This month, I have selected a work from the Columbus Museum of Art’s collection that complements a new exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957 will be on display Sept. 17-Jan. 1. It offers the first comprehensive museum exhibition in the U.S. about the experimental liberal arts college where influential artists such as Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Josef and Anni Albers, and Merce Cunningham studied and taught.
“The show’s objects span from humble studies made for class to canonical oil paintings, tapestries, ceramics and jewelry. Poetry, dance and music also abound. Collectively, these works reveal the school’s ethos, in which experience was the basis of knowledge, and objects were not fixed things, but mirrors of their environment, the result of action and experimentation.” - Kirsten Swenson, Art in America, Dec. 16, 2015.
This work by Robert Rauschenberg, Autobiography (1968, offset lithograph on paper, 66.25” by 48.75”), is representative of the spirit of the school, and nods toward the substantial body of work Rauschenberg produced for the theater. That is Rauschenberg himself on roller-skates, during a performance of Merce Cunningham’s Pelican at the long gone Washington Gallery of Modern Art’s Pop Festival in 1963.
Rauschenberg (American, 1925-2008) would try almost anything to make his work. This print uses collage, photolithograph and hand painting, all produced by a printing method theretofore reserved for the commercial world.
In 1978, I worked as a studio technician for Washington artist V.V. Rankine (1920-2004), who had also studied at Black Mountain College, and was friends with an astonishing number of well-known artists. She was the sister-in-law of Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), sharing a studio with him in the 1940s.
The college required all students to help with its day-to-day operation. When I asked about Rauschenberg, her first memory was that “Bob hated doing the dishes and would concoct all sorts of ways of getting out of the chore.”
Michael McEwan teaches oil painting classes in his Summit Street studio. His paintings are available exclusively from Keny Galleries, where his next exhibition opens Sept. 9. Learn more at www.michaelmcewan.com.