Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American painter, sculptor, printmaker, and performance artist associated with the Neo-Dada and postmodern movements, born in Port Arthur on October 22, 1925.
His education took him across several institutions, including the University of Texas at Austin, the Kansas City Art Institute, the Académie Julian, Black Mountain College, and the Art Students League of New York. Between 1954 and 1964 he created the works known as Combines, a body of work that stands among his most recognized contributions. A notable individual piece from his career is Canyon. His practice extended across painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, graphic art, design, and performance, reflecting the breadth of his engagement with materials and forms.
Over the course of his career Rauschenberg received the National Medal of Arts, the Praemium Imperiale, the AIGA Medal, and was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. He died on May 12, 2008, in Captiva. His work remained anchored throughout in the concerns of Neo-Dada and modern art, movements that shaped the frame within which his Combines and multidisciplinary output were made and received.
Quotes by Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg's insights on:
I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand - I use those words interchangeably - another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I'm not one. I'd rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can't ignore.
Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.
I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.
Steichen bought my first photographs that I ever sold. He recognized the style from the school of Black Mountain. After that, it was about twenty years before I sold another photograph.
I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else.
And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.
Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else's aesthetics. I think you're born an artist or not. I couldn't have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.
There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.