On the centenary of the birth of the US artist Robert Rauschenberg (Port Arthur, 1925 – Captiva Island, 2008), the Museum of the twentieth century of Milan presents an exceptional exhibition project that builds a bridge for the first time between the works of this fundamental protagonist of the history of art and some of the most significant masterpieces hosted inside the museum collections, intertwining a plot between the innovative vision of the American artist and the rich fabric of Italian art of the twentieth century.
Part of the Milan Art Week program, the exhibition “Eouschenberg and the twentieth century” (April 5 – June 29, 2025), organized by the Total Arte Association and promoted by the Municipality of Milan – Culture with the support of Fiera Milano and Marazzi Group, represents the culminating point of the initiatives promoted by Miart, the international fair of modern and contemporary art organized by Fiera Milano who has dedicated its collaborative spirit to Rauschenberg and His 29th edition, starting from the title, “Among Friends”, borrowed from the last retrospective dedicated to the American artist.
Central figure in the transition from modern to contemporary art, Rauschenberg has always demonstrated an unspeakable curiosity and a profound commitment to the collaboration and exchange of ideas. At the Museum of the twentieth century, these aspects are emphasized by the desire to relate and dialogue, sometimes in a deliberately anachronistic way, its research and that of artists belonging to the main artistic movements that have marked the Italian twentieth century, from futurism to poor art.
Through overlapping of visions, materials and artistic intentions, his works confront each other with the museum collections, establishing direct references, formal or thematic affinities. The result is a path that reflects the daring experiments of artists who, like Rauschenberg, invented new languages, challenging the materials and revolutionizing the conventions of painting and sculpture.
Using the advice of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the curators of the exhibition – Gianfranco Maraniello, director of the Museums of Modern and Contemporary Art Museums of the Municipality of Milan, and Nicola Ricciardi, artistic director of Miaart, with the precious support of Viviana Bertanzetti – have included the museum journey a selection of eight works from all over Europe and made by Rauschenberg between the seventies and Eighty.
The exhibition opens in the Futurism Gallery, in which the most important collection of the artistic movement of the early twentieth century and where to the unbridled enthusiasm for the car and the speed expressed by Giacomo Balla replies Rauschenberg with one of his gluts, the series for which the American artist has melted car scrap and residues of service stations to comment on the excess of the offer of oil that in the middle of the eighth to the mid -eighth, collapse of the price per barrel a to the consequent economic crisis.
On the upper floor, Bonaparte Valica il Gran San Bernardo-painted by Jacques-Louis David in the early nineteenth century and reinterpreted by Rauschenberg in the eighties of the following century-finds its place between the paintings of Mario Sironi and Carlo Carrà. The work, entitled Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba by the legendary Palindrome that Napoleon would have pronounced before crossing the Alps, was placed in dialogue also with the great sculpture of Arturo Martini, the deaths of Bligny would extend whose title derives from a speech by Mussolini on the complicated relations between Italy and France in the mid -thirties.
Going up again of a plan, you arrive at the 1950s and the first of the artists met in person by Rauschenberg, Alberto Burri. The painter of Città di Castello, among the first to experiment with unpublished languages and extrapittoric materials in his canvases – such as plastic, sand, iron, cement – was a source of significant inspiration for the American artist, present here with one of his Cardboards, the series of the early seventies in which the artist introduces pieces of cardboard in the work, not as a support, but as a material shown in its immediate value of the element of waste.
Before reaching the “Gesti and Processes” gallery dedicated to the last decades of the century, from the 1960s to the nineties – recently renovated and rearranged – there is a dialogue between presence and absence, between the present and the time that flows, between phantasmatic figures and melancholy shadows. The shadow sculpture, created as a site-specific work by Claudio Parmiggiani for the twentieth century museum, is in fact, metaphorically reflected as literally, in one of the Phantom of Rauschenberg, a very short series created in 1991 with serigrafied images on anodized mirrored aluminum: two dreamlike images that appear and disappear depending on the light, the shadows and the reflections respective surfaces.
The influence of Rauschenberg’s Combine-Palntlngs in the development of some of the characteristic features of the Nouveau Réalism movement and-such as the return to objects, the relationship with urban folklore, the integration of materials taken from reality, even the most banal one, in the pictorial context-is underlined in the next room by an ideal transoceanic dialogue among the works of Daniel Spoerri, Arman. And Christo with one of the spreads made by the American master in which we mix harmoniously transferred images, collage of fabric and objects found.
The magnificent room overlooking Piazza del Duomo, which now hosts the works white and real laying of Jannis Kounellis and above all the imposing Chinese feast of the Italian pop art master Mario Schifano, enriches the reflection with Summer Glut Fence, among the most pop works of the American artist as well as his latest series of metal sculptures. Here the work integrates art with the chaos of life: the assemblies of waste objects explore the potential of the metal and – like the tourists of Maurizio Cattelan who peep out from above an architrave – offer the opportunity to look at things in relation to their multiple possibilities.
Continuing the path, on the right side of the museum wing, a more collected space puts the conceptual works of Giulio Paolini in dialogue with the dreamlike dimension of one of the Hoarfrost of Rauschenberg. The work, of the early seventies, is part of a series whose title is the summons of the Dante Brina. The cotton and light silk fabrics, with their floating folds, reveal the images impressed by the American artist, materializing the continuous search for the beauty and ineffectiveness of art pursued by the Italian Master of Art Poor.
The exhibition ends with a reflection on the transformation. The material and energy in change in the crogioli of Gilberto Zorio and the constant tension of the stratospheric of Eliseo Mattiacci, understood as an attempt to dialogue with the universe, find a profound resonance in the ambitious Roci project conceived by the American master between 198D and 1991. This large -scale itinerant exhibition aims to trigger dialogue and promote a mutual intercultural understanding through artistic expression. Hono Snare / Roci Venezueìa, 1985, presented here, embodies this ideal, synthesis of Robert Rauschenberg’s voracious curiosity and his indomitable spirit of sharing and collaboration.
From the famous assemblies to the merger of images and objects found, from the mirroring surfaces to research on the evocative power of the simplest materials, the exhibition makes it evident that the contamination is the fulcrum of the artistic practice of Rauschenberg. A spirit that allows each section of the museum, recently enriched by a rearrangement resulting from a careful and meticulous curatorial work.