The Great Migrator ─ Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art

In 1964, Robert Rauschenberg, already a frequent transatlantic traveler, became evenmore peripatetic, joining the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as costume and set designer for itsfirst world tour. Rauschenberg and the company visited thirty cities in fourteen countriesthroughout Europe and Asia. During the tour, he not only devised sets and costumes but also enactedhis own performances and created works of art, often using local materials and collaborating withlocal art communities. In The Great Migrator, Hiroko Ikegami examines Rauschenberg's activitiesabroad and charts the increasing international dominance of American art during that period. Unlikeother writers, who have viewed the export of American art during the 1950s and 1960s as another formof Cold War propagandizing (and famous American artists as cultural imperialists), Ikegami sees theglobal rise of American art as a cross-cultural phenomenon in which each art community Rauschenbergvisited was searching in different ways for cultural and artistic identity in the midst ofAmericanization. Rauschenberg's travels and collaborations established a new kind of transnationalnetwork for the postwar art world--prefiguring the globalization of art before the era ofglobalization. Ikegami focuses on Rauschenberg's stops in four cities: Paris, Venice (where hebecame the first American to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale), Stockholm, and Tokyo. Ineach city, she tells us, Rauschenberg's work encountered both enthusiasm and resistance (which wasoften a reaction against American power). Ikegami's account offers a fresh, nonbinary perspective onthe global and the local.

Hiroko Ikegami, an art historian who specializes in American art and the postwar globalization of the art world, is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Human Sciences at Osaka University. In Fall 2010 she will become Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies at Kobe University.