Rereading Rauschenberg’s Monogram

Hiroko Ikegami has told the story of Pontus Hultén’s acquisition of Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram by the Moderna Museet and has given an admirable account of Rauschenberg’s role in the emergence of Stockholm as a leading centre for avant-garde art in the 1960s. Surprisingly, however, there have been remarkably few conventional art historical studies devoted to Monogram, notwithstanding its iconic status among Rauschenberg’s Combines. The first part of the present study situates Monogram and its goat more firmly within Rauschenberg’s biography and identity. The second reviews observations concerning the goat that Rauschenberg volunteered from time to time. These observations show that Rauschenberg himself never suggested that the goat in Monogram was anything other than a goat or that the tyre was anything more than a tyre. The next part of my study examines the physical and visual composition of the Combine. A fourth section reviews the reception of Monogram by earlier critics and scholars, focusing in particular on Kenneth Bendiner’s hypothesis that Rauschenberg created Monogram as ‘a specific re-working’ of William Holman Hunt’s Victorian painting The Scapegoat. Next, in a section headed ‘Rereading Monogram’, my paper identifies and discusses sources in Life magazine and in Sports Illustrated for eight of the photographic reproductions that Rauschenberg embedded in his goat’s ‘pasture’. This section also suggests that a funambulist in a wintry Alpine view that is pasted near the front of the goat’s ‘garden’ can be viewed as a type of portrait of Rauschenberg himself – one that accords well with the vertiginous nature of the artist’s creations from the late 1950s. Another section considers whether Monogram may be linked to Rauschenberg's interest in astrology. In this reading, the goat might be perceived as a type of Capricorn. The concluding sections of the paper consider the significance of automobiles and their tyres elsewhere in contemporary American society, literature and art.