Milton Ernest "Robert" or "Bob" Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and multi-media artist, whose work has been associated with numerous mid-20th century art movements including the New York School, Conceptual Art, Pop art, and Neo-Dada. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines (1954–1964), a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was primarily a painter and a sculptor, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance.
Rauschenberg received numerous awards during his nearly 60-year artistic career. Among the most prominent were the International Grand Prize in Painting at the 32nd Venice Biennale in 1964 and the National Medal of Arts in 1993.Lifetime Honors – National Medal of Arts
Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida, until his death on May 12, 2008.
Early life and education Rauschenberg was born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, the son of Dora Carolina (née Matson) and Ernest R. Rauschenberg.Rauschenberg's Roots , Theind, 2005 His father was of German and his mother of Dutch descent. "Chronology: The chronology by Joan Young with Susan Davidson in Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997), updated by Davidson and Kara Vander Weg for Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2010), has been further revised for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation website by foundation staff with Amanda Sroka." Rauschenberg incorrectly claimed that his paternal grandmother Tina “Tiny” Jane Howard was Cherokee. His father worked for Gulf States Utilities, a light and power company. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians. He had a younger sister named Janet Begneaud.
At 18, Rauschenberg was admitted to the University of Texas at Austin where he began studying pharmacology, but he dropped out shortly after due to the difficulty of the coursework—not realizing at this point that he was dyslexic—and because of his unwillingness to dissect a frog in biology class.Patricia Burstein (May 19, 1980), In His Art and Life, Robert Rauschenberg Is a Man Who Steers His Own Daring Course People. He was drafted into the United States Navy in 1944. Based in California, he served as a neuropsychiatric technician in a Navy hospital until his discharge in 1945 or 1946.
Rauschenberg subsequently studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the in Paris, France, where he met fellow art student Susan Weil. At that time he also changed his name from Milton to Robert. In 1948 Rauschenberg joined Weil in enrolling at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
At Black Mountain, Rauschenberg sought out Josef Albers, a founder of the Bauhaus in Germany, whom he had read about in an August 1948 issue of Time magazine. He hoped that Albers' rigorous teaching methods might curb his habitual sloppiness. Albers' preliminary design courses relied on strict discipline that did not allow for any "uninfluenced experimentation."Josef Albers, quoted in Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), p. 56.
Rauschenberg became, in his own words, "Albers' dunce, the outstanding example of what he was not talking about". Although Rauschenberg considered Albers his most important teacher, he found a more compatible sensibility in John Cage, an established composer of avant-garde music. Like Rauschenberg, Cage had moved away from the teachings of his instructor, Arnold Schoenberg, in favor of a more experimentalist approach to music. Cage provided Rauschenberg with much-needed support and encouragement during the early years of his career, and the two remained friends and artistic collaborators for decades to follow.
From 1949 to 1952 Rauschenberg studied with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor at the Art Students League of New York, where he met fellow artists Knox Martin and Cy Twombly.Walter Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s,
Personal life Rauschenberg married Susan Weil in the summer of 1950 at the Weil family home in Outer Island, Connecticut. Their only child, Christopher, was born July 16, 1951. The two separated in June 1952 and divorced in 1953. Thereafter, Rauschenberg had romantic relationships with fellow artists Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, poet John Giorno, among others. His partner for the last 25 years of his life was artist Darryl Pottorf,Ella Nayor,"The Pine Island Eagle, "Bob Rauschenberg, art giant, dead at 82", May 13, 2008 his former assistant.
In the 1970s he moved into NoHo in Manhattan in New York City.Kenneth T. Jackson, Lisa Keller, Nancy Flood (2010). The Encyclopedia of New York City , Second Edition, Yale University Press.
Rauschenberg purchased the Beach House, his first property on Captiva Island, on July 26, 1968. However, the property did not become his permanent residence until the fall of 1970.
Death Rauschenberg died of heart failure on May 12, 2008, on Captiva Island, Florida.
Work Rauschenberg's approach was sometimes called "Neo-Dadaist," a label he shared with the painter Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg famously stated that "painting relates to both art and life," and he wanted to work "in the gap between the two."Rauschenberg, Robert; Miller, Dorothy C. (1959). Sixteen Americans [exhibition]. . New York: Museum of Modern Art. p. 58. . OCLC 748990996. "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)" Like many of his Dadaist predecessors, Rauschenberg questioned the distinction between art objects and everyday objects, and his use of readymade materials reprised the intellectual issues raised by Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917). Duchamp's Dadaist influence can also be observed in Jasper Johns' paintings of targets, numerals, and flags, which were familiar cultural symbols: "things the mind already knows."His heart belongs to DADA, Time 73, May 4, 1959: 58; as quoted in Jasper Johns, Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe, Moma New York, 1996. "It all began with my painting a picture of an American flag. Using this design took care of a great deal for me because I didn't have to design it. So I want on to similar things like the targets things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I've always thought of a painting as a surface; painting it in one color made this very clear… A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator." p. 82.
