In March, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation finalised the controversial $45m sale of the artist’s home on Captiva Island in Florida. Rauschenberg had lived and worked on the 22-acre property since 1970 and died there in 2008. Now his former home in Manhattan appears to be up for sale: earlier this month Artnet spotted that it had been listed on the website of the real estate company Newmark. Rauschenberg bought the town house at 381 Lafayette Street shortly after he won the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1964. Built in the early 19th century, it was once an orphanage and convent and part of its chapel still remains. It served as Rauschenberg’s studio for many years and hosted his wide circle of friends and associates. And now, it seems, it’s soon to go.
When the foundation announced the Captiva sale, it pointed to the rising costs of safeguarding the property from environmental damage – understandable in a region that is lashed by hurricanes with increasing regularity. But the New York sale is more puzzling. The foundation has been tight-lipped about it, issuing only a brief statement saying that the likely development of an adjacent property will disrupt its operations – as if New Yorkers are unaccustomed to construction. So what’s going on? Maybe there are financial issues to be resolved. Maybe the foundation is planning some bold new rebirth. Time will tell, but the two sales raise questions about how the foundations and estates of artists safeguard legacies and whether artists’ homes and studios should be seen as shrines to be conserved.
Some artists leave studios that convey such a vivid sense of their practice that preservation is only right. Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence, furnished as it is with furniture and ornaments that are seen in his paintings, is the exemplar. Astonishing tableaux like this don’t have to remain in situ: Constantin Brânçusi’s studio has been reconstructed to powerful effect by the Centre Pompidou and Francis Bacon’s London studio is now housed at Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. Homes can also be revelatory: when Rauschenberg’s contemporary Donald Judd moved to Marfa, Texas, in the 1970s, he kept his house on Spring Street, New York. Today, maintained by his foundation, it offers a rich lesson in Judd’s attitudes to life, art and design. But some artists’ lives pass through homes and studios without leaving a profound imprint. That seems to have been the case for Rauschenberg, whose foundation never turned them into shrines.
But is a shrine necessary for the maintenance of an artist’s legacy, or is having a strong sense of purpose enough? Certainly, foundations and estates can promote the posthumous exhibition of the artist’s work, oversee sales and generally husband the reputation, but they can also do more. The Keith Haring Foundation supports – among other things – non-profits that assist children and organisations fighting AIDS; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation funds similar medical work. Neither maintains a public space. By contrast, the stated goals of the Rauschenberg Foundation can sound vague: it ‘celebrates new and even untested ways of thinking’ and it supports art that drives social change. It has been doing that through grants and, until now, residencies in New York and Captiva. The foundation has also introduced an expansive and refreshing fair use policy that supports scholarship and is in keeping with Rauschenberg’s own approach to appropriation. For the general public the absence of a shrine may make an artist recede into the background, but for those who are the recipients of the foundation’s grants, their legacy can feel much more palpable than it does when visiting some old property. The artist’s hand reaches from beyond the grave to help those they might have helped in life. At the same time, to complete a residency on an artist’s home soil is to feel you are walking in their shoes, being lifted by their spirit. While that might be superstitious, the uplift is real.
So, what next for the Rauschenberg Foundation? A more focused sense of mission? Not necessarily: mission statements are touchstones that gain clarity through implementation, and the Rauschenberg Foundation’s mission statement is as broadly drawn as that of the Warhol Foundation, which is loftily pledged to the ‘advancement of the visual arts’. Besides, every artist leaves a different legacy, material as well as artistic, and those who seek to safeguard it must work with different tools and to different aims. Those aims also have to be marshalled in changing times, when it may be easier to execute their spirit than their letter. In life, Keith Haring democratised his art through the ephemera he sold at the Pop Shop; today, his foundation licenses his motifs to Uniqlo, as well as to high-fashion retailers whose prices are far beyond the purse of the kids he loved, yet the ample returns from those deals fund the causes Haring equally loved. There’s time for development: the Rauschenberg Foundation was established only in 1990 and, by the measure of such things, it’s still in its youth. Like any young thing, it should change as it grows.
