On certain days, I’d cut school and head over to the Museum of Modern Art to dream awhile. This was in the mid-nineteen-seventies, and my high school—then called the High School for Performing Arts—was on West Forty-sixth Street. I lived in Brooklyn, and the world within the walls of that school, and beyond them, was a wonderland to me. In addition to all that I was learning in my classes, there was Manhattan itself, and, a block or so away, the Gotham Book Mart, Frances Steloff’s fabulous bookstore stuffed with treasures, and, a little farther, the moma. I didn’t know much about modern art, European or American (though I’d seen some African art at the Brooklyn Museum), but I was porous, and entering that storied building one afternoon and encountering a stuffed goat on a multi-panelled wooden platform remains one of the more destabilizing experiences of my life. The goat had a goatee, horns, and a long-haired silver torso. Its head and neck were streaked with several colors of paint, as though it had put on makeup while drunk. Not only that—there was a black-and-white rubber tire around its middle. Standing before the goat, I felt as if I were having the worst or best possible dream, and, to steady myself, I read the wall label. Titled “Monogram,” the piece had been made in 1955-59 by an artist whose retrospective I’d walked into: Robert Rauschenberg. (I learned later that, in his twenties, he’d changed his name from Milton to Robert, because he liked the approachable sound of “Bob.”) Who was this man? And what did the word “monogram” mean in this context, or in any context? I remember perspiring, not because the museum was too hot but because something was happening to me: an aesthetic experience I did not understand was changing my body temperature, changing my mind.

“Bed” (1955).Art work by Robert Rauschenberg / Courtesy © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / VAGA / ARS

It was March or April, 1977, and I was sixteen years old. In those days, the museum employed docents who shared their expertise with visitors, and I remember following a docent that seismic afternoon as she talked about another piece that sent my mind reeling. “Bed” (1955) didn’t live in space the way that unmooring goat did; it hung on a wall. But its conventionality ended there. The docent explained that, as a young artist, Rauschenberg was often short of cash, but felt—knew—that art could be made out of anything, even a bedcover. Marcel Duchamp had freed artists from the tyranny of “high” and “low”: art was what an artist chose to make. “Bed” had a wooden frame and supports. At the top was a pillow, and below it a partially turned-down bedspread; both were thick with paint, yellows, whites, reds, and blacks that dripped down the surface of the “canvas” like sleep spit—or just like paint—making something new out of this signifier of domesticity and dreams. The docent said that Rauschenberg called pieces like “Monogram” and “Bed”—art works that had elements of both painting and sculpture—“combines.”

But that goat. It resonated with a strange energy that went beyond wall labels and neat definitions. I didn’t have words for it then. The docent told me that, if I came back the next day, we could talk about Rauschenberg some more. I did go back the next day, and the day after that, because what that marvellous woman was giving me was something I hadn’t known could be given: a way of looking that language only deepened. I wanted to know more about the artist and about the world that had made both him and that goat. Together, they prompted me to see.

Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, was born a century ago this year, and two major New York institutions are exhibiting works from his vast and riveting œuvre. (A third show, on Rauschenberg’s activism and “ecological conscience,” is up at the Grey Art Museum, and Gemini G.E.L. has an exhibition of prints.) But, as thrilled as I am to be in his company again, it says something about the art world and its ethos—an ethos ruled by the laws of fashion, and hovering, just now, between the woke and the pretty—that there is no large-scale retrospective of his work in the city that was his primary home for decades, a place that he, with his collagist’s mind and eye, made us see in all its odd and beautiful juxtapositions. In order to honor Rauschenberg and the city that plays a part in many of his photographs, paintings, silk screens, and combines, which, taken together, say so much about the transformative power of energy, take a walk through Manhattan, and try to view it through his eyes: the refuse beside a discarded chair, the rushing cars and charming legs, a pile of leaves, and a wall of torn and splattered posters. And, as you walk, think about the artist’s journey from his birthplace, Port Arthur, Texas, a refinery town where his father worked for the regional utilities company.

