160 Quotes by Robert Rauschenberg

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.

I think that in the last twenty years or so, there’s been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.

You can’t make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined. That’s what makes the adventure of painting.

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.

I didn’t want painting to be simply an act of emphasizing one color to do something to another color, like using red to intensify green, because that would imply some subordination of red. I didn’t want color to serve me.

I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t. I want it to look like something it is.

Even at this late date, I go into my studio, and I think ‘Is this going to be it? Is it the end?’ You see, nearly everything terrorizes me. When an artist loses that terror, he’s through.

I’m quite taken aback when I get something that appears to be technically a good photograph, because it’s not necessarily my intention.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out the real world.