Mother of God

1 Over the past twenty years, scholarship on Robert Rauschenberg’s early artistic development has been largely informed by the exhibition and monograph organized in 1991 by Walter Hopps for the Menil Collection in Houston. In the installation and its related catalogue, both titled Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s, Hopps closely examined the groundbreaking experimentation undertaken by Rauschenberg between 1949 and 1954, charting the emergence of the principal themes and motifs that would come to define the sixty-year arc of the artist’s career. During that seminal period, Rauschenberg established an ongoing interest in grasping the full range of art-making mediums, including printmaking, painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, and conceptual modes, often blurring categorical distinctions by using multiple techniques and materials in combination. Mother of God (ca. 1950), part of an informal group of artworks that was included in his first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1951, is a key example of the innovations Rauschenberg achieved in those years. It is worth recounting here some of the details of the artist’s early biography in order to understand the origins and implicit meanings of Mother of God.