Robert Rauschenberg's bald-eagle ruffles feathers with IRS
By of the Journal Sentinel
What happens when the carcass of a bald eagle, the national bird of the United States, gets pulled from a trash can and included in an artwork by one America's greatest artists? Ruffled feathers and disputed tax bills decades later, it would seem.
The artwork in question is "Canyon," one of Robert Rauschenberg's sculptural combines, which today belongs to the heirs of New York art dealer Ileana Sonnabend.
Because the bald eagle is under federal protection, dead or alive, it would be illegal for the heirs to sell the work, so their appraisers valued the work at zero. The IRS, meanwhile, with the help of art experts, appraised the work at $65 million and is demanding that the heirs pay $29.2 million in taxes.
The whole thing is being challenged in tax court. The New York Times has a story on the whole affair today, which was published in the print edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. To see an image of the artwork, go to the Art:21 video below, created as an elegy to Rauschenberg, who died in 2008. The artwork can be seen at 3 minutes and 49 seconds in.
After it was acquired by Ileana Sonnabend in1959, "Canyon" was initially exhibited internationally and often, including in the Venice Biennale of 1964, when Rauschenberg won he grand prize for a foreign artist. It wasn't until 1981 that Fish and Wildlife agents took note of the case, according to a report on the case in ARTnews in May.
After that, restrictions based on the bald-eagle and migratory-bird acts were implemented. The artwork's whereabouts had to be on the record and special permits were needed to send it to other countries.
Defending Ileana Sonnabend's right to keep the work years ago, Rauschenberg made a notarized statement that he got the carcass from an artist who had pulled it from the trash at Carnegie Hall in 1959. The eagle had been thrown away after a Carnegie tenant, who had taxidermied the bird prior to 1940, died. The man had acquired the eagle in the wild before 1940, when the legal restrictions came into play, and was a member of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, the first. U.S. Volunteer Calvary, according to the ARTnews account.
After that, restrictions based on the bald-eagle and migratory-bird acts were implemented. The artwork's whereabouts had to be on the record and special permits were needed to send it to other countries.
Defending Ileana Sonnabend's right to keep the work years ago, Rauschenberg made a notarized statement that he got the carcass from an artist who had pulled it from the trash at Carnegie Hall in 1959. The eagle had been thrown away after a Carnegie tenant, who had taxidermied the bird prior to 1940, died. The man had acquired the eagle in the wild before 1940, when the legal restrictions came into play, and was a member of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, the first. U.S. Volunteer Calvary, according to the ARTnews account.
"Canyon" is one of Rauschenberg's iconic combines, which included layers of complex information and materials. Birds were not an uncommon conceit. This particular work explored the themes from Rembrandt's "The Rape of Ganymede," from 1635, the story of Zeus taking the form of an eagle to abduct a boy. Some say the work was an autobiographical exploration of the gay experience in the late 1950s.
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