Robert Rauschenberg
Pop Artist
BMW Art Car
1986
Robert Rauschenberg
• Born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925, Robert
Rauschenberg imagined himself first as a
minister and later as a pharmacist. It wasn’t until
1947, while in the U.S. Marines that he
discovered his aptitude for drawing and his
interest in the artistic representation of everyday
objects and people. After leaving the Marines he
studied art in Paris on the G.I. Bill, but quickly
became disenchanted with the European art
scene.
Rauschenberg
• After less than a year he moved to North Carolina, where
the country’s most visionary artists and thinkers, such as
Joseph Albers and Buckminster Fuller, were teaching at
Black Mountain College. There, with artists such as
dancer Merce Cunningham and musician John Cage,
Rauschenberg began what was to be an artistic
revolution. Soon, North Carolina country life began to
seem small and he left for New York to make it as a
painter. There, amidst the chaos and excitement of city
life Rauschenberg realized the full extent of what he
could bring to painting.
Rauschenberg
• Rauschenberg’s enthusiasm for popular culture
and his rejection of the angst and seriousness of
the Abstract Expressionists led him to search for
a new way of painting. He found his signature
mode by embracing materials traditionally
outside of the artist’s reach. He would cover a
canvas with house paint, or ink the wheel of a
car and run it over paper to create a drawing,
while demonstrating rigor and concern for formal
painting.
Rauschenberg
• By 1958, at the time of his first solo
exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, his
work had moved from abstract painting to
drawings like “Erased De Kooning” (1953)
(which was exactly as it sounds) to what
he termed “combines.” These combines
(meant to express both the finding and
forming of combinations in threedimensional collage) cemented his place
in art history.
Rauschenberg
• One of Rauschenberg’s first and most famous combines
was entitled “Monogram” (1959) and consisted of an
unlikely set of materials: a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a
police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball, and paint.
This pioneering altered the course of modern art. The
idea of combining and of noticing combinations of
objects and images has remained at the core of
Rauschenberg’s work. As Pop Art emerged in the ’60s,
Rauschenberg turned away from three-dimensional
combines and began to work in two dimensions, using
magazine photographs of current events to create silkscreen prints.
Combines
From 1954 to 1964 Robert Rauschenberg
created hybrid works, now referred to as
the Combines, that fused painted and
sculptural elements.
Monogram
1959
Coca-Cola Plan, 1958
Combine painting: pencil on paper, oil on three Coca-Cola
bottles, wood newel cap, and cast metal wings on wood
structure; 26 3/4 x 25 1/4 x 5 1/2 in.
Canyon
Rauschenberg
• Rauschenberg transferred prints of familiar
images, such as JFK or baseball games, to
canvases and overlapped them with painted
brushstrokes. They looked like abstractions from
a distance, but up close the images related to
each other, as if in conversation. These collages
were a way of bringing together the
inventiveness of his combines with his love for
painting. Using this new method he found he
could make a commentary on contemporary
society using the very images that helped to
create that society.
"Retroactive I“
1963
Charlene
1954
Estate
1963
Rauschenberg
• From the mid sixties through the seventies he
continued the experimentation in prints by
printing onto aluminum, moving plexiglass disks,
clothes, and other surfaces. He challenged the
view of the artist as auteur (a filmmaker whose individual
style and complete control over all elements of production give a film
its personal and unique stamp)
by assembling engineers
to help in the production of pieces
technologically designed to incorporate the
viewer as an active participant in the work.
Rauschenberg
• Throughout the ’80s and ’90s Rauschenberg
continued his experimentation, concentrating
primarily on collage and new ways to transfer
photographs. In 1998 The Guggenheim Museum
put on its largest exhibition ever with four
hundred works by Rauschenberg, showcasing
the breadth and beauty of his work, and its
influence over the second half of the century.
Rauschenberg passed away on May 12, 2008.