This month marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the influential American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008). To mark the occasion, more than half a dozen shows have been organised around the world, led by the New York-based Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Each focuses on a different aspect of the artist's life and work, from his relationships with his contemporaries in Five Friends at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (3 October-11 January 2026) to his experimentation with different materials in Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s at the Menil Collection in Houston (until 1 March 2026). To help us wrap our heads around Rauschenberg’s varied life and career, the Menil’s senior curator Michelle White has selected five key books on the artist.
Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (2005) by Calvin Tomkins
“Based on a series of interviews conducted for The New Yorker, this biography provides such an enjoyable journey through Rauschenberg’s life. An astute art historian, Tomkins brings great insight to the importance of the art.”
Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017) by Julia Bryan-Wilson
“Fabric is an understudied medium in the history of Modern art and Bryan-Wilson illuminates its importance in the 1970s. She argues that cloth, through its malleability and softness, is political, and fundamental to understanding why so many artists—thinking through ideas of gender and spaces outside of masculine-oriented histories—turned to it.”
The poster for the exhibition Five Friends: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly
Five Friends: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly (2025), edited by Yilmaz Dziewior, Achim Hochdörfer and Arthur Fink
“This beautifully illustrated catalogue, published for one of many exhibitions in honour of Rauschenberg’s centennial, looks at the fertile collaborations and conversations between Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Twombly. Their deep friendship, which yielded unprecedented works of music, dance and visual art, exemplifies the spirit of the cross-disciplinary contemporary practices of post-war art.”
I Don’t Think About Being Great: Selected Writings (2025), edited by Francine Snyder
“Francine Snyder, director of the archives at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, compiled a fascinating group of lesser-known writings by the artist. Humorous and profound, they are primarily short musings on his understanding of art with a capital ‘A’. The succinct statements, distinguished by the artist’s distinct capitalised handwriting, are also reproduced as facsimiles. This intimacy makes you feel like you have stumbled across a pile of his notebooks.”
Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s (1991) by Walter Hopps
“This catalogue accompanied a 1991 exhibition at the Menil Collection, curated by Walter Hopps. An early champion of the artist, his show and book set forth a still deeply under-recognised group of Rauschenberg’s experimental early work from the 1950s, tied to his formative education at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.”
• Michelle White, Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s, 204pp, $65 (hb)
