American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925 - 2008) (born Milton Ernst Rauschenberg), a microphone ... [+]
A new documentary, Taking Venice, explores the true story behind rumors that the 1964 Venice Biennale was rigged so artist Robert Rauschenberg could win the top prize. The national release of the film, directed by art critic and filmmaker Amei Wallach, begins today at the IFC Center in New York and on May 24 at Laemmle Theaters in Los Angeles.
According to the film’s publicists, “American Pop art was about to explode on the international scene with a dynamic exhibition that was bound to be questioned.”
They said art world insiders and dealer Leo Castelli “embarked on a daring plan to make Robert Rauschenberg the winner of the Grand Prize, then known as the International Prize for Painting. Although he had the potential to dazzle, Robert Rauschenberg was yet to be taken seriously by the art establishment in the early 1960s. His groundbreaking work known as ‘combines’ merged painting and sculpture with found objects and pop culture images in new ways that had not been seen before.”
Taking Venice, the publicists added, “explores the impact in Europe of a tumultuous cultural shift that fixed the art world’s gaze on contemporary American art with New York as its epicenter. On screen, The New Yorker writer and author Calvin Tomkins, who covered the 1964 Biennale, Alice Denney, who helped engineer the U.S. shenanigans, and the artist Christo recall the audacious events. (And artist Jasper Johns) recounts his relationship with Robert Rauschenberg in art and life.”
Wallach said, “There are moments in the film that sting with what we have lost and moments that encapsulate what we have gained. The stakes are even higher now than they were at the scandal-drenched Biennale, as artists everywhere try to create a way forward. My goal is to make films about art that leap out of the art world and into a reckoning with what’s relevant in our lives though the stories that they tell.”
According to the publicists, Taking Venice “illustrates how Rauschenberg’s seminal art developed, explores the art scene that produced it, chronicles its enduring influence on artists today, and looks at art by other legendary American artists who showed in Venice that year: among them James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and John Chamberlain.”
The film ends in 2022, when artist Simone Leigh, the first Black woman to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, transformed the American Pavilion to critical acclaim.
“The accusation that a new breed of American art dealers, Leo Castelli and his ex-wife, Ileana Sonnabend, was conspiring in New York and Paris to manipulate the art market further developed into a toxic anti-American expansionism brew in this tense moment at the height of the Cold War,” the publicists concluded.
