Robert Rauschenberg

(1925-2008)

Throughout his career, Rauschenberg has put pressure on conventional boundaries and challenged accepted artistic conventions. Born Milton Rauschenberg in 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas, initially he imagined himself first as a minister and later as a pharmacist. After serving as a neuropsychiatric technician in the U.S. Navy during World War II, the young Texan realized his artistic aspirations while working briefly as an illustrator for a Los Angeles newspaper. After leaving the navy Rauschenberg traveled to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian in 1948; perhaps most significant for his ensuing development, there he visited numerous galleries, becoming acquainted with the work of the European modernists. After returning to the United States, he enrolled in Black Mountain College, where he studied with the disciplined former Bauhaus master, Josef Albers, whom he would later acknowledge as his most influential instructor.  Albers encouraged his students to develop combinations of “structure, texture, and facture,” techniques Rauschenberg would employ in his combine paintings and his Hoarfrost series. (1)  While at Black Mountain, Rauschenberg also met two other individuals who would have a great impact on his art, the composer John Cage and the dancer Merce Cunningham.

In 1951, after participating in the show Abstraction in Photography, organized by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, he received his first solo exhibition, at Betty Parsons Gallery; among the works on display were his multi-panel monochromatic paintings, minimalist works done in all black or white, which in their simplicity heightened the viewer’s attentiveness to the passing shadows and falling light in the gallery space. Later series, such as his “Hoarfrost Editions,” would revisit some of the formal motivations of these early works.

Ever experimental, in 1953 the artist collaborated with John Cage to produce Automobile Tire Print, an impression in black house paint of the tire of a Model A Ford on a 22-foot length of paper. That same year he also “created” the Erased DeKooning Drawing, which, as the title suggests, is a pencil drawing by the Abstract Expressionist artist which Rauschenberg erased and presented as his own art.  These works expressed the artist’s interest in performance art, spontaneous events such as “Happenings,” and his active collaboration with other artists. During this period the artist also met Jasper Johns, with whom he would develop an intimate friendship, and even partner with in creating window displays for New York stores such as Bonwit Teller and Tiffany and Co.

In this period in the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg began to incorporate found objects, reproductions of art works, and assorted ephemeral materials into his paintings, such that they became increasingly three-dimensional, resembling both sculptures and paintings.  To describe these new assemblages, he coined the term “combines,” which accurately captured the odd, and seemingly random, juxtapositions of differing elements. By exhibiting some of these works as freestanding objects, even on the floor (as in the case of his landmark 1959 work, Monogram), Rauschenberg’s combines questioned traditions of museum display.  In 1958, the artist exhibited approximately twenty “combines” at Leo Castelli’s gallery, an event that brought the artist increased attention and acclaim.