Robert Rauschenberg
American Collagist, Painter, and Graphic Artist
Summary of Robert Rauschenberg
Considered by many to be one of the most influential American artists due to his radical blending of materials and methods, Robert Rauschenberg was a crucial figure in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to later modern movements. One of the key Neo-Dada movement artists, his experimental approach expanded the traditional boundaries of art, opening up avenues of exploration for future artists. Although Rauschenberg was the enfant terrible of the art world in the 1950s, he was deeply respected and admired by his predecessors. Despite this admiration, he disagreed with many of their convictions and literally erased their precedent to move forward into new aesthetic territory that reiterated the earlier Dada inquiry into the definition of art.
Accomplishments
- Engaged in questioning the definition of a work of art and the role of the artist, Rauschenberg shifted from a conceptual outlook where the authentic mark of the brushstroke described the artist's inner world towards a reflection on the contemporary world, where an interaction with popular media and mass-produced goods reflected a unique artistic vision.
- Rauschenberg merged the realms of kitsch and fine art, employing both traditional media and found objects within his "combines" by inserting appropriated photographs and urban detritus amidst standard wall paintings.
- Rauschenberg believed that painting related to "both art and life. Neither can be made." Following from this belief, he created artworks that move between these realms in constant dialogue with the viewers and the surrounding world, as well as with art history.
- Preferring to leave the interpretation of the works to his viewers, Rauschenberg allowed chance to determine the placement and combination of the different found images and objects in his artwork such that there were no predetermined arrangements or meanings embedded within the works.
Progression of Art
White Paintings
Originally viewed as a scandalous swindle, Rauschenberg's White Paintings were an early codification of the artistic ideals that dominated his entire oeuvre. The White Paintings currently exist in five different permutations of multi-paneled canvases, which Rauschenberg intentionally left free of any mark of the artist's hand. By removing any gesture, the works could be, and were, re-fabricated by his friends and assistants, including fellow artists from Cy Twombly to Brice Marden. This removal of an authorial mark presaged both the mechanical appearance of Andy Warhol's silkscreened works and the slick surfaces of Ad Reinhardt's Abstract Paintings (1952-67), while also hearkening back to earlier modernist works like the monochromatic paintings of Russian Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko. The seemingly blank canvases, evenly coated in white house paint, serve as a backdrop that activates as viewers approach, coming alive with their shadows while also reflecting the light and sounds of the room they occupy. Thus, Rauschenberg succinctly allowed the "subject matter" of the White Paintings to shift with each new audience and new setting, and illustrated his interest in aleatory, or chance, processes in art, while also questioning the role of the artist in determining the meaning, or subject, of a work of art.
The White Paintings were initially exhibited in the dining hall of Black Mountain College in the summer of 1952 as a backdrop for The Event (Cage's Theatre Piece no. 1) - a multimedia performance combining poetry reading, dance, music determined by aleatory processes. During the performance, four panels of the White Paintings were suspended from the ceiling in the form of a cross with films and slides projected on them. While Charles Olsen and M. C. Richards read their poetry, Merce Cunningham danced through the audience, David Tudor played Cage's music on the piano, John Cage lectured on Meister Eckhart and Zen, and Rauschenberg himself played wax cylinders of old Edith Piaf records on an old Edison horn recorder.
Latex paint on canvas - SFMOMA
Erased de Kooning Drawing
In the early 1950s, Rauschenberg explored the boundaries and the definition of art, following from the radical modernist precedent set by Marcel Duchamp's earlier Dada readymades. In this "drawing," he set out to discover if erasure, or the removal of a mark, constituted a work of art. He realized in order for the piece to succeed, he required an already notable work of art. Willem de Kooning was an established, leading figure in the New York art world when the young Rauschenberg asked him for a drawing that he could erase. De Kooning eventually acquiesced to Rauschenberg's request, albeit reluctantly. He intentionally made Rauschenberg's act of erasure difficult by deliberately choosing a heavily marked drawing filled with charcoal and pencil. Rauschenberg needed two months, and dozens of erasers, to complete the herculean task of erasing the drawing; even after he finished, traces of De Kooning's work were still present. Through the erasure of De Kooning's drawing, Rauschenberg acknowledged his admiration for his predecessor, but also signaled a movement away from Abstract Expressionism. He framed the erased drawing within a simple, gilded frame, with a mat bearing an inscription typed by Jasper Johns that identified the significance of the seemingly empty paper. The absent drawing is presented as an art object, designating the act of erasure as belonging to the realm of fine art - a typically Neo-Dada act of questioning the definition and import of the art object.
