterned design and texture is apparent in frugal white paintings around 1950. Presently Rauschenberg began to develop his subtle sense of structure, colour values and equivocal space which enabled him to perform somersaults on the tight-rope when various oddments were also held in pre- carious balance. The sensuous passages of colour, the racy contrasts of rich dark masses with flashes a white and airy spaces of cerulean blue are satisfying in their own right, with something of the brio of de Kooning. The eye passes with little surprise to a plain wooden chair affixed to such a canvas and precisely integrated with the legerdemain of a band of yellow paint.

There is no need to enumerate the influen....es extending from Picasso and Duchamp to his own compatriots which Rauschenberg has assimilated, for his vision is as singular as his instinctive methods of work. He only tends to lose his iden- tity, I think, in such ready-made conceits as a chimney cowl standing on a truck, as much with- in the compass of an English ingenuity as his imaginative illustrations to Dante's Inferno are altogether beyond it. These hallucinatory and fragmentary images in watercolour; pencil, chalk, and transfer techniques are personal, often spell- binding, reflections on the thirty-four Cantos. Technically the series is a tour de force, and especially in some later Cantos adumbrating wraith-like spacemen and Olympic sportsmen, the poetry of Surrealism gains the highest significance. Rauschenberg's art, in fine, will be eye-opening to every visitor. It happened that as the artist was walking away with Bryan Robertson down the Whitechapel High Street, they noticed a kitchen chair dangling inconsequently from a rope. It was being hauled up a much-placarded old facade. `You see,' said the New Yorker slyly. I do. I am seeing Rauschenbergs everywhere now.

NEVILE WALLIS