Once at MIA: Rauschenberg at Rest

Robert Rauschenberg, on the right, always played it cool. “Screwing up things is a virtue,” he said. He found beauty where others flinched. “I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.” He never seemed miserable. He seemed, as the Museum of Modern Art hyperbolized in its press release for a 1977 retrospective, the joyful, unapologetic “enfante terrible” of the art world.

Seven years before that exhibition, he came to the MIA for “Robert Rauschenberg: Prints 1948/1970,” which gathered for the first time the artist’s enormous lithographs and other groundbreaking prints, running from August 6 to September 27, 1970. It included enormous silkscreens—now in the MIA’s collection— made for Dayton’s Gallery 12, which once occupied the top floor of the downtown Minneapolis Dayton’s store.

The show’s curator was Gus Foster, the fellow on the left with the cigarette. “Bob was already a superstar then,” he said when I called him recently, “a magnificent artist. And he became a master printmaker basically from day one.” Rauschenberg was also a master of ceremonies—Foster recalls a string of late nights in New York with the artist and his entourage during the run-up to the show. “A dozen people every night, with Rauschenberg holding court and cocktails flowing like water.”

Foster spent a decade as curator of prints and drawings at the MIA before moving to Los Angeles in 1972, setting up a photographic studio, and getting his own work into museums, including two shows at the MIA. Known for his panoramic scenic images, he now lives in Taos, New Mexico, and makes two or three mountain treks a year to photograph America’s highest peaks. He’s still inspired by Rauschenberg’s good-natured willfulness, but he doesn’t smoke anymore. “I quit that the first time I went up a mountain,” he said.

Watch for more Once at MIA flashbacks every Monday at MIA Stories.