“Jasper—Studio N.Y.C.” (1958).Photograph by Robert Rauschenberg / Courtesy © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

“Susan, N.Y.C. (III)” (1950).Photograph by Robert Rauschenberg / Courtesy © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Rauschenberg started making art early, drawing on walls, painting furniture. He had it all along—his imagination. And he had another thing that gave him the strength to keep going: his innate drive, which counteracted the conservatism around him. Janis Joplin was born in that same port town seventeen years later, and I like to think of these two big personalities, both marked by extreme vulnerability and toughness, as cousins of a kind, Southerners who made their way out of Port Arthur but had no way of leaving behind what Flannery O’Connor called the “Christ-haunted South.”

Raised as a fundamentalist Christian, Rauschenberg considered becoming a pastor, but squelched the idea when he realized that fundamentalists weren’t allowed to dance, one of his passions. If you’ve spent time in any of those Gulf towns in Texas or Louisiana or Mississippi, you know how segregated that world was and still is, and how much the Black imagination—the Africanist spirit—dominates. Not just in the blues that influenced Joplin, say, but in the habit of what I call “making do” in art. When art schools are segregated or unaffordable, you learn to build your own garden—and sometimes it is a garden, a place to transform by arranging stones, potting plants in discarded cans, or it’s a house painted to match its owner’s emotional timbre, or a mural in a public space, or a quilt, a story told through fabric.

Cartoon by Tommy Siegel

This kind of art-making is rarely discussed in relation to Rauschenberg, but I saw the effect of that culture at moma as a teen, and again, later, in pieces he made that were inspired by the Arte Povera—or “poor art”—movement in the early seventies. Some critics were dismissive of Rauschenberg’s “decoration,” as they called it, but they espoused the white art world’s view of what constituted art at that time—heaping bowls of Abstract Expressionism, with a side of postwar Europe. For many art critics and theorists then, and even now, the South was a place of “folklore,” a word you trotted out when you wanted to talk about Black aesthetics without understanding their roots or their power. To really see what Rauschenberg was doing, one should take a page from the legendary historian Robert Farris Thompson’s books. In his 1983 study, “Flash of the Spirit,” he describes how, in Yoruba culture, people made art with whatever material was at hand; it was their hands—and their hearts—that imbued their creations with spirit. Thompson saw that spirit in Black American art as well. For Rauschenberg, who once carved a Roman palace in a bar of Ivory soap, it was life that was always at hand. Art was more powerful when it incorporated the real, even if the real was injurious. As a boy, Rauschenberg had a pet goat he loved; his father slaughtered it for food—a shattering loss he never got over. I thought about “Monogram” ’s layers for years. I knew that goats in mythology were often mischievous, symbols of randiness and disorder—“queer” animals. Was that goat a combination of the real, the queer, and the mythic? Was I?

After graduating from high school, in 1943, Rauschenberg briefly attended the University of Texas at Austin. His parents encouraged him to study pharmacology, but his resistance to dissecting a frog in one of his science classes, combined with undiagnosed dyslexia, led him to drop out. The following year, he was drafted into the United States Navy. When he made it clear that he would not hurt a living thing, he was transferred to a post as a neuropsychiatric technician in the Navy Hospital Corps, in San Diego. The damaged soldiers he worked with there only reinforced his pacifism. One day, he travelled north to visit his first museum—the Huntington, in Pasadena. There, he encountered in person Thomas Gainsborough’s romantic and sumptuous “Blue Boy” (1770) and Thomas Lawrence’s ethereal “Pinkie” (1794)—paintings he had seen before only on the backs of his mother’s playing cards. It was a transformative visit, and thereafter Rauschenberg determined to be a painter. It’s one of the best feelings in the world to find your vocation, and Rauschenberg never lost the illuminating joy that came with that discovery; indeed, his extraordinary output attests, again and again, to his excitement at what he could do with art, and for art, using art’s particular vocabulary, which allowed him to say, There’s you. And look at the world with me and you in it.

In 1946, Rauschenberg was honorably discharged. He hitchhiked back to Port Arthur to see his family, but, as he told the story, they weren’t there. They had neglected to tell him that they had moved. Perhaps it was inevitable that they would choose to “forget” this boy who couldn’t be the Southern Christian man they wanted him to be, and who found his inspiration not in Christ but in the physicality of the secular world. Within a few years of leaving Texas, Rauschenberg had upended everything the place had meant to him, smashing through the parochialism of small-town Southern life, where necks were broken in Jesus’ name, and families indentured or murdered.

