In 1989, Robert Rauschenberg, a living legend of American art, brought his travelling solo exhibition, R.O.C.I., to Moscow. This sparked huge interest throughout the Soviet art world and a chance encounter with Aidan Salakhova and her friends, a coterie of young rebellious artists, eventually led to his participation in a Soviet pavilion at the Venice Biennale. However, more ambitious plans for ongoing collaboration remained unrealised.

This year the art world is celebrating the centenary of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) with a host of exhibitions worldwide. Ironically, the only permanent museum exhibition in Russia of his art – the Ludwig Museum collection at the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg – has been temporarily taken down to make way for a large exhibition about dogs in art. Nevertheless, the artist had a very special connection with the USSR and he travelled to the Soviet Union several times. Born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Texas, he later changed his name to Robert and gained recognition in 1960s New York for his paintings, collages, assemblages and performances.

While some critics counted him among the stars of the Pop Art movement, his art transcended the boundaries of styles and movements. Using collage and assemblage, he offered a critical commentary on today's consumer society, transforming discarded items found on New York streets into art. He took his cultural mission exceptionally seriously, desiring to bring his art to societies oppressed by authoritarian regimes and hoping this would have a liberating effect on the lives and minds of people living there. In 1984, he came up with the idea for R.O.C.I. (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange), a travelling solo exhibition of his art to which more works of art would be added in each country. The somewhat awkward acronym was derived from the name of his pet turtle, Rocky, who participated in one of his performances in 1965 and has lived in his studio ever since. “Art is educational, is in all languages at once, provocative and enlightening even when first not understood. This creative confusion stimulates curiousity and growth, leading to trust and tolerance,” he announced when presenting his project at the United Nations Headquarters.

Rauschenberg planned to take the show to some twenty-two countries. The exhibition began its tour in Mexico, then travelled to China, Tibet, Japan and Cuba. He later explained to German filmmaker Viola Stephan, who was making a documentary about him called ‘An American in Moscow’: “R.O.C.I. is motivated by going to sensitive areas, mostly socialist countries. Now they realise that they have to change and capitalist countries realise they need more response from socialist countries. And that’s how we really are creating a very successful monster.”

From the very beginning, the artist had dreamt of bringing his show to the USSR. Yet it took him and his team four years to make it happen. Correspondence that I found in the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation archive in New York sheds light on the process, with all its trials and tribulations. R.O.C.I. artistic director Don Saff tried to get in touch with the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. and other Soviet officials. The First Secretary of the USSR Union of Artists, the Azerbaijani artist Tair Salakhov (1928–2021), seemed interested in the project, but insisted on a reciprocal exhibition of Soviet artists in America. However, Rauschenberg and his staff could not promise this, as the R.O.C.I. project was not affiliated with any art institution or government agency.

Apart from limited support from collector Frederick Weisman at the outset, Rauschenberg funded the entire tour himself, selling his own artworks and those of other artists from his collection, as well as mortgaging his house and studio in Florida. “I’ve mortgaged my house. But I expect to keep on until I totally run out or until some co-sponsors come along. I was naïve. I thought collectors and corportaions would be rushing to support something concrete like R.O.C.I. which is dedicated to peace. I even made up a list of contributors I wouldn’t accept. But they haven’t been breaking the door down”, he confessed in an interview to ArtNews magazine.

The artist turned to Dr Armand Hammer for help. Hammer was an influential industrialist who had strong ties with Soviet leaders going back to the time of Vladimir Lenin. Hammer played a key role in selling deaccessioned art from Russian museums in the 1930s and was officially declared a "Friend of the Soviet Union" under Leonid Brezhnev. He also built the Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel and the World Trade Centre in Moscow. Rauschenberg ended his contract with his dealer, Leo Castelli, and signed a new one with Hammer's Knoedler & Co. gallery. Journalists later speculated that the reason behind this move was Hammer's promise to take Rauschenberg to Moscow. Hammer took Rauschenberg with him on a business trip to the USSR and introduced him to the Soviet Minister of Culture, Vassily Zakharov. An invitation from the Union of Artists followed. Hammer also suggested the newly built Central House of Artists as a venue for a future exhibition. However, he mistakenly referred to it as a new annex of the State Tretyakov Gallery. In fact, the gallery occupied only part of the building, while the rest was managed by the Union of Artists – a confusion that would bear fruit in the future.

Although Tair Salakhov still insisted on a reciprocal arrangement, he finally accepted a compromise in the form of an exchange agreement with South Florida University in Tampa, where Donald Saff was head of Graphicstudio, a renowned printing workshop that collaborated with many prominent American artists. The studio offered to send printing equipment and staff to Moscow to establish a permanent printing studio in the city. American printers would then teach Soviet artists new printing techniques there. Graphicstudio would also invite Soviet artists to Tampa to create editioned artwork and offered to assist with the sales of these works, sharing the profits with the artists. However, these projects were never realised.

The show was scheduled for 1989. According to the R.O.C.I. concept, each exhibition included works inspired by Rauschenberg’s impressions of the host country. Together with Saff, Rauschenberg undertook a research trip to the USSR, visiting Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Samarkand (now in Uzbekistan), Odessa (now in Ukraine) and Tbilisi (now in Georgia). Rauschenberg was interested in meeting 'unofficial' artists. In Leningrad, they spent time with the underground musician and artist Sergei Kuryokhin (1954–1996). In Tbilisi, they were entertained by the head of the Designers' Union of Georgia, the painter and sculptor Zurab Tsereteli (1934–2025). They agreed with the local Union of Artists to hold the R.O.C.I. exhibition in Tbilisi after Moscow, but this project was never realised. In Samarkand, the artist was fascinated by the 'psychedelic' colours of the fabrics at a silk factory. He decided to buy some silk to use in his collages. Rauschenberg took lots of photographs, and his assistant, Terry van Brunt, filmed everything that caught the artist's eye: architecture, street markets, weddings, and even stray dogs. During their visit to Odessa, Rauschenberg was invited to the studio of local artist Vadim Grinberg (1947–2017), who asked Rauschenberg to add a few brushstrokes to a portrait he was painting.

