| Born Oct. 22, 1925, Rauschenberg was born Milton Earnest Rauschenberg in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas U.S. died May 12, 2008, Captiva Island, Fla. U.S. painter and graphic artist. He studied under Josef Albers. His "combine" paintings of the 1950s, incorporating objects such as soda bottles, traffic barricades, and stuffed birds, anticipated the Pop art movement. In later work, he used silkscreen and other techniques to transfer images from commercial print media and his own photographs to canvas, reinforcing the images and unifying them compositionally with bold strokes of paint. His work has roots in Dada and the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp.
Robert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas, of German and Cherokee lineage. He attended the local public schools before becoming a naval corpsman. He began his formal art education at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1946. The following year he went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. Rauschenberg was born Milton Earnest Rauschenberg in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas. As you might imagine, being born in this era, in this part of the country meant his parents were fundamentalist Christians.
Not much is known about his early life or how his strict Christian upbringing affected him both personally and professionally. However, we do know that he had undiagnosed dyslexia that partially prevented him from advancing his studies and forging a career in the medical field. Realistically, his lack of diagnosis likely stemmed from the fact that dyslexia was far less understood at that time. So, Rauschenberg seemingly would have had the deck stacked against him when it came to expressing himself creatively.
In 1948 Rauschenberg returned to America to study with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Albers stressed design as a discipline, and Rauschenberg felt he needed such training. He later admitted that Albers was the teacher most important to his development. About 1950 Rauschenberg began to paint his all-white, then all-black, paintings. From these ascetic exercises in total minimalism he turned to making giant, richly textured and colored collage-assemblages, which he called "combines."
In 1952 Rauschenberg traveled in Italy and North Africa. The following year he was living in New York City and developing his concept of the combine. His best-known and most audacious combines are the Bed (1955), an upright bed, complete with a patchwork quilt and pillow, that has been spattered with paint; and the amazing Monogram (1959), a collagelike painting-platform resting flat on the floor, in the center of which stands a stuffed, horned ram with a rubber tire around its middle. About his art Rauschenberg explained: "Painting relates to both art and life. I try to act in the gap between the two." In the 1950s he participated in "happenings," an improvisational type of theater.
In 1958 Rauschenberg had an exhibition in New York City that catapulted him to prominence, and his paintings soon entered the collections of every large museum in America and abroad. Not satisfied with cultivating his career as a painter, in 1963 he toured with the Merce Cunningham Dance Theater as an active participant. In 1964 Rauschenberg received first prize at the Venice Biennale. In the late 1960s he concentrated on developing series of silk-screen prints and lithographs. Current (1970), a set of giant silk-screen prints, was politically inspired. Rauschenberg died of heart failure on his property on Captiva Island on May 12th, 2008.
In the waning years of his life, Rauschenberg spent much of his time in his Captiva Island, Florida property. His romantic life was as diverse and captivating as his professional one. After marrying Susan Weil and having one son with her, the couple divorced in 1953. Afterward, Rauschenberg had romantic relationships with other contemporaries, including Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly. His final partner was originally his artistic assistant, Darryl Pottorf.
Rauschenberg remains active in the art world. Started in the late 1980s, he created the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Exchange. The exchange was created to broaden cultural ties. In each county he visited, he would create art and leave one piece behind. The others were added to the ever growing collection. |
