The cracks in Robert Rauschenberg’s mirror

We learn more than you might think about the artist in Tate Modern’s new retrospective – if you know where to look.

Ever ready to dig the knife in when it came to the previous generation of American artists, Robert Rauschenberg once said: “You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.”

You certainly get the impression that he was a busy bee when you walk around the Tate Modern’s new retrospective. The ideas and experimentation come thick and fast – in his early years at least. The transfers, ‘combines’, glass sculptures, screen printing, fabric assemblies, laser printing… The bed is still wet from the creative fever.

Maybe it’s just that seeing two desk fans on a painting felt like the fiercest thing I’d seen all week.

People often like to comment that Rauschenberg’s works are a mirror, reflecting back the multifarious world around him rather than the internal monologue of his mind (oh hai Pollock and de Kooning). But when you lean in and pick at the detail, the mirror has the odd hole that lets you peek through.

It reminds me of two brilliant contemporary artists George Henry Longly and Prem Sahib. I love this kind of art archeology. Dig a bit deeper and you start to form a picture not just of an individual, but also the subculture they inhabit and the wider world that slots around it, like a Russian doll. The places they hung out. There things that caught their eye. Who they loved. The slang that laced their silver tongue.

The personal becomes the universal. And the universal ends up feeling all rather… personal. It’s much bigger and has more of the theatricality of life than the abstract expressionists – who in 2016 just feel a bit boorish and self obsessed.

Or maybe it’s just that seeing two desk fans on a painting felt like the fiercest thing I’d seen all week.

What do you think? I’d love to hear in the comments below. And if you want to read more posts like this, please sign up to my blog.