Rauschenberg created Untitled (Night Blooming), and the seven-panel White Painting, as well as the three-panel matte black painting, all in the same year, during one of the most important turning points in his development as an artist.

The earliest in this series of works are the Night Blooming paintings, which bear a reference to abstract expressionism in their loose brush strokes on a black ground. You can see a figurative reference to the night blooming cereus under a crescent moon.

This series was followed by his unprecedented multi-panelled series of White Paintings, which he painted in Benjamin Moore white applied with a roller. Among the works is this seven-panel monochrome (or single colored work).

Rauschenberg was extremely excited by this body of work, and wrote a very moving and poetic letter to the New York dealer Betty Parsons, urging her to show the works in the fall of 1951. 

But what I would like to emphasize here is that Rauschenberg – who had wanted to become a preacher – described them in his letter to Parsons as “large white (1 white as 1 GOD) canvases.” And he explained, “They are a natural response to the current pressures of the faithless and a promoter of intuitional optimism.” Rauschenberg’s letter also describes the White Paintings as “(therefore it is),” delivering a fait accompli that leaves viewers with no option but to accept them as they are.

Finally he explained that, “It is completely irrelevant that I am making them – Today is their creator.”

Rauschenberg was particularly interested in the pristine surface of both the white paintings and the black matte works for how they picked up the shadows of everything in the room. If you stand in front of  both his white and black monochromes, you will see this phenomenon.

His interest in his white monochromes primarily centered on the fact that they do contain imagery for how they record passing shadows. Rauschenberg’s emphasis on shadows and time in the White Paintings is part of the reason that he always insisted that they be clean, without dust, and with bright white paint.

His attention to a reflective surface that would record the events taking place in the room is also why Rauschenberg said that “today” is their maker. He granted permission to certain individuals to reproduce the works – and he, himself painted over most of them. He also had his studio assistant – Brice Marden – remake them because although he claimed original authorship, the pristine appearance of the White Paintings in the present is was what mattered most to him.

After making his series of White Paintings, Rauschenberg attempted to make monochrome drawings by erasing his own drawings. But he felt this process did not produce legitimate art, and so he asked Willem De Kooning, the abstract expressionist painter that Rauschenberg most admired, for a drawing to erase. De Kooning understood the concept and gave him a difficult work to erase. Rauschenberg called the result a “monochrome – no image,” meaning that there were shadows of images that remained (similar to the shadows captured by his monochromes) but there was no image.

I amplified Rauschenberg’s concept of  “monochrome no-image” in this first room of the exhibition by identifying “monochrome with-image” in such works as Ai Weiwei’s Marble Chair, with its marblized and multi-colored grain; Rauschenberg’s Untitled (Hoarfrost), with its transfer images, which cannot quite be seen; Paul Graham’s Man walking with blue bags, Augusta, with its vague imagery; and Yuri Albert’s Alphabet for the Blind, with its black braille, which reads “About Beauty.”

Such works – while inhabiting entirely different histories – share in common with Rauschenberg an interest in the monochrome with- or without-image, its aesthetics and its politics.