New York Diary: Rauschenberg at the MOCA, LA

During my recent visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, I caught up with art world impresario and MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch as we perused my favorite room in the world — the Rauschenberg room. Born in 1925, Robert Rauschenberg was instrumental in bridging the gap between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. A forerunner of assemblage (a multimedia work primarily comprised of found objects), he believed that art and life were one and the same, as evidenced by his decision to regularly incorporate commonplace objects into his material matrix. Rupturing the modernist framework, the artist blurred the distinction between painting and sculpture and was the figure around which famed art critic Leo Steinberg first used the term post-modernism in 1969. His art is an exploration, celebration, and poetically poignant reflection of the everyday which never ceases to move me.

Gillian Sagansky