Damien Hirst Robert Rauschenberg Alexander Calder Man Ray Pablo Picasso Cy Twombly Willem de Kooning Michelangelo Buonarroti

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On New Year’s Eve 2007, just five months before his death at age 82, Robert Rauschenberg filed a federal lawsuit for the return of his trash. The story of how he had lost it, and what led him to seek its restitution, began a decade earlier, when a young man named Robert Montgomery was walking along a quiet street near Rauschenberg’s home on Captiva Island, Florida. It was trash day, and there, amid the detritus bagged, bundled, boxed, and awaiting pickup was something that caught his eye, both for its location and its content. Looking at his famous neighbor’s trash, Montgomery saw a number of large negatives, or "chromes," which he decided to salvage. Nothing came of his quiet appropriation until last year, when Montgomery, under the ready-made pseudonym Robert Fontaine, exhibited and sold three of the chromes. He did not present them as his own work; what he had put up for sale, complete with certificates of authenticity, was "Robert Rauschenberg’s trash." And therein began the problem. Over the years, Captiva Island’s most celebrated resident had been generous to younger artists with time, materials, and money. In his trash, however, he drew the line.

Much was, and is, strange about this chain of events, beginning with the intimate connections between artistic appropriation and trash in Rauschenberg’s own past. In 1952, Rauschenberg, then an art student living in New York, knocked at the door of Willem de Kooning’s studio and asked the man many considered the most important artist of the day for a drawing — so that he could erase it. In a magnanimous gesture, de Kooning gave him a particularly dark drawing. A box of erasers later, Rauschenberg exhibited his perplexing, but accurately titled, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). On display was nothing more than a grubby sheet of white paper; what viewers were encouraged to see was not only that, but what was no longer there.

Rauschenberg’s irreverence proved a sign of successes to come, and his success proved a sign of irreverences to come. While studying with the Bauhaus master Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, he had listened carefully to his teacher’s austere pronouncements before deciding to do "exactly the reverse." Having gone as far as he could in the way of provocative reduction with his Erased de Kooning Drawing, he turned to provocative profusion. Along with fellow Black Mountain student Cy Twombly, Rauschenberg left America for Italy in 1953. Running low on money, he landed a job with a construction firm that took him to Morocco. In his free time there, he made art from what he found in the trash. Back in Italy, he exhibited these wild works in galleries in Rome and Florence, sold many, and threw the rest into the Arno. Returning to New York shortly thereafter, he continued in this vein. "I often had a house rule," Rauschenberg recalled. "If I walked completely around the block and didn’t find enough [trash] to work with, I could take one other block and walk around it in any direction." His next works were the ones for which he was to become most famous — the "Combine" paintings of the 1950s, for which he threw everything he could find in, at, and onto his canvases. In Canyon (1959), a bald eagle and a pillow projected from the painting’s surface. A year earlier, Odalisk’s list of materials comprised "oil, watercolor, pencil, crayon, paper, fabric, photographs, printed reproductions, miniature blueprint, metal, newspaper, glass, dried grass, steel wool, pillow, wood post, electric lights, Plymouth Rock rooster, wood structure mounted on four casters." Rauschenberg once used his own bedding (Bed [1955]), and in Monogram (1959), the picture literally couldn’t hold what he placed on it (a stuffed angora goat with a tire wrapped around its midriff), so he set the cluttered canvas on the ground. The artworld was not long in asking what these things were and what they meant. Many took one look and saw trash. Others saw a message and a method — but what message and what method? Was Canyon’s eagle and pillow a modern retelling of the story of Zeus and Ganymede, or a surrealistic juxtaposition of improbable found objects? Was Monogram’s goat grazing on the pure material of past art a symbol of lustful excess, or was it just a paint-smeared goat with a tire wrapped round its midriff standing atop a canvas, its monogrammatic message nothing other than its strange self?