Unfamiliar early Rauschenbergs at the Corcoran

The Corcoran Gallery will the first and only East Coast stop for a travelling exhibition of works by Robert Rauschenberg. The sixty-five largely unexhibited and unpublished works date from between 1950 and 1953, the first major phase of Rauschenberg’s career, and are tied up with the emergence of the New York School of painting. Three distinct styles are present: Abstract Expressionism; imagist collages of objets trouvés, and proto-conceptualism. The show, important for going back to Rauschenberg’s artistic roots from which his later works developed, runs at the Corcoran Gallery of Art from 15 June to 11 August. It then travels to the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas (which organised the exhibition), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A fully illustrated catalogue will be available.