Robert Rauschenberg

The great enfant terrible of post-Abstract Expressionism, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), grew up as Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, where the landscape was riddled with industrial equipment for the regional oil industry. Because he was young during the Depression, he may not have grasped how desperate times were, although he did realize that his mother made his shirts from scraps in order to give him “new” clothes—a talent he always credited for his creativity in collage media.

Rauschenberg’s drawing skills emerged during childhood, even though he had no artistic role models. As an adult he learned he had dyslexia, which explained his difficulty with academics, although he was a bright and well-liked student. At eighteen, after three semesters at the University of Texas at Austin, he left to join the Navy, which meant he did not have to tell his father he had flunked out. He was unwilling to be a combatant, and, instead, was trained as a neuropsychiatric technician at the San Diego Naval Hospital. When he was reassigned to Camp Pendleton, he visited an art museum for the first time—the Huntington Library and Gardens in Pasadena—and saw the famous portraits known as “Pinkie” and “Blue Boy” by the British artists Thomas Lawrence and Thomas Gainsborough. Later, Rauschenberg explained that the encounter with the originals of images he had previously known as playing cards directly inspired him to be an artist.

After World War II, he moved to Los Angeles, got a job as a packing clerk, and then, on the advice of a friend, enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute on the G.I. Bill. This was when he changed his first name to Bob, but people would later assume his full name was Robert. At the institute, his study of art history inspired him to go to Paris, where, again funded by the G.I. Bill, he enrolled at the famous Académie Julien. It was not the right place for him, however, but while there he did meet his future wife, fellow artist Susan Weil. Together, in 1948, they went to study at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, under Josef Albers, a Bauhaus-trained artist whom Rauschenberg always admired. Even though their philosophies and practices were at odds, Rauschenberg appreciated Albers’s discipline and always considered him an important teacher. After a year, Rauschenberg went to New York City and took classes at the Art Students League. He returned to Black Mountain College for the 1951 and 1952 summer sessions and met many important artists, dancers, and musicians with whom he later collaborated: Merce Cunningham, Dorothea Rockburne, John Cage, and others. Rauschenberg participated in Cage’s Theater Piece #1 and became actively involved as a stage designer, dancer, and choreographer in avant-garde dance and theater.

In 1951, the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York mounted Rauschenberg’s first solo exhibition which featured his White andBlack paintings. From autumn 1952 to spring 1953, Rauschenberg traveled with Cy Twombly to Europe and then on to North Africa. Returning to New York in 1953, he produced his Red Paintings, designed costumes and sets for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and very late in the year met the emerging artist Jasper Johns. With Johns, Rauschenberg signaled a new direction in contemporary art away from the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism. In 1954, he created his first Combines—his name for art assemblages that combined painting with made and found objects. Four years later, he exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery and developed a type of drawing using solvent to transfer magazine photographs onto a paper support, obtaining a slightly blurry and lighter but still recognizable image. His first retrospective took place in 1963 at the Jewish Museum, and the following year he won the Grand Prize at the Thirty-Second Venice Biennale. He had already started to incorporate electronics in his art, dance, and theater work, and, in 1966, with electronics engineer Billy Klüver, he co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology to promote cooperation between artists and engineers.

During the 1960s, Rauschenberg began work as a printmaker, and in 1962 made his first lithograph at Universal Limited Art Editions in West Islip, New York. His penchant for experimentation and social collaboration led to making fine art print editions with every important studio during the printmaking explosion that began in the post-World War II period. In addition to U.L.A.E., he worked at Gemini G.E. L. in Los Angeles; Tyler Graphics in Bedford and later Mt. Kisco, New York; Graphicstudio in Tampa, Florida; Styria Studio in New York; and Saff Tech Arts in Oxford, Maryland, as well as at his own studio, Untitled Press, established in 1971 on Captiva Island near Fort Myers, Florida. His avid interests in travel, people, and other cultures led him to establish in 1984 the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange. For eight years, Rauschenberg’s collaborative mixed media endeavor toured Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, China, Tibet, Japan, Cuba, Russia, Germany, and Malaysia, with a final culminating exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1991.

Rauschenberg founded and directed Change, Inc., a non-profit organization that provides emergency funds for artists. The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, started in 1990, is also a non-profit entity devoted to projects that increase public awareness about subjects of vital interest to the artist. An artist-activist, Rauschenberg was also an inventive trendsetter who frequently borrowed imagery from a broad range of sources, including the work of other artists. He explained his approach as liberating: “I always select my images in order to have them look as little like a particular point of view as possible. And I’ll take images from any source, whether it’s a magazine or a letter, left on a table. People send me special, old things, but I have avoided using special things in my public work. I prefer images that are less specific so that there is room for everyone’s imagination.” [1]

Notes:

[1] Barbara Rose, An Interview with Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 77.