Brown. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

Avant-garde choreographer Trisha Brown has won the Foundation for Contemporary Art's inaugural Robert Rauschenberg Award, a $25,000 grant endowed by the artist's estate, Artforum reports. Though the new award is not reserved for Rauschenberg's collaborators, he designed sets and costumes for a number of Ms. Brown's performances starting in the late 1970s. For Glacial Decoy (1979), Rauschenberg projected black-and-white photographs of an orchid and a shattered windshield on screens surrounding the dancers, and for Astral Convertible (1989), he created jungle-gym structures and shimmering silver costumes.

Ms. Brown, who has staged gravity-defying performances on the rooftops of Soho and the walls of the Whitney Museum, is presenting a new piece titled I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours at the Brooklyn Academy of Music at the end of the month.

A painting from the series. (Courtesy Wikipaintings)

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens has just finalized plans to buy a Robert Rauschenberg Spread painting from 1979.

The institution purchased the work from Gagosian gallery. From the story:

Though not considered as important as his "Combine" assemblages from the 1950s and '60s, which radically introduced the detritus of everyday life into art, the later Spread series has some classic Rauschenberg touches: the incorporation of found objects (in this case, smashed glue brushes) along with painted surfaces (here, acrylic), the use of photo-transfer techniques, and the inclusion of newsprint to signal or simulate the texture of daily life.

More details here.

Robert Rauschenberg "Early Bloomer (Anagram (a Pun))" (1998). (Courtesy The Art Newspaper)

Robert Rauschenberg's Early Bloomer [Anagram (a Pun)] will be hanging over the fireplace in the White House dining room, where the president hosts formal dinners. It will replace an equestrian portrait, according to The Art Newspaper. This is only the fourth contemporary artwork in the White House collection. Raushenberg will join the ranks of Josef Albers (who has two works on the walls) and Georgia O'Keefe.

This news comes after the announcement that the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation will dramatically increase its operations over the course of 15 years to become "one of the largest grant-making bodies for the visual arts in the U.S."

A detail from The Big Hawthorn, 2008, by David Hockney. Photograph: Richard Schmidt

Ian Jack wonders if it is a problem that David Hockney's blossoms look like "evil yellow slugs." [Guardian UK]

Georgina Adam on the ongoing controversy involving a Rauschenberg, a stuffed eagle and the IRS. [Financial Times]

David Shrigley has a new billboard coming to the High Line, at 10th Avenue and 18th Street, April 5—his deadpan brand of twee existential insecurity writ large, super large. [Paper Magazine]

Sotheby's will sell Gunter Sachs's collection of art and design in London in May. Mr. Sachs was once married to Brigitte Bardot! [Bloomberg]

Riding with the rock: how transport of the Levitated Mass sculpture took over one journalist's life. [LA Times]

Matthew Yglesias has a good and humorous piece on Louis Vuitton's campaign against free speech. [Slate via Art Law Blog]

A different kind of 'ruin porn': photographers document two relics of the atomic age. [NYT]

The Wall Street Journal gets around to reviewing James Rosenquist's F-111 at MoMA. [WSJ]

Here's Peter Schjeldahl on the John Chamberlain exhibition. [The New Yorker]

In case you missed it this weekend: a brief history of Knoedler Gallery. [NYT]

The U.K. Observer scores a rare interview with the elusive Damien Hirst! [UK Observer]

Mr. Lerner told the magazine that the IRS informed him "a recluse billionaire in China might want to buy it and hide it. … It’s bizarre. It sounds like a James Bond movie.” The IRS has long argued that it can "tax stolen or illegal items in an estate based on 'illicit market' value," according to the magazine. (The IRS has declined to comment.) But, as Mr. Lerner pointed out, the estate is not preparing to break the law by selling the work. It is now on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Interestingly, possessing a stuffed bald eagle—even one attached to a celebrated painting—is illegal under current law, though Ms. Sonnabend obtained a special waiver in the 1980s to allow her to keep the work and loan it to museums.

The Sonnabend estate has already paid a sizable tax bill, Forbes notes, giving some $331 million to the U.S. and $140 million to New York state. To cut those checks, the heirs sold off a sizable chunk of that collection in a deal believed to be worth $600 million that involved Larry Gagosian and GPS Partners, the firm of Franck Giraud, Lionel Pissarro and Philippe Ségalot.