Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg: The Gap Between Art and Life

In 1953 a young Texan knocked on Willem de Kooning's door and asked the most celebrated painter in America for a drawing he could rub out. He had tried erasing his own work and found it meaningless; only a masterwork by a universally recognized artist would do. De Kooning agreed, reluctantly. What remains — a nearly blank sheet, infrared-scanned decades later to reveal female figures in graphite and charcoal — is *Erased de Kooning Drawing*, and it announced a career built on the idea that subtraction, accident and other people's leftovers could be raw material. "Painting relates to both art and life," Rauschenberg said. "I try to act in that gap between the two."

Port Arthur and the Dunce

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born on October 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas, to Dora Carolina and Ernest R. Rauschenberg; he had a younger sister, Janet. He was dyslexic and did not know it, a fact he grasped only after dropping out of the University of Texas at Austin, where he had been studying pharmacology. He went on to the Kansas City Art Institute, then the Académie Julian in Paris — where he met the painter Susan Weil and, in a small act of self-invention, changed his name from Milton to Robert.

In 1948 he arrived at Black Mountain College in North Carolina specifically to study under Josef Albers, whose Bauhaus rigor he hoped might discipline what he considered his own sloppiness. It did not take. He later described himself as "Albers' dunce, the outstanding example of what he was not talking about." The teacher who mattered was on the same campus: John Cage, whose tolerance for chance and silence gave him both a method and a lifelong ally.

White, Then Everything

He married Susan Weil in the summer of 1950; their son Christopher was born on July 16, 1951. They separated in June 1952 and divorced in 1953. Rauschenberg went on to relationships with Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, and spent his last twenty-five years with the artist Darryl Pottorf, formerly his assistant.

The *White Paintings* of 1951 were made with ordinary house paint rolled onto flat, unembellished panels. They look like a refusal. Cage understood them otherwise, calling them "airports for the lights, shadows and particles" — surfaces that register whatever passes in front of them, so the room finishes the picture. In 1952 Rauschenberg took part in Cage's *Theatre Piece No. 1* at Black Mountain, usually counted as the first Happening.

With the de Kooning erasure of the following year, the packaging mattered as much as the emptiness. Around 1955 Jasper Johns lettered the inscription — ERASED DE KOONING DRAWING BY ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG 1953 — in machine-precise capitals with a pantograph, and the sheet went into a gilded frame. Rauschenberg was adamant it was integral: "DO NOT REMOVE DRAWING FROM FRAME FRAME IS PART OF DRAWING."

The Combines

Then came the works that made his name and needed a new word, which he supplied: Combine. Running from 1954 to 1964, these hybrids hung on the wall or stood on the floor, giving, as his foundation puts it, "new significance to ordinary objects by placing them in the context of art." There are more than sixty.

*Bed* (1955) is a worn quilt, sheet and pillow smeared with red paint and hung vertically like a painting — frequently read as a self-portrait, though Rauschenberg called it "one of the friendliest pictures I've ever painted." *Monogram* (1955–59) is a taxidermied Angora goat, bought for $15 from a secondhand furniture store on Seventh Avenue because that was all the cash he had, with a car tire around its middle; the union of goat and tire, he said, recalled the interwoven letters of a monogram. Three versions across four years arrived at the final arrangement, an idea from Johns: the goat on casters in the middle of the floor, as if in a pasture. Pontus Hultén bought it for Stockholm's Moderna Museet in 1965. *Canyon* (1959) uses a stuffed golden eagle salvaged from the trash, which later made the work legally unsellable under the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. Others include *Odalisk*, *Rebus* and *Satellite*, with its pheasant and socks.

The critic Leo Steinberg gave the Combines their most durable reading. Each, he wrote, was "a receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered" — a shift from the upright window of Renaissance painting to what he called the flatbed picture plane, a horizontal work surface like a printer's bed.

Silkscreens, Dances, Engineers

After visiting Andy Warhol's studio in 1962, Rauschenberg began transferring photographic images to canvas by silkscreen, producing among other things the thirty-two-foot *Barge*. Critics promptly filed him under Pop. In 1964 he won the International Grand Prize in Painting at the Venice Biennale, among the first American artists to take it.

He never stayed inside painting. He designed sets, lighting and costumes for Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor; choreographed his own first piece, *Pelican*, for the Judson Dance Theater in May 1963; and in 1966 staged *Open Score* at the 69th Regiment Armory for *9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering*. With the Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver he founded Experiments in Art and Technology that same year to pair artists with engineers, producing works like *Soundings* (1968), a light installation that answered ambient noise. In 1969 NASA invited him to watch Apollo 11 launch; the *Stoned Moon* lithographs followed.

Captiva and ROCI

He bought a beach house on Captiva Island, Florida, in July 1968, and by the autumn of 1970 had made it his permanent home and studio. From there came the most quixotic project of his life: the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, a seven-year tour from 1984 to 1991 through Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, China, Tibet, Japan, Cuba, the U.S.S.R., Germany and Malaysia, making work in each place from local materials and collaborators. He had already founded Change, Inc. in 1970 to make emergency grants to artists, and in 1990 established the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Why Robert Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty was promiscuous attention: an ability to see any object — a goat, a quilt, a stuffed eagle — as already halfway to being art, and to hold dozens of unrelated things in one work without resolving them into a message. The Whitney calls him "a relentlessly pioneering figure in American art" who "inventively fused painting, sculpture, collage, photography, and printmaking into new, hybrid forms." Steinberg's flatbed picture plane names the discovery precisely: Rauschenberg changed the orientation of the picture, from a window you look through to a surface things land on. That is a formal invention, not a mood, and installation, assemblage and art-and-technology all run through it.

The objections are not small, and the best witness against him is de Kooning, who consented and then was angry when the erased sheet was shown, feeling that "the murder should have remained private, a personal affair between artists," and calling the idea "sort of a corny idea." He had a point: the work is famous mainly because of whose drawing it was, and Johns's lettering and the gilt frame do the persuading the blank paper cannot. SFMOMA, which owns it, likens the assembly to a religious reliquary, dependent on ornate presentation and an attached story to create an aura around what it holds — less a compliment than an accurate description. Beyond that, the Combines lean on chance and salvage, which makes the line between inspired selection and simply not deciding hard to draw — Albers, a serious judge, thought him undisciplined and said so. And the market now runs ahead of the work: *Buffalo II* fetched $88.8 million in 2019, a sum that flatters whatever it lands on. What survives all of it is the range. Very few artists change what a picture physically is.

Legacy

Rauschenberg died of heart failure on Captiva Island on May 12, 2008, at eighty-two. He had received the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate in 1986 and the National Medal of Arts from Bill Clinton in 1993. His foundation still funds artists and environmental and humanitarian work, which is consistent: a man who spent fifty years insisting art and life were adjacent was never going to leave a purely aesthetic estate.

Achievements

• National Medal of Arts
• Praemium Imperiale — 1998
• AIGA Medal
• Notable work: Canyon
• Movement: Neo-Dada and Postmodernism