Welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. You can unlock the entire LRB archive for free for 24

hours by visiting lrb.co.uk forward slash open. He has created more than any artist after Picasso,

Jasper John said of Robert Rauschenberg, his one-time partner. And the Rauschenberg retrospective

now at Tate Modern until the 2nd April

2017, fully attest to the sheer abundance of his six-decade career. He died in 2008. There are

impressive inventions here, such as his extravagant combinations of painting, collage, and sculpture,

as well as mixed experiments,

such as his enthusiastic forays into new media technologies.

But there's a lot of recycling and wheel spinning, too.

No review can take it all in, so I will focus on one early phase, a key moment when, after a brief sojourn in Rome and North Africa with Cy Twombly, another close friend, Rauschenberg returned to New York in spring

1953 and set up a simple studio on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan.

Before his tour abroad, Rauschenberg had attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina,

where, with teachers such as the former by-house master, Joseph Albers,

he absorbed as many avant-garde experiments as he could.

By contrast, Fulton Street was a period of reduction and redirection.

It was then that Rauschenberg

elaborated his materialist reinterpretations of the monochrome, known as the white and black

paintings, as well as his rudimentary arrangements of found rock, scrap metal, and old twine,

known as the elemental sculptures. What motivated such austere works?

What prompted his interests not only in material process, but also in conceptual gestures?

It was during this time, too, that Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning, whom he greatly admired,

for a drawing which he then laboriously erased.

...