Traces of drawing media on paper with label and gilded frame - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Automobile Tire Print
Another collaboration between Rauschenberg and John Cage, this print redefined the medium for the 20th century in a fatalistically Neo-Dada fashion. Rauschenberg glued together 20 sheets of typewriter paper into a continuous scroll, and laid them out on an empty Fulton Street road in front of his studio. He poured black house paint in a pool in front of the rear tire of his Model A Ford, and directed Cage to drive over the 23 feet of paper, with the front tire embossing the scroll and the rear imprinting the paper with a continuous black tire tread mark. While this work is categorized as a print, it is the artifact from a collaborative performance that explored process printing, the artist's mark, and serial imagery. While it was his idea and direction that initiated the creation of the print, Cage acted as the printer and press. In the creation of this work, Rauschenberg effectively shifted the term "action painting" from the Abstract Expressionist active creation of the artist's mark with their own hands to the action of driving a car, part of his continued interest in the obfuscation of traditional notions of the artist and work of art.
Ink on twenty sheets of paper glued together, mounted on fabric - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Bed
One of Rauschenberg's first "combines," Bed transcends the line between painting and sculpture through its Dadaist assemblage of traditional materials and the detritus of everyday life. Rauschenberg coined the term combine to describe a series of works from the 1950s and 1960s that literally combine the media of painting and sculpture within a single, three-dimensional art object. Apocryphal or not, the legend behind the combine states that one day Rauschenberg ran out of canvas and turned instead to his bed linens, first scribbling on the pillow, sheets, and quilt with pencil, then rapidly dripping and spilling paint on them. He then stretched the bed linens over a rectangular wooden support, in the place of a canvas, and attached the pillow and quilt in a way that made it appear as if the bed was made with only one corner un-tucked. He applied the paint in a loose, dripped, gestural fashion that calls to mind the authorial marks of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. However, the brushstroke in the combine was no longer a mark indicative of the artist's psyche, but an appropriated symbol designating a shift towards the external world within the avant-garde. The found objects present more of an accurate portrait of Rauschenberg than the dripped paint, as they were items that he owned and used in his daily life, rather than an aesthetic sign borrowed from a previous generation.
Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wooden supports - The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Monogram
One of Rauschenberg's most famous works, Monogram, pushed the art world's buttons by further merging painting and sculpture as the combine moved from the wall to the pedestal. While he began with traditional materials - an abstract painting executed in oil on stretched canvas - he abandoned tradition by adding an assemblage of found objects on top of the painting to create a canonical, three-dimensional combine painting. Rauschenberg often acquired materials for his artwork on his meanderings about New York City, allowing chance encounters with found objects to dictate his artistic output, and Monogram was no exception. In one of his wanderings in the early 1950s, Rauschenberg found and purchased a stuffed angora goat from an office supply store and later encircled it with a tire he encountered in street trash. He applied paint to the goat's snout in gestural brushstrokes that quoted Abstract Expressionism. On top of the canvas, Rauschenberg surrounded the goat with a pasture of more detritus strewn about its hooves - including a tennis ball, a wooden plank, and several found and reproduced images.
Similar to his earlier combine, Bed (1955), Monogram is a work that engages the viewer on multiple levels, as they look at, down, and around the interwoven elements of the work all vying for the viewer's attention at once. However, despite many varied interpretations, Rauschenberg refused to hint at any predetermined meaning of the different symbols within the work, instead allowing viewers to create their own associations between the objects and images. Despite Rauschenberg's insistence against specific meanings of the work, often critics interpret the tire-ringed goat as a symbol of the artist's sexuality, as well as his role within the art world, trampling over tradition with his own artistic monogram.
