Robert Rauschenberg
Combine paintings.
Robert Rauschenberg mixed painting with objects – a stuffed goat, a bed – in his “combines”. He carried Duchamp’s ideas into Pop Art.
Robert Rauschenberg was born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, and was originally named Milton. After serving in the navy during the Second World War he studied art in Kansas City and Paris and then at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Josef Albers taught there, and there he met the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham, who became lifelong collaborators.
In the early 1950s he made radical experiments. He painted entirely white canvases in which only the shadows and light in the room become the content of the picture. In 1953 he asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing and then erased it. The work, Erased de Kooning Drawing, is in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. For a time he lived with Cy Twombly and then with Jasper Johns.
From 1954 he made his combines, combinations of painting and sculpture incorporating real objects. In Bed of 1955, in the Museum of Modern Art, a quilt and a pillow are smeared with paint. Monogram of 1955–59, with a stuffed angora goat and a car tyre around its middle, was bought in 1965 by Moderna Museet in Stockholm and is one of the museum’s best-known works. Rauschenberg said he wanted to work in the gap between art and life.
In the 1960s he used screen printing to bring press photographs, such as John F. Kennedy and space flights, into his paintings. In 1964 he became the first American to win the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. In 1966, together with the Swedish engineer Billy Klüver, he founded the organisation Experiments in Art and Technology, which brought artists and engineers together.
From 1970 he lived on the island of Captiva in Florida. He continued to experiment with new materials and techniques until his death in 2008. Rauschenberg is regarded as one of the most important links between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, and his way of mixing materials has influenced much of contemporary art.