‘Taking Venice’ Documentary Revisits Scandal at 1964 Venice Biennale

Photo Ugo Mulas/©Ugo Mulas Heirs, All Rights Reserved

Every generation seems to get the scandalous, headline-grabbing art exhibition it deserves. The most recent one is Documenta 15 in 2022, which was so controversial that there may never be a future edition of the show in Kassel, Germany. There is also, of course, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which introduced so-called identity politics into the mainstream discourse of art. Going back even further, there was the 1913 Armory Show in New York, the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, and the 1865 Paris Salon, where Manet’s Olympia created a stir.

In all of these cases, it was the art on view that generated uproar, not the forces behind the exhibitions themselves. A different situation unfolded at the 1964 Venice Biennale. The show is remembered, not always fondly, for Robert Rauschenberg having taken home the exhibition’s Grand Prize for Painting (the precursor to today’s Golden Lions)—a choice that some said smacked of corruption among the jury and other insiders who meddled with it. 

Taking Venice, a new documentary out next month in limited release, wants viewers to revisit this history, forgotten in many ways because of the outsize role that Rauschenberg and his cohort have since assumed in the canon of art history.

The documentary points out that because the United States has never had a Ministry of Culture, as many European countries do, the country’s pavilion in Venice is an anomaly. It was built not by the US government but by philanthropist Walter Leighton Clark and his artist co-op Grand Central Art Galleries before ownership was later transferred to various museums over the years. The 1964 Pavilion, however, was the first to be organized by a government entity, the fine arts division of the United States Information Agency (USIA). It was the height of the Cold War after all, and the US was in it to win it, aiming to ensure the triumph of liberal democracy over Communism. Culture then would be an extension of that, soft power avant la lettre.

Enter the commissioner, the insider, the dealer, and the artist. Those are the codenames that art critic Amei Wallach, the film’s director, gives to Alan Solomon, the groundbreaking curator who at that moment was heralded for transforming the Jewish Museum into supporting the avant-garde; curator Alice Denney, a friend of the Kennedys and the wife of a State Department intelligence researcher; New York gallerist Leo Castelli; and Rauschenberg, respectively. Taking cues from the spy genre, Wallach connects them in a web.

The intention of that group (minus Rauschenberg) was to ensure an American would win the Grand Prize, as none before had. “One of the intriguing subplots of the Biennale all through the decades, more than a century, has been how art and politics overlap. And it peaks—there’s a kind of high-altitude moment—with the American presence in 1964. It reverberates through history,” says Philip Rylands, a former director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (who appears on screen with a tag reading “he was there”) puts it more succinctly, “It was the crown American politics was missing.”

Denney dismisses those allegations, telling Wallach simply, “We didn’t cheat. We wanted to win the prize and show that we had some great art. And we thought with Rauschenberg we had a very good chance.”

Over the next 90 minutes, Wallach lays out the story of what happened, though for a documentary aiming to tell a clear history, the non-linear construction of the film is more than a bit befuddling, especially to viewers who haven’t been primed with a background on postwar art history.

To put it a bit more coherently, by 1964, Rauschenberg was on the cusp of wider acclaim, having already had his artistic breakthrough a decade earlier with his “Combines,” works that broke down the barriers between painting and sculpture. But his reception in New York wasn’t exactly welcomed. New Yorker staff writer Calvin Tomkins, who was also there, calls him the “bête noire of the American art establishment.” Rauschenberg, in an archival interview, himself admits that he was considered a “clown” and a “novelty.”

Even still, Solomon, whose debut exhibition at the Jewish Museum had been a mid-career retrospective for Rauschenberg, believed in this artist and planned to show him in Venice alongside a group of boundary-pushing creators: Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, and Jim Dine, plus two Abstract Expressionists, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

Rauschenberg’s art was stocked with references to Americana, from JFK to the Space Race to the Statue of Liberty to Coca-Cola, all of which appear in the screenprints he would show in Venice. (This long-winded film features stock footage of all of these references, as if its makers were trying to merely fill up time.) In a rare moment of clarity, the film points out that Rauschenberg’s use of these weren’t merely celebratory but “commenting on what it takes to maintain a superpower,” according to art historian Hiroko Ikegami, who has written on Rauschenberg’s rise.