Oil paint, printed paper, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber heel and tennis ball on canvas, with oil paint on angora goat and tire on wooden base mounted on four casters - Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Canyon
Among Rauschenberg's most iconic and controversial combines, Canyon features amongst its mixed media; pieces of wood, a pillow, a mirror, and a stuffed bald eagle. The eagle appears to emerge directly from the canvas, perched on top of a cardboard box and peering down on a pillow dangling below the assemblage. A photograph of Rauschenberg's son emerges from the incongruous cacophony of objects, boldly outlined with black above a mint green patch of paint so that it stands out amidst the fragments of printed matter.
Rauschenberg acquired the taxidermied eagle from fellow artist Sari Dienes, who retrieved the bird from the detritus of a recently departed neighbor that had shot the bird during his time as one of the last of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders. While Rauschenberg submitted a notarized letter in 1988 that the bird was killed well before the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act went into effect, the stuffed eagle still became the source of recent governmental ire. In 2007, the estate of the former owner - Ileana Sonnabend - declared that Canyon was of zero value because it could not be sold without violating the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. However, in 2011, the United States government appraised the work at 15 million dollars, and also levied a penalty for an undervaluation at Sonnabend's heirs. In the end, the U.S. government dropped the 40 million plus dollar claim against Sonnabend's estate after the work was donated to the Museum of Modern Art. While the eagle became the source of immense bureaucratic drama over the course of many years, it is also the most potent source of allegory and imagery within the work. Critics cite references ranging from nationalism in the guise of McCarthyism to the Greek Ganymede myth embedded within the taxidermied bird, yet Rauschenberg always left the interpretation open to the viewer.
Oil, pencil, paper, metal, photograph, fabric, wood, canvas, buttons, mirror, taxidermied eagle, cardboard, pillow, paint tube and other materials - The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Skyway
While Rauschenberg was no stranger to collaged found imagery, the silkscreen technique reinvigorated his artistic practice in the early 1960s. After Andy Warhol introduced him to the photo-silkscreen technique. Rauschenberg created a series of silkscreen paintings that allowed for an open-ended association of meanings through his appropriation and arrangement of mass media imagery. In Skyway, Rauschenberg wanted to communicate the frenetic pace of American culture encapsulated in the early half of the decade, particularly as represented on television and in magazines. He stated, "I was bombarded with television sets and magazines, by the excess of the world. I thought an honest work should incorporate all of those elements." He created the work in the year following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was a potent symbol for change, even though he was struck down only halfway through his first term as president. The image of Kennedy appears twice in the upper half of the painting surrounded by images that illustrate the ideals of American progress in the second half of the 20th century including an astronaut, the bald eagle, and a large, mechanical crane surrounded by a demolished building. The lower half of the canvas contains a repeated image of Venus at Her Toilet (1608) by Peter Paul Rubens. The mirror within the painting expands the image into the viewer's space, mirroring the world around them as well as the world around Rauschenberg when he created the work. While the appropriated images can be read as politically and socially laden, Rauschenberg claimed he aimed to encapsulate the contemporary climate rather than comment on it, using "simple images" to "neutralize the calamities that were going on in the outside world."