Preparing the exhibition was beset by all kinds of problems. The staff at the Union of Artists ignored Saff’s increasingly desperate telexes for weeks and replied a month and a half later that Salakhov was on holiday and no decision could be made in his absence. Transporting 600 metres of silk over the border proved challenging, as Soviet customs regarded it as a commercial purchase, subject to a high export tax. This issue was only resolved thanks to direct intervention from Hammer. The Union of Artists’ staff tried to back down on their promises to pay for a police escort for the trucks carrying the artwork or to provide painters and carpenters to install it for free. Having learned from his experience of the previous R.O.C.I. event in Cuba, Rauschenberg was aware of the scarcity of resources in socialist countries and shipped all the materials necessary for the installation, including wood and paints, along with the artwork. The remainder was donated to the Union of Artists in exchange for installation and exhibition staff, including painters, carpenters, and ‘grandmother observers’ in the halls. Poet Evgeny Yevtushenko, who had agreed to write an article for the catalogue, disappeared instead of submitting the text on time, but Rauschenberg's team finally tracked him down in Tel Aviv.

The exhibition finally opened on 2nd of February 1989. Rauschenberg personally wrote a message to be faxed to Fidel Castro inviting him to the opening – a considerable feat for the dyslexic artist – and he tried his best to invite Gorbachev, but neither the Cuban nor the Soviet leader attended the event. The show included over 200 artworks, including collages from the ‘Soviet-American Array’ series, in which photos taken in the USSR were overlaid with images of America, as well as ‘Samarkand Stitches’, large fabric works incorporating Uzbek silks. Yevtushenko delivered a passionate speech, stating that “the Iron Curtain has fallen”. Rauschenberg encouraged Soviet artists to discover what they had missed due to censorship and the country's isolation. “Now they've got to make twenty years of mistakes in five years. They've got to do the bad stuff now. That’s how an artist grows.” The show was attended by 145,000 visitors. Next door at the State Tretyakov Gallery, the first ever exhibition of works by Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) was running at the same time. Perestroika was in full swing. Yet Soviet bureaucracy had not lost its power. The exhibition in Tbilisi was effectively sabotaged by the Georgian authorities and never realised.

Instead, Rauschenberg took R.O.C.I. to Berlin, where it was exhibited simultaneously in both the eastern and western parts of the city. Although the Tretyakov Gallery is a museum of national art that never shows international artists in its permanent exhibition, the artist donated thirteen works to it. He was apparently under the impression that the space in which his exhibition was held was part of the gallery, despite the fact that the Union of Artists and the Gallery were two different institutions.

The opening celebrations continued at Zurab Tsereteli’s Moscow studio. Salakhov and his 23-year-old daughter, artist Aidan Salakhova (b. 1964), were also present. At the time, she was about to open her own gallery with two other young artists: Evgeny Mitta (b. 1963) and Alexander Yakut (b. 1955). This was a new development: the constraints of the Communist regime were slowly being relaxed, and private initiatives had just started to appear in Moscow. She called it ‘The First Gallery’, a misnomer as it was actually the second independent art gallery in the city. During the party at Tsereteli’s studio, Aidan asked Rauschenberg to donate a piece of art to her gallery. Tsereteli put a clean canvas on an easel. Rauschenberg started to paint right away. According to photographs in the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s archive, Tsereteli joined him, and they began painting together. The subject of the painting, a female nude, was probably suggested by the Georgian artist, as it is not very typical of Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg later described this painting to his curator, Thomas Buehler, as a portrait of Aidan.

In May 1989, the painting became the centrepiece of the First Gallery show, ‘Rauschenberg to Us – We to Rauschenberg’. It featured works by Salakhova and Mitta, as well as pieces by other artists. ‘The commissioner of the Soviet Pavilion in Venice, Goryainov, came to the exhibition and really liked it,’ Mitta told me during our recent interview in Moscow. ‘He decided to bring it to Venice the following year.’ Aidan then telexed Rauschenberg to ask if he would like to take part in the Soviet Pavilion exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1990. The artist agreed enthusiastically, offering to create a new piece for the pavilion instead of the painting. It was a brass panel with an attached sousaphone from his ‘Borealis’ series. This was his second time participating in the Biennale, where he had previously won a Golden Lion for his exhibition in the USA pavilion in 1964. The Soviet pavilion received an honourable mention from the jury.

Rauschenberg arrived in Venice for the opening of the Biennale, accompanied by Salakhova and other Russian artists, most of whom had never met him before. “He kept telling us, ‘Keep close to me; this is your chance’,” Mitta recalls. According to Mitta, at the farewell dinner that the American artist hosted for them in a restaurant on the island of Torcello, he was almost in tears. “We had such a nice aftertaste of this trip. But I never met him again afterwards, however stupid that may sound”. The Soviet pavilion received an honourable mention from the jury. This came as such a surprise that the Soviet artists had left early, and it was Vladimir Goryainov, the pavilion’s commissioner, who received the prize at the ceremony. Inspired by the success of the R.O.C.I. exhibition, Salakhov agreed to bring the James Rosenquist (1933–2017) exhibition to the Central House of Artists. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The Iron Curtain was lifted, the ‘Evil Empire’ ceased to exist, and independent Russia became part of the global economic and cultural landscape. Or so it seemed at the time.

This article was made possible thanks to the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation's Archives Residency programme.