Robert Rauschenberg - Exhibitions

Exhibitions

In 1951 Rauschenberg had his first one-man show at the Betty Parsons Gallery and in 1954 had a second one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery. In 1955, at the Charles Egan Gallery, Rauschenberg showed Bed (1955), one of his first and certainly most famous Combines.

Rauschenberg had his first career retrospective, organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1963, and in 1964 he was the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale (Mark Tobey and James Whistler had previously won the Painting Prize). After that time, he enjoyed a rare degree of institutional support. A retrospective organized by the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), Washington, D.C., traveled throughout the United States in 1976 and 1978. A retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1997), traveled to Houston, Cologne, and Bilbao (through 1999). Recent exhibitions were presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2005; traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, through 2007), and at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2009; traveled to the Tinguely Museum, Basel, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese, through 2010).

A memorial exhibition of photographs opened October 22, 2008, (on the occasion of what would have been his 83rd birthday) at the Guggenheim Museum.