Rauschenberg's Inferno drawings

I had been meaning to see the Rauschenberg exhibition at Tate Modern for many weeks and always put it off, then, finally, yesterday afternoon I decided to go. I have to be in a particular mood to go to an exhibition because I dislike crowds but these days it's hardly possible to go to a major gallery such as the Tate and not find other people there, at all hours. I also have to be on my own, if I go with a friend I just don't enjoy it  because we chat and I cannot talk and take in art works at the same time (I usually have to go back).
I was familiar with Rauschenberg's collaboration with Merce Cunningham, the great master of modern/contemporary dance and with dancer/choreographer Trisha Brown. But I did not know Rauschenberg's work too well and had never seen the drawings inspired by Dante's Inferno.  They were a true revelation to me.
I should say, at the outset,  that I have a love/hate relationship with Dante. As a schoolgirl in Italy I positively detested him, his Divina Commedia was constantly being shoved down my throat, 'the greatest work of Italian literature' and so on and so forth. Then with his constant declaring that he was an immortal genius he seemed a little pompous (however, he was right on that one, he definitely had foresight and knew his worth). But the Inferno, in truth, always made me giggle, as Dante's was an extraordinary vision of hell, in which he put all his enemies and dreamt up unbelievable punishments for their sins. I later learnt to admire the Inferno for its undeniable poetry, its moments of  lyricism,  its display of encyclopaedic knowledge, its humour. That Dante's imagination was boundless is a gross understatement.

Botticelli's Divina Commedia drawings, Map of Hell, Google Images

His influence throughout the centuries never  diminished. He was a source of inspiration for many artists,  including Alessandro Botticelli, who drew, between 1485 and 1495,  ninety-two illustrations for each canto of the Commedia, with a strict eye on the topography of hell.  The Commedia manuscript with Botticelli's drawings was discovered only in the 19th century and justly praised as an outstanding work of art.  I count myself lucky to have seen  those beautiful drawings at an exhibition held at the Royal Academy in 2001 (I know, time flies!).
Rauschenberg's drawings illustrate thirty-four cantos of the Inferno, using his own special  transfer technique and populating them with contemporary figures, such as JF Kennedy.  Many an article has been written on why he turned to Dante for inspiration. For Charles Derwent, writing for the Independent newspaper,   Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso parallel  the Freudian id, ego and superego, thus the drawings would bear a link to Rauschenberg's closeted (in the 1950s)  homosexuality. Derwent says, poignantly, that "what marks the "Inferno" drawings as great is not their humour or even their place in art history, but their empathy with pain and instinctive feel for obscurity. They are veiled, encoded calls to redeem the time – to turn mass-produced images into hand-drawn artworks, to de-trash trash, to de-demonise human sexuality."

Poster of Rauschenberg's Exhibition at Tate

Others, such as Leo Steinberg, see them differently. He claims that the drawings were born out of Rauschenberg's relationship with television and its serialization, rather than an interest in poetry per se, and Steinberg points out that references to Old Masters were already present, for example, in the Combines. I do not find this entirely convincing. Maybe Rauschenberg, as Warhol also did, was in the habit of trivialising his artistic choices when asked about them in interviews, in other words, he adopted a dismissive stance.
Karl Fugelso in his 2003 essay on the drawings sees in Rauschenberg's take on Dante a condemnation of commercialism and of advocates of conservatism, which would fit in well with the socio-cultural context of the early 1960s, soon to be challenged by a Pop art in the making.

Rauschenberg, Inferno,  circle 8 The Falsifiers, detail. Own photo 

I just think that Rauschenberg's Inferno drawings are stunning, whatever their motivation and whatever the artist's intent. The exhibition is worth visiting just to see them, even though there is a lot more on display, this being a retrospective of one of the most intense and prolific artists of the 20th century.
So hurry, if you have not seen it, it will end on 2nd April.