Milton Ernest "Robert" or "Bob" Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and multi-media artist, whose work has been associated with numerous mid-20th century art movements including the New York School, Conceptual Art, Pop art, and Neo-Dada. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines (1954–1964), a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was primarily a painter and a sculptor, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance.
Rauschenberg received numerous awards during his nearly 60-year artistic career. Among the most prominent were the International Grand Prize in Painting at the 32nd Venice Biennale in 1964 and the National Medal of Arts in 1993.
Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida, until his death on May 12, 2008.
Rauschenberg was born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, the son of Dora Carolina (née Matson) and Ernest R. Rauschenberg. His father was of German and his mother of Dutch descent. Rauschenberg incorrectly claimed that his paternal grandmother Tina “Tiny” Jane Howard was Cherokee. His father worked for Gulf States Utilities, a light and power company. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians. He had a younger sister named Janet Begneaud.
At 18, Rauschenberg was admitted to the University of Texas at Austin where he began studying pharmacology, but he dropped out shortly after due to the difficulty of the coursework—not realizing at this point that he was dyslexic—and because of his unwillingness to dissect a frog in biology class. He was drafted into the United States Navy in 1944. Based in California, he served as a neuropsychiatric technician in a Navy hospital until his discharge in 1945 or 1946.
Rauschenberg subsequently studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris, France, where he met fellow art student Susan Weil. At that time he also changed his name from Milton to Robert. In 1948 Rauschenberg joined Weil in enrolling at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
At Black Mountain, Rauschenberg sought out Josef Albers, a founder of the Bauhaus in Germany, whom he had read about in an August 1948 issue of Time magazine. He hoped that Albers' rigorous teaching methods might curb his habitual sloppiness. Albers' preliminary design courses relied on strict discipline that did not allow for any "uninfluenced experimentation."
Rauschenberg became, in his own words, "Albers' dunce, the outstanding example of what he was not talking about". Although Rauschenberg considered Albers his most important teacher, he found a more compatible sensibility in John Cage, an established composer of avant-garde music. Like Rauschenberg, Cage had moved away from the teachings of his instructor, Arnold Schoenberg, in favor of a more experimentalist approach to music. Cage provided Rauschenberg with much-needed support and encouragement during the early years of his career, and the two remained friends and artistic collaborators for decades to follow.
From 1949 to 1952 Rauschenberg studied with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor at the Art Students League of New York, where he met fellow artists Knox Martin and Cy Twombly.
Rauschenberg married Susan Weil in the summer of 1950 at the Weil family home in Outer Island, Connecticut. Their only child, Christopher, was born July 16, 1951. The two separated in June 1952 and divorced in 1953. Thereafter, Rauschenberg had romantic relationships with fellow artists Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, poet John Giorno, among others. His partner for the last 25 years of his life was artist Darryl Pottorf, his former assistant.
In the 1970s he moved into NoHo in Manhattan in New York City.
Rauschenberg purchased the Beach House, his first property on Captiva Island, on July 26, 1968. However, the property did not become his permanent residence until the fall of 1970.
Rauschenberg died of heart failure on May 12, 2008, on Captiva Island, Florida.
Rauschenberg's approach was sometimes called "Neo-Dadaist," a label he shared with the painter Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg famously stated that "painting relates to both art and life," and he wanted to work "in the gap between the two." Like many of his Dadaist predecessors, Rauschenberg questioned the distinction between art objects and everyday objects, and his use of readymade materials reprised the intellectual issues raised by Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917). Duchamp's Dadaist influence can also be observed in Jasper Johns' paintings of targets, numerals, and flags, which were familiar cultural symbols: "things the mind already knows."
At Black Mountain College, Rauschenberg experimented with a variety of artistic mediums including printmaking, drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, and theatre; his works often featured some combination of these. He created his Night Blooming paintings (1951) at Black Mountain by pressing pebbles and gravel into black pigment on canvas. In the very same year he made full body blueprints in collaboration with Susan Weil in his New York apartment, which "they hope to turn [...] into screen and wallpaper designs".
From the fall of 1952 to the spring of 1953, Rauschenberg traveled in Italy and North Africa with his fellow artist and partner Cy Twombly. There, he created collages and small sculptures, including the Scatole Personali and Feticci Personali, out of found materials. He exhibited them at galleries in Rome and Florence. To Rauschenberg's surprise, a number of the works sold; many that did not he threw into the river Arno, following the suggestion of an art critic who reviewed his show.
Upon his return to New York City in 1953, Rauschenberg began creating sculpture with found materials from his Lower Manhattan neighborhood, such as scrap metal, wood, and twine. Throughout the 1950s, Rauschenberg supported himself by designing storefront window displays for Tiffany & Co. and Bonwit Teller, first with Susan Weil and later in partnership with Jasper Johns under the pseudonym Matson Jones.
In a famously cited incident of 1953, Rauschenberg requested a drawing from the Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning for the express purpose of erasing it as an artistic statement. This conceptual work, titled Erased de Kooning Drawing, was executed with the elder artist's consent.