But Solomon found the American Pavilion too small for his ambitions and sought a second location. (Wallach implies that Solomon is responsible for the rise of the off-site collateral event, now ubiquitous at the modern-day Biennales.) He found the recently closed-down US consulate in Venice suitable. Noland and Louis were placed in the Pavilion, and everything else went to the consulate, with the assurance (verbal, not written) that Rauschenberg would still be eligible for the Grand Prize. Despite JFK’s assassination just over six months before the exhibition was to open, the show went on, with full support of the US government.

Sam Hunter, an American with a bona fide international art CV, was added to the seven-person jury who would decide the Grand Prize winner. This has raised not a few eyebrows, as has the fact that the works were shipped from the US via an army plane, loaned by the Department of Defense. Denney, who helped secure the plane through her government connections, says they just didn’t have any money to ship them any other way. (Their military-escorted arrival, however, immediately set off rumors at the Biennale that the US government had already rigged the Grand Prize competition, per Wallach’s retelling.)

A range of quotes has been marshaled in an attempt to prove malfeasance. Solomon later wrote that he and the others had “engineered” Rauschenberg’s victory. Lois Bingham, the former director of USIA’s fine arts division, said years later that the artists showing had to effectively be cleared by the House Un-American Activities Committee. That latter point may be the most damning one, though it isn’t exactly revelatory, given the anti-Communist fervor and US foreign policy at the time.

But the key part of the story, the one that perhaps might establish what happened definitively, is mostly just hinted at, implying that Castelli and his ex-wife Ileana Sonnabend, who had a Paris gallery at this point, had behind-the-scenes involvement. It’s worth noting that Wallach incorrectly implies that Castelli helped established the market for contemporary art when the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought Jackson Pollock’s 1950 Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) for $30,000 in 1957; it was sold by Sidney Janis, not Castelli. The only nefarious thing Sonnabend officially does, at least in the purview of this film, is promote Rauschenberg’s showing in Venice via mailers. Putting aside cynicism for a second, that isn’t quite the unethical action Wallach implies. Maybe Sonnabend was just ahead of her time in her support for her artists.

The jury, however, wasn’t initially unanimous in wanting to give the prize to Rauschenberg, especially since most of his paintings were on view at the US consulate building, not the American Pavilion in the Giardini. So, at the last minute, the organizers moved several canvases, via speedboat, to the Pavilion, hanging them on walls that were, well, jury-rigged, in that they were constructed just outside the Pavilion. (A last-minute performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, with Rauschenberg-designed costumes, at the Teatro La Fenice also helped tipped the scales.) Despite the odds, Rauschenberg won, and was paraded on the shoulders of Italian artists in the Piazza San Marco.

Overall, the film has more of the tone of an elder statesperson of the art world, recounting, with a bit of lurid gossip and a convincing detail or two, the biggest scandal they ever saw play out. It lacks the full substantiation that a good documentary needs: the hard, cold facts.

That isn’t to say it isn’t probable, or even likely, that there were unsavory maneuverings on the part of Castelli and USIA to secure the win for Rauschenberg. But Wallach doesn’t give much evidence to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the sort of thing you need now to prevent conspiracy theories from flying across the internet. Sure, it’s a nice story, but there’s not enough confirmation here.

Perhaps the film’s most salient point is that, despite an American winning the Grand Prize in 1964, the US government has still failed to meaningfully invest in arts and culture. The following year, USIA shut down its fine arts division. The Pavilion today is signed off by the State Department but gets minimal government funding, just $375,000 this year. Whether or not the competition was stolen for Rauschenberg, what the 1964 Biennale did do was publicly declare that the center of the postwar art world was New York, not Paris, as Solomon wrote in a statement on his exhibition. A whole country exists beyond that city, but still today, the artists who represent the US tend to be based there. In 2024, perhaps the most pressing question is, when will New York resign its position?