Oil and silkscreen on canvas - Dallas Museum of Art
Sky Garden
While the space race was still in its infancy when Rauschenberg included astronauts in his 1964 silkscreen paintings, by 1969, space flight was a reality that inspired Rauschenberg, and many Americans, with the potential for collaboration between man and technology. In July of 1969, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) invited Rauschenberg to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to witness the launch of the momentous Apollo 11 mission and granted him unrestricted access to the grounds and facilities, allowing him to explore the facilities and meet with scientists as well as utilize official photographs and technical documents. The visit instilled a renewed sense of optimism in Rauschenberg, and regarding NASA's missions, he said, "The whole project seemed one of the only things at that time that was not concerned with war and destruction." His Stoned Moon series (1969-70) is a testament to that sense of hope, particularly poignant in the tumultuous context of the late 1960s, defined by civil rights movements and anti-war protests against the Vietnam War. To create the prints, Rauschenberg collaged transferred photographs supplied by NASA. He discovered in the early 1960s that if he soaked reproductions from magazines in lighter fluid he could transfer them on to paper by rubbing the back with a dry pen nib. The imagery juxtaposes the technology of the booster rocket in red with the natural surroundings of Cape Canaveral in blue and green, echoing the sensory overload experienced as one witnessed the Apollo 11 launch. Sky Garden is one of the largest lithographs in the series, at an astonishing 89 inches in height and was the largest hand-pulled lithograph ever created when it was printed in 1969.
Lithograph and screen print - Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
Signs
Immediately after the turmoil of the 1960s had come to a close, Rauschenberg created this collage summarizing the upheaval of the decade. While the lower left corner anchored the piece with the exhilaration and optimism of the 1969 moon landing embodied in the image of astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Rauschenberg surrounded this figure with a constellation of figures that symbolized the turmoil of the preceding decade as well. The surrounding images of John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert, or Bobby, Kennedy, who were both assassinated in 1968, highlighted the destruction of the political optimism during the 1960s. The image of Janis Joplin - a fellow native of Port Arthur, Texas - at the top right emphasized the loss of young talent in the music industry as rock stars partied themselves to death, Joplin having died of an overdose in October of 1970 right before Rauschenberg created the print. Other images surrounding the astronaut portray urban violence, the Vietnam War, and a peace vigil - all descriptions of the tumult of the 1960s. The collage structure and all-over composition further visually enhance and reflect the chaos of this period.
Screenprint collage - The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota
Biography of Robert Rauschenberg
Childhood
Robert Rauschenberg was born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in the small refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas. His father, Ernest, was a strict and serious man who worked for the Gulf State Utilities power company. His mother, Dora, was a devout Christian and a frugal woman. She made the family's clothes from scraps, a practice that embarrassed her son, but possibly influenced his later work with collage and assemblage. Rauschenberg drew frequently and copied images from comics, but his talent as a draughtsman went largely unappreciated, except by his younger sister Janet. Until he was 13, he planned to become a minister - a career of high standing in his conservative community. However, Rauschenberg discovered that his church called dancing a sin, and, as a skilled dancer himself, was dissuaded from a career in the ministry. He asked for and received a store-bought shirt for his high school graduation present, the very first in his young life.
Early Training
Following his parents' wishes, Rauschenberg attended the University of Texas in Austin to study pharmacology, but was expelled in his freshman year after refusing to dissect a frog. The draft letter that arrived in 1943 saved him from breaking the news to his parents. Refusing to kill on the battlefield, he was assigned as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps and stationed at a hospital caring for combat survivors in San Diego. While on leave, he saw oil paintings in person for the first time at the Huntington Art Gallery in California. After the war ended, Rauschenberg drifted, eventually using the G.I. Bill to pay for art classes at Kansas City Art Institute. On his arrival in Kansas City, he decided he would mark his new life with a new first name: Bob. The following year, the newly anointed Robert Rauschenberg traveled to Paris to study at the Academie Julian.
While in Paris, Rauschenberg met fellow American student Susan Weil, and the two became inseparable friends. He saved up enough money and followed her to Black Mountain College in North Carolina after reading about, and admiring, the discipline of its famed director, Josef Albers. Ironically, after Rauschenberg entered the college, Albers criticized his work frequently and harshly. Albers' course on materials, in which students investigated the line, texture, and color of everyday materials profoundly influenced Rauschenberg's later assemblages. Rauschenberg and Weil stayed at Black Mountain for the 1948 to 1949 school year and then moved to New York City, which Rauschenberg determined to be the center of the art world. They arrived as the Abstract Expressionist movement was just reaching maturity. In June 1950, Rauschenberg and Weil were married, and in August 1951 they had a son, Christopher.
