Two major New York museums are celebrating the centennial of Robert Rauschenberg’s (1925–2008) birth this fall with exhibitions that spotlight lesser-known chapters of his wildly inventive career.
At the Guggenheim New York, the artist’s monumental silkscreen painting Barge (1962–63) is returning to New York in October for the first time in nearly a quarter century for a show highlighting the museum’s deep Rauschenberg holdings. Just a few blocks uptown, the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) will showcase his undersung work in photography, particularly how Rauschenberg turned his lens on New York City.
Interestingly, neither exhibition will showcase Rauschenberg’s “Combines,” the series of works incorporating everyday objects and taxidermy animals for which he is perhaps best known, focusing instead on other aspects of his wide-ranging practice.
“His career was so long and varied, and he was so prolific,” Joan Young, the Guggenheim’s senior director of curatorial affairs, told me. She has worked at the museum since Rauschenberg’s last major exhibition there, a 1997 exhibition so massive it filled not only the Fifth Avenue flagship, but two satellite spaces. “It was the largest, biggest exhibition that I’ve ever done.”
Robert Rauschenberg, Barge (1962–63). Collection of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. ©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The Guggenheim’s new show, announced today, will take up just one gallery. Titled “Life Can’t Be Stopped,” it’s part of a major moment for both Rauschenberg and the Guggenheim, which was one of the first institutions to exhibit his work. The celebrations for the artist’s 100th birthday are being overseen by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which is loaning several works to the Guggenheim and helping present a slew of other exhibitions around the world paying tribute to the centennial. The show is part of the museum’s new “Focus” series, launched last November, which aims to highlight its vast the collection.
Why ‘Barge’ Is Significant
Among the Guggenheim’s impressive holdings of Rauschenberg’s work is Barge, a striking black-and-white painting measuring 32 feet wide.
“It has this really panoramic and almost cinematic quality,” Young said. “You really have to move across the painting to be able to see it. You can’t absorb it all at once. And you really get a sense of Rauschenberg’s movement as he created paintings.” It was created in the early 1960s, when the artist was also engaged in performance, making sets and costumes for Merce Cunningham as well as his own performance work.”
Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at the Venice Biennale, 1964. Photo: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute.
The Guggenheim acquired Barge in 1997, to be owned jointly by the New York museum and its then-fledgling Bilbao outpost in Spain. But it hasn’t been on view in Manhattan since 2001, spending its time either in Bilbao or traveling to other exhibitions. The New York Guggenheim normally reserves its famed spiraling rotunda—and thus, the bulk of its galleries—for temporary exhibitions, leaving limited floor space to showcase its impressive holdings, especially one of such epic proportions. The Bilbao location, in contrast, has for years given over the entirety of its third floor to works from its collection, allowing Barge to take pride of place.
It is the largest example of the 79 silkscreen works Rauschenberg made between 1963 and ’65. His exploration of the medium—which he picked up around the same time as its most famous practitioner, Andy Warhol (1928–1987)—is at the heart of the Guggenheim presentation.
Art historians debate which of the two artists actually used silkscreen first. Young said it was probably Warhol, but he may have been inspired by Rauschenberg’s process of transfer drawing, which incorporated images from newspapers and magazines by a transfer process rather than collage.
“There’s a story of how Bob [Rauschenberg] visits Andy’s studio and they decide they want to make a trade,” Young said. “He asks Andy to share the source of who made his silkscreens, which are commercially produced. And in return, Warhol asked Bob for photographs that he could use in his paintings. And he actually did go on to create a number of works using these photographs that Bob had shared!”
Robert Rauschenberg, New York (1983). ©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
How Rauschenberg Used Photography
As Rauschenberg’s practice developed, he moved from using found imagery to incorporating photos he took himself into the works. And those photos were also works unto themselves, as the MCNY exhibition aims to tease out.
“By incorporating photographs and everyday objects into his artworks, Robert Rauschenberg placed the realities of life at the center of his art, blurring traditionally held boundaries between the two and compelling us to look more closely at the world around us,” Sean Corcoran, the MCNY’s senior curator of prints and photographs, said in an email. “His work continues to resonate in an increasingly image-saturated world.”
“Even pre-internet, Rauschenberg was really responding to—and he talked about this too—the oversaturation of visual stimulation within mass media, television and film and advertising and such,” Young agreed. “It’ll be nice—the photographic image is going to have a very strong presence in our exhibition, and then just up the street, people will be able to go and see and appreciate his photographs as photographic medium and as a photographic practice too.”
Together, the two shows are the first Rauschenberg museum exhibitions in New York since the 2017 retrospective organized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern in London.
“Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped” will be on view October 10, 2025–April 5, 2026 at the Guggenheim New York, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.
“Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World” will be on view September 12, 2025–March 22, 2026 at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.
