A band of sharp-witted American diplomats and art world players figured out how to manifest a win for Rauschenberg, whose work mixed collage, painting, and silkscreen and sometimes utilized ordinary household objects, curios, and junk. This was the Pop-Art era, in which many exhibits, particularly in the US, prompted visitors to ask, “Is this really art?” Rauschenberg was one of the exemplars of the movement, along with Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, and Andy Warhol. Prior to Venice, he had been criticized both at home and abroad as, in his own words, “a clown” or “a novelty.” But he was also becoming more popular and had begun to sell work for large sums of money, so it’s not as if he was Philip Glass still driving a taxi cab after “Einstein on the Beach” had premiered at the Metropolitan Opera. There’s a mysterious inevitability to the way that certain cultural figures keep rising throughout their careers, and Rauschenberg had that kind of aura. He seemed like somebody already headed for the summit of the mountain who just needed a push to get to the top.
This made him the perfect candidate for special attention from the American government at the Biennale. The US had become a superpower, and President John F. Kennedy (who was prominently featured in Rauschenberg’s work and would be assassinated six months before the Biennale) was the most enthusiastic supporter of the arts that the country had ever had in the White House. The State Department under Kennedy wanted to establish that America was making unique, adventurous fine art that was meaningful and beautiful, wasn’t just being dumped in overseas economies like blue jeans and Coca-Cola, and was proof of why people should be on Team America instead of Team Soviet Union.
As a journalist, Wallace got in under the wire, as it were, and interviewed major players in the 1964 Venice Biennale who were in their seventies and eighties and still lucid, along with witnesses. The biggest get is Alice Denney, the former vice-commissioner of the US pavilion and a key player in this art history sideshow. Denney’s husband was deputy director for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. She suggested a man named Alan R. Solomon to be the US Biennale commissioner along with her. Solomon was a smooth, smart man who, in the words of New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins, had “a fine hand in his aggression.”