In 1951 and 1952, Rauschenberg split his time between the The Art Students League in New York, where he studied with the instructors Morris Kantor and Vaclav Vytlacil during the academic year, and Black Mountain College, where he spent the summer. His ambition secured him a prestigious solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, exhibiting a series of White Paintings with scratched numbers and allegorical symbols (1953). Rauschenberg continued his paintings in white at Black Mountain College, where he rolled white house paint onto canvas with a roller. The flat white canvases were influenced by their surroundings, reflecting shadows of people and the time of day. He was also encouraged by the painter Jack Tworkov to explore black. His Black Paintings (1951), unlike the white series, were textured with thick paint and incorporated newspaper scraps. Also while at Black Mountain College, Rauschenberg met the minimalist composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham, who both taught at the college and advocated the use of chance methods, found objects, and common, everyday experiences within high art. All of these ideas proved to be major influences on the young artist.
Early Mature Period
On Rauschenberg's return to New York from Black Mountain in fall 1952, Weil filed for divorce and brought Christopher to live with her parents. Rauschenberg left for Europe and North Africa to travel with Cy Twombly - a fellow student in the Art Students League and later an important Conceptual artist, with whom he was also romantically involved at the time. During his travels, Rauschenberg made his first assemblages from junk he collected in the Italian countryside. When he returned to the United States, he continued his experiments in paintings with the Red series in 1953, which featured varied surface textures like the Black series (1951), and also incorporated newsprint. Rauschenberg began to include objects in the surface of his paintings, from parasols to parts of a man's undershirt. Rauschenberg called these assemblages "combines," because they combined paint and objects (or sculpture) on the canvas.
Rauschenberg met the young painter Jasper Johns at a party in the winter of 1953 and after several months of friendship, the two became romantic and artistic partners. In 1955, Rauschenberg moved into the same building as Johns, and the two artists saw each other every day, exchanging ideas and encouraging their mutual exploration of the boundaries of art. Though their styles were initially too different to form a truly coherent movement, the intensity of their artistic partnership has been compared to the partnership between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. As Rauschenberg said, he and Johns gave each other "permission to do what we wanted." The pair also developed a close friendship with Cage and Cunningham, who were also living in New York at the time. The four artists shared a similar philosophy, one that was labeled as the Neo-Dada style by later art historians. They rejected the coded psychology of Abstract Expressionist paintings and embraced the unplanned beauty in everyday life. Rauschenberg's close relationship with Johns did not last, however. Johns was featured on the cover of Art News in 1957 and The Museum of Modern Art bought three of his works. This explosion of fame caused tension between Johns and Rauschenberg, who eventually ended their relationship in 1961, although they began moving apart in the late 1950s with each artist frequently working in studios outside of New York City. Regardless, Rauschenberg remained a friend and collaborator to Cage and Cunningham.
Collaboration was a recurring theme in Rauschenberg's career. His interest in dance led to a ten-year partnership with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (1954-64), as well as with choreographers Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown. He created costumes and sets for Cunningham's troupe while Cage composed the music. He also choreographed and planned his own "theater pieces" with fellow artists throughout the 1960s. Rauschenberg's interest in the promise of technology led him to co-found Experiments in Art and Technology(E.A.T.) in 1966 with Billy Kluver of Bell Laboratories, which encouraged collaboration between engineers and artists. Rauschenberg sought collaboration in other media as well: he began to create lithographs in 1962 with Tatyana Grosman, the printmaker and owner of Universal Limited Art Editions. He later collaborated with other printmaking studios, and in 1969, he bought a house on Captiva Island, which served as the home of Unlimited Press, a printmaking studio available to emerging and established artists.
Rauschenberg was himself rapidly becoming an established figure within the art world. He earned an early retrospective in 1963 at the Jewish Museum in New York, which was very well received by critics and viewers alike. His booming popularity in America was followed by an exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in London, and then by an exhibition of his works at the Venice Biennale, which he visited while on tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. At the peak of his career, he was awarded the Biennale's first prize for painting in 1964, marking the first year this prize was awarded to an American.
