Milton Ernest Rauschenberg a.k.a. Robert Rauschenberg was born in the southern oil refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas
in 1925. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians and they believed
in instilling a hard-work ethic in their children. Rauschenberg said he never
liked school because he suffered terribly from dyslexia. After he managed to get through high school Rauschenberg
chose to go into the military, enlisting with the Navy. He was stationed in
California, and it was during a visit to the Huntington estate in Pasadena that
he was first exposed to fine art. He decided to study art after finishing his
military service and went to the Kansas City Art Institute. Then he went to France for a brief study at
the Académie Julian in Paris. and after returning to the United States in 1948
Rauschenberg went to study at the famed Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
Josef Albers was one of his instructors at BMC, and Rauschenberg often
credited Albers as inspiring him to move toward
experimentation [the opposite of what Albers taught], which lead to his now
infamous combine painting/sculptures. Rauschenberg later studied with Vaclav
Vytlacil and Morris
Kantor at the Art
Students League of New York, from 1949-1952. He briefly married artist Susan Weil in
1950 and they had a son, Christopher. After his divorce he was known to be
involved with fellow artists Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns and Darryl Pottorf, but
he mostly kept his private life out of the public’s eye.
In 1966, Rauschenberg,
along with Billy Klüver, established a non-profit organization called Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)
to promote collaborations between artists and engineers. He continued that idea
and expanded upon it in 1984, when the Rauschenberg
Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) was announced at the United Nations. This seven-year project was designed to
encourage "world peace and understanding" as he went on a ten-country
tour of Chile, China, Cuba, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Soviet Union, Tibet, and Venezuela;
leaving behind a piece of artwork about the culture he observed. The ROCI
venture, supported by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was exhibited in 1991.
In 1990, Rauschenberg created the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (RFF) to promote awareness of the
causes he cared about, such as world peace, the environment and humanitarian
issues. In 2011, the foundation launched its “Artist as Activist” print project which will invitean artist to
come to work at the late artist’s estate on Captiva Island in Florida to create
an editioned work on a subject of his/her choice. The foundation also maintains
the 19th Street Project Space in New
York. Additionally, Rauschenberg set up one-time only grants via Change, Inc., to assist
financially-challenged visual artists.
Artistically, Rauschenberg questioned the difference between art
and everyday objects, much in the same vein that Marcel Duchamp’s "Fountain" revisited art’s meaning in the eye of the observer. In in
Rauschenberg created an international incident in 1953 when he asked Abstract
Expressionism’s leader, Willem DeKooning, to participate in an ‘art experiment’ where he
‘erased’ a multimedia drawing by de
Kooning. The result initially
sent shock waves throughout the art world for defacing a work of art by a
modern master, but the concept held
ground and he was seen as a pioneer of Neo-Dada.
"Combines" mainly refers to Rauschenberg's work begun from
1954 to 1962. Critics first saw these as difficult to interpret due to his densely-laden
imagery with no apparent order to their presentation. By 1962, Rauschenberg regularly
utilized appropriated images from mainstream newspapers and magazines. He
transferred photographs to canvas via the silkscreen
process and this touched off a firestorm of interest
in printmaking. Rauschenberg liked the multiplicity of creating images, and continued
to embrace this flattened over-layered image for the rest of his career, but he
challenged the parameters of the medium like everything else he touched. This
work propelled him to become seen as one of the pivotal artists of the Pop Art movement
and put him on a par with Andy Warhol.
As for his prints, one of the first series he attempted was the
16.5-meter-long silkscreen print called Currents (1970), and
his Surfaces project (which soon
followed). They both consisted of large-scale screened prints with newspaper
headlines and textures, creating the illusion of looking at a television screen
with bad reception. The air wave patterns he created while layering his images
cover over and obscure the messages of the clippings. His subtle yet
hit-you-over-the-head commentary about the effects of bombarding our ever-acquiring
society with information couldn’t have been better timed. It pre-dated the movement
of social consciousness and political art which defined work in the 70s.
Likewise, Rauschenberg’s obsessive exploration of alternative media and
manipulation allowed him a freedom to break with traditional means of making
art. His combines and assemblages broke new ground and liberated younger
artists to mix media, much in the same manner as Pablo Picasso’s assemblages, or
Frank Stella’s combined sculpture/painted/prints of the late 1980s.
In printmaking, Rauschenberg left no inked method untouched. He
printed with anything available; including a rubber car tire and etched sheets
of glass and backlit them within a frame. One of his multi-media prints
stretches a staggering ¼ mile in length. His prints’ subjects spanned all the
current events of the mid-20thc, and they brought a new voice to the collage
method introduced by Picasso fifty years prior. One of his last
technological innovations was making large-scale digital Iris prints and using
biodegradable vegetable dyes in his transfer processes, which advanced the
medium toward the bio-friendly movement in the 1990s.
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Robert Rauschenberg was
a dominant force behind the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, and he continued to
challenge himself artistically up until his death. As a printmaker,
Rauschenberg was a leader in the social/political circles. His comments were not
only pointed, but they were diplomatic and ‘inclusive’. Some saw the work as a
mere reflection of ‘current’ events, but looking back on those Currents and Surfaces series now, one can see his vision was a clear and pointed
criticism of the mass media frenzy which surrounded people and events of the
day. He was unafraid of people’s responses to the work, and said what he wanted
to say. You see, he felt he had nothing to lose. He came from no art
experience, from a nothing town to become a pinnacle voice of the 20th
c. art world. He felt his background permitted him a fresh look at the world,
and left him untainted by his ignorance. The viewer was called to give an
opinion of what they saw and responded to his word collages at a time which
pre-dated Joseph Kosuth’s conceptualist group and their minimal ‘worded’ images
of the 1970s. From 2003 Rauschenberg worked at his home and studio on Captiva Island, in Florida. He died there in 2008, from
heart failure, but his legacy continues a support for younger artists,
artists in need and intercultural exchange.
Honors and Awards
1964
the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale
1983 Grammy Award for Album Design, Talking Heads
1993 National Medal of Arts
Commissions
1965 Life magazine Inferno: theVietnam War, racial violence, neo-Nazism, political assassinations, and ecological disaster.
1998 Vatican commission commemorate controversial Franciscan
priest Pio of Pietrelcina,
Exhibitions
1951 one-man show at Betty
Parsons Gallery
1954 one-man show at Charles Egan Gallery
1963 first career retrospective, at
the Jewish Museum
1976& 1978 retrospective by Smithsonian American
Art Museum, Washington, D.C., traveled
throughout the United States
1997-1999 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Houston, Cologne, and Bilbao.
2005-2007 traveling retrospective to
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm,
2008 collection of photographs shown
at the Guggenheim Museum
2009-2010 Peggy Guggenheim
Colleciton, Venice. Tinguely
Museum, Basel, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao,
and Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese.
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