Monogram

Fifteen dollars for the goat

Robert Rauschenberg saw the stuffed Angora goat in the window of a secondhand office-furniture store on Seventh Avenue in New York. The asking price was thirty-five dollars. He paid fifteen towards it and took the goat to his studio.

It was the largest object he had ever tried to get into a painting. The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation records that the work then went through three states, documented in drawings and photographs, before it was finished in 1959.

The title came at the end, from the shape the finished thing made. The goat standing inside the tire reminded him of the interwoven letters of a monogram.

Three states over four years

In the first state, of 1955 to 1956, the goat was poised on a shelf attached to a Combine painting. Calvin Tomkins records Robert Rauschenberg's dissatisfaction: the animal looked as though it belonged in a painting, and it could only be seen from one side. That Combine painting was later reworked into a separate work, Rhyme, of 1956.

In the second state, of 1956 to 1958, the goat stood on a wooden platform in front of an upright panel, encircled by the tire with its tread painted white. The panel was salvaged from a dismantled five-panel White Painting of 1951. Robert Rauschenberg still was not satisfied; he felt the goat looked as though it were pulling the painting along behind it.

That upright panel did not survive into the finished work either. It was reworked and absorbed into the central panel of Summerstorm, of 1959.

The third state settled it, on a suggestion from Jasper Johns, whose studio was one floor below. Jasper Johns proposed setting the animal inside a picture on the floor. Robert Rauschenberg laid the square canvas flat, put the goat in the middle of it as if in a pasture, kept the tire and raised the whole platform on four casters.

A preliminary drawing of 1955 shows how differently it might have gone. In it the goat is mounted against a nearly square upright panel and placed behind a ladder. That sheet is now in Jasper Johns's own collection.

What laying it flat did

Leo Steinberg used the Combines to argue that the picture plane had changed function. A traditional painting is an upright window onto another space. A Combine, in his words, is a receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered — a tabletop or a bulletin board rather than a view.

Monogram makes the claim literal, because its picture is on the floor and the viewer looks down at it. The art historian Roni Feinstein notes that the collage elements reinforce the horizontality. Four footprints at the edge of the canvas, the heel of a rubber-soled shoe, a street barricade with signboard lettering and photographs all lie flat.

A paint-smeared tennis ball sits on the platform behind the goat's hindquarters.

The Museum of Modern Art turned it down

The finished work was first shown from 31 March to 8 April 1959, in a three-person exhibition with Norman Bluhm and Jean Dubuffet at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York.

The collector Robert Scull offered to buy it and give it to the Museum of Modern Art. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the museum's director, declined the offer.

The Moderna Museet in Stockholm bought it instead. The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation's chronology dates the purchase to December 1964; the museum's own credit line reads Purchase 1965 with contribution from The Friends of Moderna Museet, the group known as The Museum of Our Wishes. The Foundation's separate page on the work gives 1964 as well. The two dates are best read as the agreement and the accession.

Moving it is a problem in itself

The work is a heavy horizontal object with a fragile taxidermied animal standing on it, which makes installation a specialist job. Film of the 1977 showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art records the curator Walter Hopps and a team of art handlers putting it in place.

Walter Hopps had proposed Robert Rauschenberg as the living American artist to honour the country's bicentennial, and curated the retrospective that opened at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington in 1976 before touring. He stayed closely involved in the installation of Monogram at each venue.

It travelled again for the 1997 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where the artist and Calvin Tomkins were filmed discussing it.

Where it is now

The Moderna Museet in Stockholm holds the work under inventory number NMSK 1963. That is a number, not a date: the museum dates the work 1955 to 1959 and gives the acquisition separately.

Since 23 November 2024 it has anchored an exhibition named after it, Monogram: Robert Rauschenberg and the Moderna Museet Collection, which runs to 30 January 2028. The museum's object record shows it on view in the Study Gallery.

Robert Rauschenberg signed it where nobody standing beside it can see. The signature is on the underside of the platform and reads RAUSCHENBERG 1959, with the title in quotation marks.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Monogram is photographed from above and in front, standing on a scuffed dark grey floor. The whole platform is in frame and so is the goat, but the camera is on one side of it: the animal's rear quarters are hidden behind the tire, the underside of the platform is not shown, and the four casters the work runs on are never visible.