Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism: Art, “Sensibility” and War

This impressive book is more than a study on Rauschenberg and Surrealism, more specifically on the largely unnoticed or forgotten link between them. It is also a reflection on the way we write art history today, as a strange mix of theory, thoroughly documented archival research, and, above all, an obsession with linear periodization—in this case, the question of how modernism turned into postmodernism, with the work of Rauschenberg as a kind of no-man’s-land cum bridge, after Greenbergian modernism and French theory enhanced postmodernism—and finally also an equally strong fixation on naming and classification. All these debates are at the heart of the matter of this book, since during the years in which Rauschenberg came nationally and internationally to the fore (the 1950s and early 1960s, with a turning point after his victory at the 32nd Venice Biennale in 1964), there was no longer a real place for Surrealism in...