Green Shirt’s vibrance and massive scale give the impression of a cryptic neon billboard. At close proximity, it takes time for one’s eyes to adjust before forms emerge. Some seem random, including bees, cubes and the titular green shirt, while others Robert Rauschenberg drew from his earlier work, such as the mirror-gazing woman. The sketch-like quality of these unrelated images challenged neon’s typical commercial aesthetic and required skilled glass benders at the New York sign-making firm Artkraft Strauss to translate the artist’s gestural lines into glowing tubes. Green Shirt was an outlier for Rauschenberg in terms of both size and medium, and as a result it was not of interest to his usual collectors. After the artist donated it to the Pasadena Art Museum, now the Norton Simon Museum, members of the public criticized it as an eyesore when it was installed on the museum’s facade in 1970. Rauschenberg did not return to neon until the 1990s with his Bicycloids series, a sculptural concept he had first explored in this work.