Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008)
Robert Rauschenberg was born Milton Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925. He became one of the major artists of his generation and is credited along with Jasper Johns for breaking the stronghold of Abstract Expressionism.
Rauschenberg began his formal studies in art at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1947-48. He trained briefly in Paris at the Academie Julian and, from 1948 to 1949, attended Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he studied under Josef Albers. While there, he met composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, with whom he would collaborate closely. This period was followed by several years of attendance at the Art Students League in New York City, where he befriended the artist Cy Twombly. Rauschenberg met Jasper Johns in 1953; the two would share a long creative friendship, as well as neighboring studios.
Rauschenberg declared that he wished to work “in the gap between art and life” and he pioneered an artistic approach would sometimes be called “Neo-Dada.” He is known for his assemblage, conceptualist methods and willingness to experiment with non-artistic materials – all innovations that anticipated later movements such as Pop Art, Conceptualism and Minimalism. He also created environmental works that manipulated light, shadow and sound through interaction with the viewer. His subject matter often focused on modern urban city-life, revealing the artist’s preoccupation with the affects of modernization. His appropriation of images from magazines and newspapers and the union of both two and three-dimensionality mark him as a pivotal figure in art history and the Pop Art movement.
Printmaking was another aspect of Rauschenberg’s career and, in 1962, he had begun to silkscreen paintings. That same year, he would create his first lithograph at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in New York and, by 1967, had made his revolutionary Booster and 7 Studies with Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles. For the next five decades, Rauschenberg would produce an extraordinary body of print work through both ateliers. Printmaking would prove to be a meeting point for his interests in painting, photography and collage, as well as fuel his passion for experimenting with new technologies.
In 1964, Rauschenberg was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. His career would encompass photography, sculpture, printmaking, performance, choreography, set design, art-and-technology works, and even a Grammy won for his design of the Talking Heads album, Speaking in Tongues. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1993.
Rauschenberg’s work can be found in all major museum collections and has been the subject of countless career retrospectives both within the United States and abroad, including the Stedelijk Museum (1968), the Smithsonian Institution (1976), the Menil Collection (1991) and the National Gallery of Art (1991). In 1997, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, exhibited the largest retrospective of Rauschenberg’s work to date. Subsequent major exhibitions have included ‘Combines’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2005) and ‘Gluts,’ at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2009). Most recently, the Gagosian Gallery, Paris, hosted an exhibition of Rauschenberg’s paintings and sculpture throughout Fall 2011.
Robert Rauschenberg lived and worked on Captiva Island, Florida until his death in 2008.