"One begins by breaking windows. Then one becomes a window oneself."
Heimito von Doderer

Robert Rauschenberg, "Monogram," 1955-59, image via modernamuseet.se/pics/

UPDATE: Unlike Michael Kimmelman, Christopher Knight did not leave out the salient fact that Robert Rauschenberg strugged with alcohol. Text amended.

Robert Rauschenberg died last night, announced today. Immediately the obits appeared, coast to coast and written in advance. To nobody's surprise, tops so far are Michael Kimmelman's in the NYT, here, and Christopher Knight's in the LA Times, here.

Both offer a solid sense of the man's contributions. Kimmelman is more eloquent and Knight more concrete. Why do NYT obits (except Roberta Smith's) seem like pillows cushioning the corpse?

Only Knight acknowledges that RR and Jasper Johns were "romantically linked." Neither mentions interest in astrology and Kimmelman leaves out his alcoholism, making his life sound easier than it must have been.

All along the way, there were good to great art critics out to get him. In the New Yorker (May 16, 1977), Harold Rosenberg tried to do for Rauschenberg what Peter Schjeldahl recently did for Richard Prince - be the nail that punctures the tire of critical hot air surrounding the work.

Rosenberg: "Dr. Joshua Taylor, director of the National Collection of Fine Arts, found that Rauschenberg had achieved a state of 'continuous freshness' by lifting himself above a consciousness of art history: 'His career has been characterized not by a set of styles but by a persistent creative exuberance that has the happy effect of belittling categories, invalidating definitions, and freeing the viewer to discover beauty and meaning where he might least expect it.' Joy and exuberance provide an alternative to ideas; in literary circles this set of values is known as anti-intellectualism. One is urged to believe that the art world has been overburdened with thought, and that Rauschenberg has come as an embodiment of inarticulate energy - a kind of Mynheer Peeperkorn or Harpo Marx - to liberate art and the art public from excessively precise thinking."

In the '80s, few thought Rauschenberg was blazing trails or even on track with the ones he blazed already.

Charles F. Stuckey, writing in Art in America, maintained that the artist's "1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece," billed as the world's biggest painting, epitomized "Rauschenberg's decline after the mid-1970s from gregarious avant-garde wizard to semi-isolated, softheaded art impresario."

Softheaded? Because his shimmering pools of polyglot imagery and text printed on fabric and paper from the late '70s onward seem tame next to the radical combines of earlier days, the artist was faulted. I too love early Rauschenberg. But must the raw be more esteemed than the cooked, the crude held higher than the delicate?

When the artist is RR, yes. Surely Stuckey overstated his case, but to borrow a phrase from Harold Bloom, RR's early work was inconceivably great. The later work, conceivably.

Others before him made much of trash, but he turned it to gold. In Robert Hughes' 1976 cover story on the artist for Time magazine, Hughes called New York City a ''great filthy gift" that worked to the artist's advantage. ''Manhattan throws away more manufactured goods in a week than 18th-century France produced in a year."

Rauschenberg gave New York trash and curio shop items a distinctly Pop art life, a brash joy and punning intelligence. Then he changed direction. Instead of leading a revolution, he went fishing in the quieter waters of the world's image stream. Lightly impressed on the skin of fabric or paper, his photographed imagery floats on colored air, plucked from the raw data of what is seen, glanced at and ignored: all the visual sensations vying for attention in his media-soaked century.

This just in: Rachel Campbell Johnson's admirable RR obit, here, posted by Tyler Green, who's keeping track.