Spiritually overqualified: Robert Rauschenberg and ‘The Happy Apocalypse’ commission
by Leah Modigliani • June 2025 • Journal article
Abstract
For a few days in June 2023 the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York, was illuminated by an uncanny amber glow. Outside, an orange sky hung heavy with particulate matter and the atmosphere was hazy with smoke. The polluted air was pushed into the northeast United States by storm winds in Nova Scotia after unprecedented wildfires in Quebec. Eerie images of a dystopian New York FIG. 1 populated news and social media, as if a portent of an apocalyptic end. Those working inside the Foundation could gaze out of the windows from a place of relative safety, as it had recently embarked upon an extensive post-COVID-19 HEPA filter system retrofit. But nothing really prepares one for the unsettling psychological response of seeing the skies darken and turn orange. There was no business as usual. Instead, staff and researchers talked openly about their unease, and some left early.
Orange skies result from an optical phenomenon. Sunlight, which appears white to the human eye, contains all the colours of the spectrum. As sunlight travels through the atmosphere, it functions as an electromagnetic wave that causes the charged electrons and protons inside air molecules to move up and down. This movement creates an effect called ‘scattering’, in which air molecules redirect the sunlight outwards in many different directions.1 Shorter wavelengths, such as blue and violet, scatter more readily than longer wavelengths, which is why the sky usually appears blue: gases such as nitrogen and oxygen are especially effective at scattering this part of the spectrum. Smoke particles, on the other hand, are larger than gas molecules and are better at scattering the longer wavelengths of red, yellow and orange, which then dominate our perception, resulting in fiery-looking skies.
This is one way to explain what happens when smoke or pollution blankets a city. The resulting psychological response, however, feels almost primal. Today the word ‘apocalypse’ elicits images of spectacular destruction that signify the end of the world, as often visualised in blockbuster films. The first known appearance of the term comes from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, which introduces itself as the ‘apokalypsis of Jesus Christ’.2 In Greek, however, apokalypsis means uncovering, which is a form of revelation and does not itself signify the vast growth of eschatological religious literature describing or prophesising the cataclysmic end of time. Furthermore, in ancient texts that predate the Book of Revelation, ‘apocalypse’ was more widely associated with the fate of the human soul after death, the heavenly temple, astrological phenomena and secrets of nature.3 Although Revelations is the central text for Western religious doomsday scenarios, the foretelling of the end of time is also present in Eastern religions and philosophies of Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Taoism.4
This article explores how the concept of cataclysmic events has not always entailed a divine, binary judgment of the righteous and the damned. Instead, it considers a broader – even secular – interpretation of apocalypse that recognises the destabilising transition from an anthropocentric extractive worldview to an ecocentric, more-than-human one. The present author is concerned with modern works of art that prefigure the social change now upon us – one that is felt at its best, by the privileged, as a deep unease, and at worst, by the global poor, as cataclysmic death and ruin. One such example is the unrealised commission The Happy Apocalypse (1999) by Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), which integrates Christian theological content with secular artistic practice and personal experience.
In the summer of 1996, at the start of what would become a long friendship, Rauschenberg wrote a letter introducing himself to the well-known architect Renzo Piano (b.1937). The curator Mario Codognato, whose parents were collectors of Rauschenberg’s work, had met the artist in Venice the previous spring. It was Codognato who invited Rauschenberg to consider a major commission for the new Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church in San Giovanni Rotondo, which was then being designed by Piano in honour of the life of S. Pio da Pietrelcina. In his letter, Rauschenberg recounted an interaction with a Franciscan friar he had met through the project:
One of the monks, who was at the vernissage the day before said, ‘It is none of my business, and I should not ask it, and it does not matter, but are you Catholic?’ I said ‘no’. He then repeated the first part of the previous preface and added, ‘What are you?’ I answered ‘An artist’. Later at the close of the interview, after politely declining lunch, we were leaving the holy compound and the same monk held my arm and said, ‘Before you finish this project, I bet you will be a Catholic’. I replied, ‘Or you will be an artist’.5
While displaying Rauschenberg’s characteristic wit, this exchange is also a clear demonstration of what Kristine Stiles has described as Rauschenberg’s lifelong dedication to working in the ‘gap’ between art and life: ‘Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two)’.6 As Stiles compellingly argues, this gap was fundamentally shaped by Rauschenberg’s belief in art’s capacity to affect its viewers. He understood art as an activator of phenomenological engagement with the present in order to live more fully. For Rauschenberg, conscious and focused involvement with materials was both a by-product and a conduit for such a life. Once completed, the work of art carries this material engagement forwards, later drawing other people into its orbit.
