CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/26/2017

MoMA's remarkable facsimile edition of Robert Rauschenberg's 'Thirty-Four Drawings for Dante’s Inferno'

If, like many New Yorkers, you’ve got Robert Rauschenberg on the brain, you'll want to know about this limited facsimile edition of the artist's drawings series after Dante’s Inferno. Packaged in a beautiful clothbound clamshell box, this volume includes a copy of the trade edition, plus a complete facsimile of the artist’s 1958-60 series. Rauschenberg produced one drawing for each Canto of Dante's Inferno, and all 34 are reproduced here at true size. “The ghostly images aptly evoke the shades of Dante’s world, Glenn D. Lowry writes. “...It is perhaps the searching of an artist who, approaching the end of youth, is pushing himself to greater wisdom and comprehension of the world around him. And it is a poignant and haunting vision of hell, of souls condemned to eternal suffering by sins both great and small, of human imperfection and vulnerability.”