Late Mature Period
In keeping with his interest in current events and culture, Rauschenberg began to integrate images of space flight into his work in the 1960s. A Modern Inferno (1965), an image created for Life Magazine in celebration of Dante's seven-hundredth birthday, portrays Dante as an astronaut. In the series Stoned Moon (1969-70), Rauschenberg incorporated photographs from NASA's records in 33 lithographs. The 1970s also marked a return to assemblage as Rauschenberg embarked on the Spreads (1975-82) and Scales series (1977-81). He used techniques and imagery from his early works, combining silkscreen prints, magazine images, and everyday objects, but with more color and on a larger scale than in previous works. While several pieces in this series sold to collectors, critics were not impressed by what they perceived as a rehashing of old methods. Rauschenberg continued to work in a large scale in 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece (1981-98), a collaged painting that grew to be even longer than its title implied.
In 1984, Rauschenberg combined his interest in traveling with his belief that art could change society, founding the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (R.O.C.I.). He traveled primarily to developing nations and Communist countries, in defiance of then-current American Cold War policies, learning craft traditions from the host country's artists and artisans. Each of the twelve trips resulted in a major exhibition of Rauschenberg's works inspired by the host country. The culmination of the journey was an exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. While Rauschenberg built ties with artists abroad, critics at home were unimpressed. Roberta Smith writing for the New York Times neatly summarized the project as "at once altruistic and self-aggrandizing, modest and overbearing."
Late Years and Death
In 1990, the Whitney Museum of American Art gave Rauschenberg a retrospective, accompanied by a smaller show at the Corcoran Gallery of his earlier work from the 1950s. The exhibitions cemented his status as one of the giants of the art world while emphasizing the importance of his early work in the development of modern American art. Rauschenberg won the Commandant de l'Ordre des Lettres from the French government in 1992, followed by the National Medal of the Arts in 1993. In 1996, the artist checked into the Betty Ford clinic to recover from alcoholism, which had grown more severe in his later years. He completed his rehabilitation program in time to celebrate the opening of his 1997-98 retrospective of 467 works at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a show that took six years to prepare.
Rauschenberg suffered a series of medical mishaps beginning in 2001, first breaking his hip, which led to an intestinal perforation and then a stroke in 2002 that paralyzed his right side. With the assistance of his caregiver and friend, Darryl Pottorf, Rauschenberg learned to work with his left hand. He worked until his death on May 12, 2008, from heart failure.
The Legacy of Robert Rauschenberg
Rauschenberg's work of the 1950s and 1960s influenced the young artists who developed later modern movements. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein traced their inspiration for Pop art to Rauschenberg's collages of appropriated media images, and his experiments in silkscreen printing. The foundation for Conceptual art in large measure lies in Rauschenberg's Dada-based belief that the artist had the authority to determine the definition of art. The most fitting example is his 1961 portrait of Iris Clert, made for an exhibition at her gallery in Paris, which consisted of a telegram that stated: "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so/ Robert Rauschenberg." Additionally, happenings and later performances of the 1960s trace their lineage to Rauschenberg's collaboration with John Cage at Black Mountain College in The Event (1952). The postmodern aesthetic of appropriation that influenced artists like Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine is also indebted to Rauschenberg's penchant for borrowing imagery from popular media and fine art. His penchant for bricolage influenced the choice of many later artists, even land artists and feminist artists, to utilize non-traditional artistic mediums in their work.
While critics agree that Rauschenberg's later works were not as influential as his earlier ones, his continued commercial success allowed him to support emerging artists. He co-founded Artists Rights Today to lobby for artists' royalties on re-sales of their work, after he observed the gains made by early collectors with the boom in the art market. In 1970, he co-founded Change, Inc., which helped struggling artists pay their medical bills. He became more politically active as he grew older, testifying on behalf of artists for the National Endowment of the Arts in the 1990s. His undying energy was at the root of his success as an artist and as a spokesman for artists, and clearly drove the far-reaching influence of his work well beyond his lifetime.