At Black Mountain College, Rauschenberg experimented with a variety of artistic mediums including printmaking, drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, and theatre; his works often featured some combination of these. He created his Night Blooming paintings (1951) at Black Mountain by pressing pebbles and gravel into black pigment on canvas. In the very same year he made full body blueprints in collaboration with Susan Weil in his New York apartment, which "they hope to turn [...] into screen and wallpaper designs".
From the fall of 1952 to the spring of 1953, Rauschenberg traveled in Italy and North Africa with his fellow artist and partner Cy Twombly. There, he created collages and small sculptures, including the Scatole Personali and Feticci Personali, out of found materials. He exhibited them at galleries in Rome and Florence. To Rauschenberg's surprise, a number of the works sold; many that did not he threw into the river Arno, following the suggestion of an art critic who reviewed his show.Holland Cotter (June 28, 2012), Robert Rauschenberg: 'North African Collages and Scatole Personali, c. 1952' New York Times.
Upon his return to New York City in 1953, Rauschenberg began creating sculpture with found materials from his Lower Manhattan neighborhood, such as scrap metal, wood, and twine. Throughout the 1950s, Rauschenberg supported himself by designing storefront window displays for Tiffany & Co. and Bonwit Teller, first with Susan Weil and later in partnership with Jasper Johns under the pseudonym Matson Jones.
In a famously cited incident of 1953, Rauschenberg requested a drawing from the Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning for the express purpose of erasing it as an artistic statement. This conceptual work, titled Erased de Kooning Drawing, was executed with the elder artist's consent.
In 1961, Rauschenberg explored a similar conceptual approach by presenting an idea as the artwork itself. He was invited to participate in an exhibition at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, where artists were to present portraits of Clert, the gallery owner. Rauschenberg's submission consisted of a telegram declaring "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so."
By 1962, Rauschenberg's paintings were beginning to incorporate not only found objects but found images as well. After a visit to Andy Warhol's studio that year, Rauschenberg began using a silkscreen process, usually reserved for commercial means of reproduction, to transfer photographs to canvas.Thomas Crow, "Social Register," Artforum (New York) 47, no. 1 (Sept. 2008), pp. 426–29. The silkscreen paintings made between 1962 and 1964 led critics to identify Rauschenberg's work with Pop art.
During this period Rauschenberg created Barge, a 32 foot long silkscreen and oil work created predominantly over a 24 hour period. Images recognizable in the work include trucks, spacecraft, text and parts of Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, among others.
Rauschenberg had experimented with technology in his artworks since the making of his early Combines in the mid-1950s, where he sometimes used working radios, clocks, and electric fans as sculptural materials. He later explored his interest in technology while working with Bell Laboratories research scientist Billy Klüver. Together they realized some of Rauschenberg's most ambitious technology-based experiments, such as Soundings (1968), a light installation which responded to ambient sound. In 1966, Klüver and Rauschenberg officially launched Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a non-profit organization established to promote collaborations between artists and engineers.Kristine Stiles & Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings (Second Edition, Revised and Expanded by Kristine Stiles) University of California Press 2012, p. 453
In 1969, NASA invited Rauschenberg to witness the launch of Apollo 11. In response to this landmark event, Rauschenberg created his Stoned Moon Series of lithographs. This involved combining diagrams and other images from NASA's archives with his own drawings and handwritten text.Craig F. Starr Associates, New York, Robert Rauschenberg: Stoned Moon 1969–70, May 30 – July 26. Exh. cat. with essay (ca. 1970) by Michael Crichton.
From 1970, Rauschenberg worked from his home and studio in Captiva, Florida. The first works he created in his new studio were Cardboards (1971–72) and Early Egyptians (1973–74), for which he relied on locally sourced materials such as cardboard and sand. Where his previous works had often highlighted urban imagery and materials, Rauschenberg now favored the effect of natural fibers found in fabric and paper. He printed on textiles using his solvent-transfer technique to make the Hoarfrost (1974–76) and Spread (1975–82) series; the latter featured large stretches of collaged fabric on wood panels. Rauschenberg created his Jammer (1975–76) series using colorful fabrics inspired by his trip to Ahmedabad, India, a city famous for its textiles. The imageless simplicity of the Jammer series is a striking contrast with the image-filled Hoarfrosts and the grittiness of his earliest works made in New York City.