This concept was especially present in the artist’s early work. For example, although an art-historical discourse evolved later to position his White Paintings (1951) as either existential evocations of Neo-Dada or as proto-Greenbergian modernist works, Stiles reminds us that at the time the artist himself described the work as a ‘natural response to the current pressures of the faithless and a promoter of intuitional optimism’.7 He also wrote that ‘they are large white (1 white as 1 God) canvases organised and selected with the experience of time and presented with the innocence of a virgin’.8 White as pure light and painted on large stretched canvases, the works in this series capture the movement of the world: human and non-human shadows and reflections animate the paintings as long as the world exists to activate them. In keeping with Rauschenberg’s collaborative work in dance and theatre, the paintings were created to be forever participatory.
Significantly, this spiritual attitude was not aligned with the more pervasive avant-garde strategies of the 1950s and 1960s, which were determined to collapse art and life. As Stiles discusses, this may even account for the distance that Rauschenberg’s friend and collaborator John Cage (1912–92) created between them in the late 1960s. For Cage, erasing the gap between art and life was paramount; to maintain a space between would be too ‘Roman Catholic’ for his liking and would make ‘a mystery out of being an artist’.9 The gap, as articulated by Rauschenberg and often experientially activated, challenged ‘the idea of either the unity or the dualism of art and life, fundamentally exposing the claim for unity as utopian, and for dualism as falsely oppositional and potentially hierarchal’.10
Rauschenberg did not shy away from taking on a variety of assignments throughout his life, and he readily engaged with the Padre Pio commission. After being approached by Codognato, he began a correspondence with Piano, who in September 1996 described the project as a ‘very important job’ with ‘financial resources [that] will not be a problem at the right moment’.11 Rauschenberg was originally invited to create work for different interior locations, but two months later Piano wrote again to offer the artist an even larger commission in a more visible part of the church. He was now tasked with designing images to be printed on large curtains that would rise and fall on a glass-walled façade, clearly visible to the 20,000 pilgrims expected to gather outside the church in the parvis. The sanctuary was built to replace a much smaller brick pilgrimage church dedicated to the Capuchin friar and celebrated mystic Padre Pio, who died in 1968 and was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 2002. The saint became widely known in 1918, after his followers witnessed him bleeding from his side, hands and feet: like Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century, he received stigmata, the wounds of Christ. After Padre Pio’s death, the number of pilgrims travelling to the site of his tomb and monastery numbered six to seven million a year, necessitating a large new sanctuary and modern church.
The theme of the commission was the Apocalypse, and Rauschenberg was asked to create an original design that could be reproduced if the original curtains faded from exposure to sunlight.12 In the beginning, Rauschenberg responded to the theme with his usual enthusiasm: ‘I could not be more enlightened with the selection of points, religiously, to be incorporated into the artwork. I find them inspiring and filled with beauty’.13 Despite this early optimism and his desire to make a positive statement with his work, he nonetheless worried that depicting a joyous apocalypse would not be appropriate, since many people making the pilgrimage to San Giovanni Rotondo would be in physical pain.14
In January 1998 Rauschenberg reached out to contacts he had met on earlier projects about lightweight strong fabrics used by NASA. By June 1998 he had narrowed down his material choice and was working on a design informed by a meeting with Piano, the Vatican representative and ‘artistic coordinator’ Crispino Valenziano and the Capuchin monks from San Giovanni Rotondo. In early 1998 he was asked to provide a plan of the work to Piano and Valenziano with the goal of delivering the final work in time for the church’s unveiling in late 1999. In March 1998 Valenziano clarified the specific themes of the Apocalypse to be depicted in a document sent to the artist: the ‘Seven Churches’, the ‘Multitudes of the Elected’ and the ‘Celestial Jerusalem’15 – or, as Rauschenberg later summarised, a ‘joyful apocalypse’.16 The correspondence also included photocopies of the text from the Book of Revelation with some passages underlined. By the time he completed the design he thought he had done the impossible and ‘transform[ed] the Judgement Day into something to celebrate, something that would heal you through faith’.17 This design, which he presented to Piano in April 1999, was to be printed on five sections of fabric, measuring in total roughly 14 by 43.5 metres when fully extended, which would be hung from the ceiling across the entrance façade.
