1. Robert Rauschenberg 1962 – 2008 American collage artist
Robert Rauschenberg was born “Milton” in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, a refinery town where, as he said, “It was very easy to grow up without ever seeing a painting.” In that small town, even the air smelled like oil, and Robert’s family struggled every day. His mother made economies like making new clothes from scraps of old ones. Robert said later that all this taught him to find beauty in unexpected places. He had a normal school life and showed an ability to draw early on – not that anyone noticed.
After high school he tried college but it didn’t work out (he was dyslexic, for one thing). He enlisted in the Navy during World War II and was sent to work in a naval hospital in California. There he went into an art gallery for the first time, and recognized some paintings from playing cards that his mother had at home. He realized that a person could be an artist – that these pictures were made by someone.
Robert Rauschenberg
1962 – 2008
American collage artist

2. Monogram, 1955 (other pieces in the background)
After the military, he tried different careers and tried different art schools. He even went to France to an art academy on the GI Bill, but he still wasn’t a very good student and spent most of his time wandering around Paris. He ended up at a famous school in North Carolina called Black Mountain College, and he learned to put some discipline around his imagination. He made good friends there and starting making art of the things he found doing his chore there, the garbage collection. He then moved to New York, the center of the art world at that time.
These days we take for granted many of the ideas that Robert Rauschenberg explored in his art, starting with creating art from what you find around you. But back then it was something new. One day Robert found a stuffed angora goat, took it home and washed it, then put paint on its face. He ringed it with a tire and stood it on a collaged base. He called it Monogram, and it was one of the first pieces that brought him a lot of attention. You’ve got to admit it’s kind of funny.
Monogram, 1955 (other pieces in the background)

3. He lived a starving artist lifestyle in New York, trying to make a name for himself. He knew many of the older, more famous artists, like Jackson Pollock, but he thought those guys took themselves too seriously. Robert was all about trying new things, using whatever appealed to him in that moment. He was making pieces that weren’t really paintings or really sculptures – he called them “combines” to keep people from being confused.
An early one is Bed. Here he framed a well-worn pillow, sheet, and quilt, scribbled on them with pencil, and splashed them with paint. These bedclothes, legend has it, were his own, making the work as personal as a self-portrait, or more so. "Painting relates to both art and life," he once said. "I try to act in that gap between the two."
Bed, 1955

4. More “Combines” Canyon and Collection
Here are a few more Combines – as Rauschenberg asks again and again, “What are the limits of art?” A friend called him one day to offer him a treasure she had found in a dumpster -- the stuffed bald eagle which became the centerpiece of Canyon. It juts out from a canvas covered with items including a photograph of his son, Christopher; a postcard of the Statue of Liberty; a man’s white shirt, cut and opened up; a crumpled tube of paint; fragments of printed words; and an industrial metal drum. Rauschenberg believed in objects as the stuff of life and of art.
Collection is the first Combine painting, designed to hang on a wall. He’s playing with color here, notably red, yellow and blue (the influence of his friend Jasper Johns?). If you see the work up close, you can see comic strips, squirts of oil paint, different fabrics, newspaper clippings of car thefts and department store ads. There are also tiny reproductions of artworks by Renoir and van Gogh – truly a collection of high and low.
More “Combines”
Canyon and Collection

5. Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1960
Andy Warhol:
Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1960
You can see a direct connection between Rauschenberg and Pop Art, especially Andy Warhol, in this combine that uses Coca-Cola bottles, wings and a piece of a staircase. Rauschenberg and Warhol about the same age, but Robert got his start in the art world much earlier than Andy did. He was taken to see Warhol’s silkscreen paintings and was fascinated. He also noticed that Warhol had lined up Coke bottles, like he had done, three years earlier. Warhol did eventually share his silkscreen techniques with Rauschenberg, but the two men were always rivals as well as friends.
Rauschenberg once said, “I feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”
Coca Cola Plan, 1958

6. Minutiae, 1954 created as part of the set for a John Cage ballet;
created of oil paint, paper, fabric, newspaper, wood, metal, plastic with mirror, and string on a wooden structure with a beaded framework
Rauschenberg always had many projects going on at once. He was close friends with experimental musicians and dancers and loved to create the sets for their shows – like this one. You can see here the influence of his mother and her fabric scraps – even though he said once that all he wanted for his high school graduation was his first store-bought shirt, he also loved making something out of nothing.

7. Many of the combines could be read almost as an autobiography – with family photographs, pieces of wallpaper, and fabric and doors tied to his childhood and his professional and private life. A photograph of an elegant young man dressed in white advances on a mirrored base shared with a Plymouth Rock hen. The vertical white table leg is like a column separating the young man and the hen’s space. The dandy is like a “portrait of the artist as a young man,” and a Southern man (like Robert) at that. Above are many images of the artist’s family and his past.
Autobiography, 1954

8. Untitled, 1955
oil paint, crayon, pastel, paper, fabric, print reproductions, photographs and cardboard on wood

9. Rauschenberg began to experiment with silk-screening techniques, combining it with paint and collage. Silkscreening is a technique in which a design is imposed on a specially prepared fine-mesh screen (with the blank areas coated to fill the holes up) and then transferred onto paper or canvas by pushing paint or ink through the screen. He could transfer newspaper photographs, art reproductions, and his own photos to his canvas.
Borrowing images from other artists and from pop culture, he created art with popular images that could be duplicated over and over – not just for a museum, but something that could be shared widely. Here he uses many of his favorite motifs – the Statue of Liberty, a bald eagle and a box of fruit, with the repeating circle pattern, combined with a shot of a Texas refinery scene (in red).
Windward, 1963

10. The symbolism is fairly straightforward here: Military helicopters represent the Vietnam War, the bald eagle indicates American patriotism, and Rubens’ Venus suggests that this is a work about love and war. Although Rauschenberg made experimental modern art, he had great respect for the Old Masters and often used images of their work in his.
Tracer, 1958

11. More favorite Rauschenberg images – he was fascinated with the ideas of flight and space travel and loved to add astronauts to his pictures. There’s the fruit again, and a photo of President John Kennedy. Rauschenberg said about Kennedy that he “reestablished what a President is supposed to be—somebody special.” If Rauschenberg were working today, the parallel would be President Obama, another young, energetic leader who brought hope to many.
Retroactive I, 1963

12. Here’s another crazy bunch of images –street signs, the Statue of Liberty, a Michelangelo ceiling, city buildings and a glass of water. The splashes of colorful paint help pull everything together.
Estate, 1964

13. Robert Rauschenberg died at the age of 82 on Captiva Island, Florida, where he had lived – and been a beloved local fixture – for decades. He is remembered for his innovative approach to blending images, materials and categories, finding beauty in everyday objects and sights. This remains one of the most significant developments in the history of modern art.