Robert Rauschenberg
b. 1925, Port Arthur,
Tex.
Robert Rauschenberg was born Milton Rauschenberg on
October 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas. He began to study pharmacology at
the University of Texas at Austin before being drafted into the United
States navy, where he served as a neuropsychiatric technician in the navy
hospital corps in San Diego. In 1947, he enrolled at the Kansas City Art
Institute and traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian the
following year.
In the fall
of 1948, he returned to the United States to study under
Josef Albers at Black Mountain
College, near Asheville, North Carolina, which he continued to attend
intermittently through 1952. While taking classes at the Art Students
League, New York, from 1949 to 1951, Rauschenberg was offered his first
solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Some of the works from this
period included blueprints, monochromatic white paintings, and black
paintings. From the fall of 1952 to the spring of 1953, he traveled to
Europe and North Africa with
Cy Twombly,
whom he had met at the Art Students League. During his travels,
Rauschenberg worked on a series of small collages, hanging assemblages,
and small boxes filled with found elements, which he exhibited in Rome and
Florence.
Upon his return to
New York in 1953, Rauschenberg completed his series of black paintings,
using newspaper as the ground, and began work on sculptures created from
wood, stones, and other materials found on the streets; paintings made
with tissue paper, dirt, or gold leaf; and more conceptually oriented
works such as Automobile Tire Print (1953) and Erased de Kooning
Drawing (1953). By the end of 1953, he had begun his Red Painting
series on canvases that incorporated newspapers, fabric, and found objects
and evolved in 1954 into the Combines, a term Rauschenberg coined for his
well-known works that integrated aspects of painting and sculpture and
would often include such objects as a stuffed eagle or goat, street signs,
or a quilt and pillow. In late 1953, he met Jasper Johns, with whom he is
considered the most influential of artists who reacted against
Abstract Expressionism. The two artists had
neighboring studios, regularly exchanging ideas and discussing their work,
until 1961.
Rauschenberg
began to silkscreen paintings in 1962. He had his first career
retrospective, organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1963 and was
awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the 1964 Venice Biennale.
He spent much of the remainder of the 1960s dedicated to more
collaborative projects including printmaking,
Performance,
choreography, set design, and art-and-technology works. In 1966, he
cofounded Experiments in Art and Technology, an organization that sought
to promote collaborations between artists and engineers.
In 1970, Rauschenberg
established a permanent residence and studio in Captiva, Florida, where he
still lives. A retrospective organized by the National Collection of Fine
Arts, Washington, D.C., traveled throughout the United States in 1976–78.
Rauschenberg continued to travel widely, embarking on a number of
collaborations with artisans and workshops abroad, which culminated in the
Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) project from 1985 to
1991. In 1997, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, exhibited the
largest retrospective of Rauschenberg’s work to date, which traveled to
Houston and to Europe in 1998.
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