Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg is a recurring presence in Andy Warhol’s diaries, encountered as a fellow artist, a social companion, and a figure whose work is repeatedly measured against changing standards of artistic value. Across the entries, their relationship is recorded less through sustained explanation than through gestures and episodes: a kiss in an elevator, an appearance at a gallery opening, a shared Berlin visit, and candid judgments about art and its prices. Together, these moments place Rauschenberg within the overlapping personal, artistic, and commercial worlds Warhol observed.

Identity and Artistic Standing

Warhol’s references to Rauschenberg move easily between personal familiarity and professional assessment. At a 1981 dinner, Bill Bradley said he had works by both Rauschenberg and Warhol on his walls, an offhand remark that places them together in a collector’s home. At a 1984 exhibition at the Whitney, Warhol singled out Rauschenberg’s work as the best in the show, saying that somehow it looked new. That judgment stands out amid his mixed responses to other artists’ work and to the scale and limitations of the exhibition.

Warhol also returned to the question of how artistic reputations translated into market value. In 1985, he told David Whitney that Peter Brant had bought a James Rosenquist work and predicted that Rosenquist’s prices would rise if he received a major exhibition. He contrasted those prices with the sums being paid for David Salle, while insisting that Rosenquist was the better artist. In the same market-minded discussion, Warhol described Rauschenberg’s early works as pieces that sold for good prices, alongside early work by Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly. The entries therefore place Rauschenberg among the established artists whose earlier work served as a reference point for judgments about artistic quality and value.

Encounters and Familiarity

At the opening of a Jasper Johns exhibition at the Whitney, Rauschenberg first blew Warhol a kiss in the elevator, then came over and kissed him, saying the gesture had been silly. The episode is brief, but its progression—from playful signal to direct greeting—shows an ease between the two men. At the small gathering for lenders, Warhol was also preoccupied with securing a catalogue and an inscription: after failing to find Johns at first, he asked Rauschenberg to sign it, then later found Johns, who crossed out Rauschenberg’s signature and wrote his own. The scene records their contact within the informal rituals surrounding a museum exhibition, where signatures, artists, and collectors converged.

Rauschenberg also appears in Warhol’s account of the January 1982 openings of Dollar Signs and Reversals. Warhol described the gathering as a return to the atmosphere of the busy sixties, noting Rauschenberg’s presence alongside Joseph Beuys and Hans Namuth. Later, at a dinner for Leo Castelli, Namuth took artists to the bathroom to photograph them. Warhol described his own behavior with Rauschenberg during the session as deliberately camp, and remarked that the encounter left him with a less idealized impression of Rauschenberg’s body. The episode’s importance lies in its shift from public artistic stature to private, comic observation: Rauschenberg remains an artist among artists, but also a person caught up in Warhol’s unsparing social record.

A photograph caption from March 1982 places Warhol in Berlin with Rauschenberg and Joseph Beuys. The caption supplies a concrete point of shared travel, extending their association beyond New York openings and dinners. It offers no account of what they did together there, but confirms Rauschenberg’s place in Warhol’s international artistic company.

Art, Money, and Reputation

The diaries show Rauschenberg’s work circulating not only in exhibitions but also through gifts and sales. In 1985, David White asked Warhol whether he minded if Rauschenberg sold a Popeye painting Warhol had given him in 1962 for one million dollars. Warhol agreed, without knowing the buyer, and expected to hear the buyer’s identity after the deal was completed. His response turns an old gift into a present-day transaction, linking their history to the practical business of selling art.

That history reaches further back in Warhol’s recollections of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. While sorting through a drawer, he found photographs of the couple that he had taken in the sixties or early seventies. He recalled a period when he, Lennon, and Ono considered buying three Greene Street buildings, each priced at $200,000; the intended purchases fell through after Ono wanted all three. Warhol remembered that he had been pushed out of the picture and reflected that the properties would be worth millions by the time he wrote about them. The entry does not place Rauschenberg in that property episode, but its wider recollection of downtown artistic and social connections accompanies the later account of the Popeye painting and makes the passage of time, ownership, and value especially visible.

Recurring Presence in Warhol’s Social World

Rauschenberg’s appearances are dispersed across years and settings rather than organized around a single dramatic storyline. In 1977, Warhol encountered him indirectly through a story about his arrest in Texas after he urinated beside a bus when a gas-station restroom was locked. Warhol seized on the anecdote to worry about what could happen to anyone in a similar predicament in New York. The episode is reported as something David Whitney told him, not as an event Warhol witnessed, but it made Rauschenberg the occasion for a broader anxiety about public rules and ordinary bodily necessity.

Other entries put Rauschenberg in the room: at a political dinner where Bill Bradley mentioned owning his work; at gallery events with younger and older generations of artists; at dinner in 1983, where he was drinking Jack Daniel’s and Warhol thought he might be working on costumes for Laurie Anderson; and at the Whitney exhibition where Warhol judged his work to feel newly alive. None of these snapshots offers a complete account of their friendship. Their cumulative effect is instead to establish a durable familiarity that crosses museum settings, social gatherings, travel, and the art market. Rauschenberg emerges as both a personal acquaintance and a continuing measure of artistic achievement, while Warhol’s diary preserves the friction between affection, amusement, aesthetic judgment, and money.