The final commission was never realised, but one can get a sense of Rauschenberg’s vision from the large maquette he made FIG. 2. Comprising a semi-circle, the work features a collage of photograph-based images arranged according to the method Rauschenberg used throughout his life. The composition is dominated by a central image that is significantly larger than all the others: a satellite dish FIG. 3, comparable to the C-Band dishes available to homeowners for watching cable television in the 1980s and 1990s.18 It has been coloured gold; sandwiched between its inside surface and antenna are two ovals, each containing one-half of a flattened image of Earth. The left one shows the Americas and the right one shows Europe, Africa, Russia, the South Pacific and Australia; they are connected at the centre. The ovals, filled mostly with the blue of the globe’s expansive oceans, suggest the breathing lungs of the satellite dish. This central image appears to unite the material structure of Earth with the human development of technology, which reaches out into space.
The left side of the composition FIG. 4 is filled with smaller images of weather events interspersed with human monuments of the built environment: Tower Bridge, London, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the Great Sphinx of Giza, Istanbul’s Süleymaniye Mosque, the Statue of Liberty in New York, the leaning tower of Pisa and the Parthenon in Athens are surrounded by aerial pictures of swirling hurricanes, red skies and fires.19 Some are photographs taken by Rauschenberg while travelling, whereas others are stock images.20 The hard edges of each photographic fragment jut into each other, creating a large, faceted field occasionally softened by the amorphous spread of watered-down acrylic paint applied after the collage was constructed. The colour palette of the left side consists of patches of complementary hues of blue and orange, which seem to pulse with movement. Immediately above and below the satellite dish, in two roughly vertical strips, are several images of the natural world: a rooster head, sheep in a grassy field, swans swimming in water, two waterfalls (one above, one below), a snow-capped mountain, a rushing ocean and river currents.
On the right side are several fractal-like structures FIG. 5. These were created by projecting photographs onto a screen or wall in a darkened room in Rauschenberg’s studio and then re-photographing the projections through a kaleidoscope.21 The resulting images, of a multiplied Gothic church spire or a silhouette of a man walking, were then arranged on colour fields of pastel blue, yellow and pink. These crystalline clusters are positioned next to images of sea anemones, flowers and a dandelion puffball. As the viewer’s eyes move to the right-hand side of the work, the visibility of these images decreases until the background dominates.
Rauschenberg sent a letter to Codognato in August 1999 describing the three zones of his work: ‘the left edge begins with storms, fragments + memories of man-made monuments in destructive transformation’, while the ‘radar with earth is the tool or symbolism of spiritual wisdom “know all, see all”’ and these are ‘surrounded by a quieter pastoral energy phasing into crystalline of spiritual energy’, and ‘souls [as] unworldly radiances moving into holy infinity’.22 Twenty-five years later, this movement is easy to see. Rauschenberg, who was raised by a devout Protestant mother and whose family belonged to the Church of Christ, spent childhood Sundays in church and summers in bible study class, so choosing secular images that represented Christian themes – and would resonate with Padre Pio’s Catholic pilgrims – was not difficult. The flood story told in Genesis, the sheep as a symbol of God’s people, the solo tree as a symbol of communion with God, and the fires of Judgment Day are all evident in Rauschenberg’s images.
