Robert Rauschenberg, "Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp)" - 1960.
From 1959 to 1962, Robert Rauschenberg created a series of "Trophies," highly personal combines dedicated to those artists who had most influenced him. In "Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp)," he repurposed a seven-panel white painting, inbuing it with vibrant color, aseemblage, and references to Duchamp and his wife, Teeny. The left-hand panel refers to Teeny with its inovcation of letters T and Y, while the right-hand panel is a stand-in for Duchamp and includes an aluminum sheet in an oblique reference to the reflective surface of The Large Glass.
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis owns this 1960 piece. I saw it at the Rauschenberg/Cage/Duchamp/Cunningham show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in late December 2012.
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
