Sometime in the early 1960s Christopher Rauschenberg — the son of the artist Robert — found some roller skates in his father’s huge Greenwich Village loft studio and taught himself to skate. As he did laps of the studio the young Christopher had to avoid his father’s pet kinkajou, an animal like a monkey that “was always biting everybody”. His father, who had left his mother for the painter Cy Twombly when Christopher was still a baby, sometimes talked to the boy and sometimes worked, while also “trying to listen to music by Stockhausen and then trying to understand it”, which he didn’t. As the first posthumous retrospective of Robert’s work opens at Tate Modern in December, the path he helped to clear, through ceaseless…

Source: The Times November 11, 2016 17:04 UTC