There is no doubt that the artist was revisiting themes present in his earliest works. In her essay on one of Rauschenberg’s earliest paintings, Mother of God FIG. 6, Susan Davidson discussed the dichotomies that exist in his overt Christian references, such as his work titles, which he paired with representational imagery of the natural and urban world.23 Mother of God is a medium-sized Masonite panel, partially covered with pieces of North American city maps cut out from Rand McNally & Company road atlases, which occasionally overlap. Rauschenberg left empty a circular void in the centre, which he then painted white. This round white form takes up about two-thirds of the entire surface; a horizontal strip at the bottom of the panel, which resembles a predella, was also left empty and painted white. The map fragments are laid down in different orientations – not the standard North American city grid. On the bottom right there is a newspaper clipping that reads ‘“An invaluable spiritual road map . . . As simple and fundamental as life itself.”—Catholic Review’ FIG. 7. As Davidson asserts, the work ‘embraces more broadly the notion of a spiritual journey’, and also that the round form may allude to cycles of birth and rebirth (Rauschenberg and Susan Weil’s son was born the same year) or perhaps planets, the sun or the moon against the city grid.24
The circle was a recurring motif in Rauschenberg’s work and, like the spiritual road map evident in Mother of God, it became a central component of The Happy Apocalypse nearly fifty years later. Like the earlier work, the man-made built environment is considered in relation to the natural world’s life cycles. Whereas the satellite dish at the centre represents technology, the white void in Mother of God is now pictured as a ground of light pastel hues dissolving the crystal structures that move towards it. As noted earlier, and according to Rauschenberg, these are human souls transitioning from ‘a quieter pastoral energy [. . .] into crystalline of spiritual reality’.22 If, as Rauschenberg’s partner Darryl Pottorf (b.1952) stated about The Happy Apocalypse, the central image ‘looks like a big penis’ (an antenna reaching up out of globular testicles), then the seeding of a new world is here not limited to the feminine imaginary.26
Beyond any biological references to human procreation, the satellite dish with the Earth at its centre also roughly resembles the shape of a human eye. It is significant that in 1999 Rauschenberg created an image that anticipates twenty-first-century concerns over privacy and surveillance necessitated by global networks and social media. Given his commitment to the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange (ROCI), it is likely that he was attracted to the potentially positive consequences of intercultural understanding and exchange through developing digital communications, which were then only starting to be available to ordinary citizens.27 From this perspective, the eye as the so-called ‘window to the soul’ functions as a symbol of theological transformation as well as a gateway through which human intimacy may be cultivated across both small and vast distances. The opening and closing of this work, by the raising and lowering of curtains, at the entrance of Padre Pio might further exemplify these themes of openness and embrace.
Given Rauschenberg’s focus on technological communication at the centre of a commission about the Apocalypse, it is important to recognise the impact of concerns over the Y2K bug that were omnipresent in 1999. Since at least 1993, when the Canadian computer engineer Peter de Jager published an article in Computerworld titled ‘Doomsday 2000’ FIG. 8, fears had escalated that a coding problem with computer software and hardware – the inability to recognise the four-digit date of 2000 – would create cascading infrastructure failures, such as banking errors, disruptions to power and water utilities, stalled food distribution and accidental nuclear launches. In June 1999 the 106th Congress of the United States introduced the Y2K Act (H.R. 775), which was signed into law on 20th July by President Bill Clinton. The report identified numerous potential problems and a plan for addressing the crisis before 1st January 2000. Since then, scholars have discussed the necessity of understanding the global media event of Y2K as an international discourse that worked to signify and engender the increasing value placed on communication technologies.28 It seems quite natural that networked information and communication technologies would be at the forefront of Rauschenberg’s thinking, especially given his regular involvement with international projects that also influenced his work. The topic was regularly discussed on television, and Rauschenberg always had the television on in his home and studio.29
Whereas the satellite dish is the omniscient technological force that may also spur on the Doomsday of the millennial apocalypse, the circular form at the centre of The Happy Apocalypse also clearly references the figure of Christ Pantocrator (Christ as ruler over all), which originated in the seventh-century Eastern Orthodox church, and the nimbus, or halo, that appears throughout Christian art. The term ‘nimbus’ derives from the Latin word for cloud and refers to a radiant light shown behind the heads of important spiritual figures depicted in illustrated manuscripts, mosaics and frescos. A golden nimbus is used to represent the holiest figures – unsurprisingly, the satellite dish that Rauschenberg’s assistants found in a Florida dump was painted silver then digitally coloured gold for use as the central image in The Happy Apocalypse.30 Furthermore, the satellite’s four-pronged support of the central antenna functions as the lines of a cruciform nimbus, reserved for images of God or Christ. By surrounding the Earth, this golden nimbus therefore signifies the planet’s holiness, a sly way of shifting the power of an all-knowing God to nature. Valenziano and the Capuchin monks would have been well versed in these ancient symbols and would have easily recognised Rauschenberg’s challenge to historic Christian narratives. Once the maquette had been delivered and reviewed, they responded by endorsing the design in general but respectfully asking that the artist replace the satellite with something else. As Piano explained in a letter on 30th September 1999, the ‘Vatican Committee and the President absolutely want your art for the façade of the Padre Pio Church’, but they considered it a ‘historical challenge for the Catholic church [because] the central image with the antenna is seen as incompatible with the commission and this is not for formal or representational reasons but for theological constraints’.31 In other words, the church rejected it.
