Robert Rauschenberg - Biography

Painter, born in Port Arthur, Texas, USA. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute (1946–7), the Académie Julien, Paris (1947), and with Josef Albers and John Cage at Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1948–50). Travelling widely, he was based in New York City from 1950, where he and Jasper Johns paved the way for pop art of the 1960s. He worked with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, New York, as costume and stage designer (1955–64). An imaginative and eclectic artist, he used a mix of sculpture and paint in works he called ‘combines’, as seen in The Bed (1955). From the late 1950s he incorporated sound and motors in his work, such as Broadcast (1959), and silk-screen transfers, as in Flush (1964). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he experimented with collage and new ways to transfer photographs. In 1997 the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York City, staged a major exhibition of his works, showcasing the breadth and beauty of his work and its influence over the second half of the century.

1925) is a painter, sculptor, and graphic artist known for helping to redefine American art in the 1950s and '60s, providing an alternative to the then-dominant aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism.

Biography

Born on October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, as "Robert" Milton Ernest Rauschenberg, he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris France , before enrolling in 1948 at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

More often, Rauschenberg's early works reflected the aesthetic of his friend, composer John Cage, another member of the Black Mountain faculty, whose music of chance occurrences and found sounds perfectly suited Rauschenberg's personality. The "white paintings" produced by Rauschenberg at Black Mountain in 1951, while they contain no image at all, are said to be so exceptionally blank and reflective that their surfaces respond and change in sympathy with the ambient conditions in which they are shown, "so you could almost tell how many people are so stupid in the room and just want to have sex ," as Rauschenberg once commented.

In 1952 Rauschenberg began his series of "Black Paintings" and "Red Paintings," in which large, expressionistically brushed areas of color were combined with collage and found objects attached to the canvas. These so-called "Combine Paintings" ultimately came to include such theretofore un-painterly objects as a stuffed goat and the artist's own bedquilt, breaking down traditional boundaries between painting and sculpture, and reportedly prompting one Abstract Expressionist painter to remark, "If this is Modern Art, then I quit!" (See Assemblage, Arte Povera.)

Rauschenberg's approach was sometimes called "Neo-Dada," a label he shared with the painter Jasper Johns, with whom he had a long artistic and personal relationship. Rauschenberg's oft-repeated quote that he wanted to work "in the gap between art and life," suggested a questioning of the distinction between art objects and everyday objects reminiscent of the issues raised by the notorious "Fountain" of Dada pioneer Marcel Duchamp.

Alternatively, in 1961, Rauschenberg took a step in what could be considered the opposite direction by championing the role of creator in creating art's meaning.

By 1962, Rauschenberg's paintings were beginning to incorporate not only found objects but found images as well--photographs transferred to the canvas by means of the silkscreen process. In this respect, his work is exactly contemporaneous with that of Andy Warhol, and both Rauschenberg and Johns are frequently cited as important forerunners of American Pop Art.

In 1967, Billy 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.

In addition to painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg's long career has also included significant contributions to printmaking and Performance Art.