“Barge” (1962-63).Art work by Robert Rauschenberg / Courtesy © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / VAGA / ARS

After some time in art school in Kansas, in 1948 Rauschenberg left for France on the G.I. Bill. He enrolled at the Académie Julian, in Paris, but, disappointed by what he saw as his fellow-students’ lack of drive, he spent much of his time haunting the city’s galleries with another American art student named Susan Weil. The two became lovers, and headed back Stateside, to Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, where the artist Josef Albers held sway. But, soon, Rauschenberg felt boxed in by Albers’s boxes, both on canvas and in life, and so, in 1950, he and Weil moved on, marrying and setting up house in New York. They had a son in 1951, and divorced the following year.

If you want to get a sense of who Rauschenberg was and what he saw during his years in New York, check out “Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World” (at the Museum of the City of New York through April 19th). Curated with acuity by Sean Corcoran, the show comprises eighty works, plus a well-edited selection of related ephemera.

I found myself drawn to the gelatin-silver prints that the very young Rauschenberg made at Black Mountain. Rauschenberg learned from artists who passed through the school, including Harry Callahan, but already he was taking photographs that no one else could take, and the best ones have “mistakes”—the mark of real life in them. In his 1950 portrait “Susan, N.Y.C. (III),” we see a seated Weil. The skirt of her patterned short-sleeved dress is spread out, her hands on either side. Her bare feet poke out from under the skirt, but what we notice more powerfully is how the shades of black in the dress echo the black of her hair, below which we see her closemouthed face, slightly out of focus—and it’s that “mistake” that makes the photograph. She’s an avenging angel waiting to avenge something. But what? The man on the other side of the camera, who may already be falling out of love with her?

Also in the show are two portraits of Rauschenberg’s second significant male lover, the formidable Jasper Johns, from Augusta, Georgia. The two met at the end of 1953, and were involved until 1961, living in adjacent studios near Coenties Slip, in lower Manhattan, where many other artists, including Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly, also settled. It was cheap down there, and you could smell the river air—the kind of air that helps to open your mind. Merce Cunningham and his partner, John Cage, were frequent guests. (From 1954 to 1964, Rauschenberg was the resident designer for Cunningham’s dance company, making ingenious stage elements, including a chair he strapped to Cunningham for the dance “Antic Meet”—a human combine.) Whereas Weil’s energy leaps out of the image at you, Johns’s self-containment, his inscrutability, in “Jasper—N.Y.C. (I),” from 1954, makes the portrait more formal, like the beautiful overcoat he wears as he stares out of the frame at the waiting world, his hands in his pockets. I didn’t see the beauty of Johns’s hands until I got to “Jasper—Studio N.Y.C. ” (1958). In this image, Johns sits on a table littered with liquor bottles. He’s off center, one leg resting on the table, his left hand on his ankle, the right holding a drink—and that’s when you notice his long, tapering fingers, and his eyes, looking at the photographer straight on, which seem to say, I am here, but I could be over there, too. Behind Johns are two of his target paintings, a series that changed everything.

The work that Rauschenberg made that decade changed American art, too: his extraordinary “White Paintings” from 1951, say, whose white-painted canvases reflect light and shadow, or his “Black Paintings” (1951-53), to which he added texture by painting over newspaper, creating craters you can get lost in. But you wouldn’t know this if you were just looking at the photographs, which is one of the problems of not having a retrospective: you have to piece the history together yourself, instead of luxuriating in hall after grand hall. As I looked at “Jasper—Studio N.Y.C.,” a kind of sadness descended on me. Because it was during this period that Rauschenberg was becoming more entrenched in the New York art world, and whereas the South was about feeling through culture, New York was falling under the sway of Johns’s tremendous art about the denial of feeling and the mitigation of queerness.