In response, Rauschenberg instructed his assistant Bradley Jeffries to write a short letter to Piano, which stated that ‘it would be extremely difficult for me to cut out the central, spiritual orbit of the composition’.32 After three years of working with Rauschenberg, Piano carefully toed the line. He simultaneously entreated the artist to compromise and to meet the monks in person to discuss their concerns, while also stating unambiguously that the work was an essential and ‘magnificent piece of art in [his] architecture’ that he would not censor or ask Rauschenberg to modify.33 The artist declined to meet the theologians in person, and wrote a terse letter to Valenziano on 5th February 2000, asking him:
What were halos? Fashion or stylistic affectations of antiquities to celebrate the extravagance of the sponsor or the holiness of the biblical story? Contemporary symbolism has to follow and change with the recognizable experience. The antenna is communication and mystery of the miracle of the ‘all knowing’ with the majestic aura of the halo. It is boundless, encircling the world inspired by all space.34
During the early hours of 6th February 2000 Rauschenberg had an epiphany about the project and notified Valenziano that he was withdrawing his work from consideration and abandoning the commission. He told Valenziano that he had concluded he was ‘either spiritually under or overqualified’ for the work, which he felt had been morally compromised. His God, he explained, ‘does not use wrath, threats, revenge or heavenly bribes to control or teach justice, compassion or goodness’.35
Eight months later Piano was still trying to convince Rauschenberg to reconsider and be open to discussing the future of The Happy Apocalypse with the church officials.36 While there is no longer any written evidence of what Rauschenberg thought about this, he never completed the commission. Regardless, time was running out before the public opening of Padre Pio, so Piano and the monks pursued other options. They decided on a temporary solution that was meant as a placeholder until a new artist commission could be organised. Illustrations taken from parts of the Apocalypse Tapestry (1377–82; château d’Angers) were arranged as a large unified collage, printed on fabric and hung as curtains against the glass FIG. 9, with the plan that someday a new work would take their place.37 Verses from Revelations depicted in the tapestry, such as the celestial city of Jerusalem, the scroll and the lamb, the woman and the dragon and paradise restored, are all visible alongside the handwritten notes of Piano that were part of the provisional design sketch. Twenty years later, this temporary solution is still hanging.
Piano’s handwriting notwithstanding, the work on the façade of Padre Pio references medieval iconography that is recognisable in many historic churches. Familiar passages from Revelations are highlighted, and the pilgrims entering Padre Pio are not challenged to interpret contemporary images in the context of an ancient biblical text, as Rauschenberg’s work would have done. The choice is not surprising, but it is incongruous with Piano’s contemporary architecture, which itself is a formal and technical innovation of historic church designs. Consequently, it is not surprising that Piano came to appreciate Rauschenberg’s work and tried as best he could to include it, even as late as October 2000.
In hindsight, the prescience of Rauschenberg’s vision is impressive. His composition foreshadowed the complex integration of factors that have come to define life today: the breakdown of planetary ecosystems marked by heat waves, fires, floods and the consequent destruction of the human-built environment; the near-complete saturation of all social and political infrastructure with digital technologies; and the growing fear of an impending societal breakdown with unimaginable consequences. Yet despite these dystopic possibilities, the planet will survive and thrive – the cycles of birth and rebirth to which Rauschenberg returned again and again. It is a curious and interesting coincidence that The Happy Apocalypse, like the Y2K Doomsday bug, failed to materialise at the start of the new millennium. It suggests, perhaps, that narratives built around final endings are inadequate. Instead, apocalypses are continuous events, evolutions into ideally more improved states of being. In the future this period may be remembered as a difficult time necessary for engendering sustainable economic and technological social systems that respect and collaborate with the more-than-human ecosystem. In fact, the title The Happy Apocalypse only makes sense in this way: an apocalypse can only be joyful if it is imagined as a transition to something better. The demons and hellfire are already here even if all the world cannot see them yet.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York, and its staff for supporting my research with an Archives Research Residency in June 2023.