“Untitled (Red Painting)” (c. 1953).Art work by Robert Rauschenberg / Courtesy © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation / VAGA / ARS

Rauschenberg’s bold “Erased de Kooning Drawing” (1953)—which is not in any of the current shows—is just what it says it is, and is also one of the more beautiful and enigmatic works of the mid-twentieth century. By partially erasing the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning’s work, Rauschenberg made himself visible as a playful, Duchampian smudge on the landscape of the world ruled over by that Dutch Big Daddy. But, at the same time, in adopting the vocabulary of modernism, Rauschenberg took on a language that his heart didn’t speak. Andy Warhol, in his fantastic book “Popism: The Warhol Sixties” (1980), asks a friend why Rauschenberg and Johns had cut him dead, and the friend says because he was “too swish.” In the butched-up art world of the mid-century, to be successful you had to be a “real” man beneath all that paint. Has any ambitious person—as ambitious as Rauschenberg was—ever been able to reject the compromises that fame demands?

My spirits lifted, though, when I got to the silk-screen works of the early sixties. Rauschenberg’s world became bigger, grander, a sky filled with unbridled gesture and thought. He was no longer rolling around in ideas about modernism but standing up straight and queer in them. In the M.C.N.Y. show, I loved “Soviet/American Array VI” (1988-90), an intaglio with a gorgeous blend of politics, nature, and the everyday, featuring photographs that Rauschenberg took in Moscow and New York. On the left side of the piece, we see a statue of Lenin; it floats by an image of grass, and another of an oval car mirror reflecting the road we’ve just travelled. Nearby, a man crosses the street in what could be the ghastly heart of an endless New York summer. We’re living both in the real world and in the dream world that Rauschenberg often places before us, asking us to think not about where we stand but about what we can love or learn there.

Rauschenberg loved life—the life that went into art—just as much as he loved the art, and it’s the broad sweep of his energy which makes “Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped” (at the Guggenheim through May 3rd), curated with care and a sure eye by Joan Young, so essential. There are fifteen works in the Guggenheim show, and Young has done well to space them out, allowing for a certain stillness between pieces—though stillness didn’t really appeal to the dervish Rauschenberg. He was interested in the next and the next and the next. The future: he imagined it, and, once it arrived, he’d leap past it, giddy for the still unknown.

Although there is one piece in the show from the Arte Povera-inspired seventies, there’s no major work—like the fabulous “Untitled (Venetian)” (1973), in which a tire tread is stretched into a line between two rough-hewn wooden bookends—to give a sense of Rauschenberg’s Fluxus-meets-Africanist heart or to demonstrate that his form of recycling was an acknowledgment of how quickly things can disappear or become something else.

I spent some time with “Untitled (Red Painting)” (c. 1953), a piece that gives you a new way of seeing a color that’s difficult to manage. (Rauschenberg’s red paintings came after he had wrestled with white and black.) This vertical work, more than six feet high, is, for me, less about texture than about expanse, how to make something reach up, rather than from side to side, which is how we view most paintings. “Barge” (1962-63), a silk screen on canvas, on the other hand, extends across the wall. It’s thirty-two feet wide, an astonishment not only of black and white but of verve and placement. With no three-dimensional objects stuck to it, “Barge” has only Rauschenberg’s brilliance as a collagist to rely on. It’s a funked-up Chinese scroll of a painting, without a set story to tell. Rauschenberg is said to have executed “Barge” very quickly, in less than a day, and the improvised feel of it—the big drips and swaths of paint over or near images of “real” things, including birds, athletes, and an umbrella in a downpour of paint—keeps you looking, as if you were in a rehearsal studio watching a choreographer perform steps, just for you, that no one could ever reproduce.

Rauschenberg was intensely interested in performers and performance—how time worked with, or created tension in, a finite dance or theatre piece. (One wonders what he would have made of the event-based work of artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose art sometimes consists of cooking and sharing a meal. What would Rauschenberg cook and serve? Certainly not goat.) Some years ago, when I visited the actress Lily Tomlin and her wife, the writer Jane Wagner, I saw two enormous Rauschenberg prints in the entryway of their home. Tomlin told me that the artist was a fan of her work and had said that he wanted her to play him in a movie of his life. That ability to see himself in other bodies, in other cultures, is what remains once we free Rauschenberg from the restrictions of fashion and climb onto his barge, guided as much by the authority of his hand as by his certainty that none of us knows a thing. But he does know barges and how to steer them. They were a familiar sight on the waterways of Port Arthur. ♦