Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg, born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg on October 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas, was an American artist who worked across painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. His father was of German descent and worked for a utility company; his mother was of Dutch heritage. Rauschenberg incorrectly claimed his paternal grandmother was Cherokee.

Raised by Fundamentalist Christian parents, he had a younger sister. He briefly studied pharmacology at the University of Texas at Austin but dropped out due to academic difficulty—he was unaware he had dyslexia—and a refusal to dissect a frog. Drafted into the Navy in 1944, he served as a neuropsychiatric technician in California until his discharge around 1945 or 1946.

He then studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and in Paris, where he met fellow student Susan Weil and changed his first name to Robert. In 1948, he and Weil enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

There, he sought out Josef Albers, hoping the Bauhaus founder’s strict methods would curb his sloppiness. Rauschenberg later called himself “Albers’ dunce,” but found greater kinship with composer John Cage, who encouraged his experimental approach. From 1949 to 1952, he studied at the Art Students League of New York with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, meeting artists Knox Martin and Cy Twombly.

Personal life

Rauschenberg married Susan Weil in 1950; their son Christopher was born in 1951. They separated in 1952 and divorced the following year. He later had romantic relationships with Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and poet John Giorno, among others.

His final partner of 25 years was artist Darryl Pottorf. He lived in New York City’s NoHo district in the 1970s and bought a property on Captiva Island, Florida, in 1968, making it his permanent residence by fall 1970. He died of heart failure there on May 12, 2008.

Work

His work is linked to the New York School, Conceptual Art, Pop art, and Neo-Dada. He is best known for his Combines (1954–1964), which merged everyday objects into artworks that blurred painting and sculpture. His approach was called Neo-Dadaist, a label he shared with Jasper Johns.

Rauschenberg said he wanted to work “in the gap between” art and life, questioning the boundary between art objects and ordinary things, echoing Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. At Black Mountain, he experimented with mixed media, creating Night Blooming paintings (1951) by pressing pebbles and gravel into black pigment. That same year, he and Weil made full-body blueprints in his New York apartment, hoping to turn them into wallpaper designs. From 1952 to 1953, he traveled in Italy and North Africa with Twombly, making collages and small sculptures from found materials.

After exhibiting them in Rome and Florence, he threw unsold works into the Arno River on a critic’s suggestion. Back in New York in 1953, he began sculpting with found objects from his Lower Manhattan neighborhood. Rauschenberg received the International Grand Prize in Painting at the 1964 Venice Biennale and the National Medal of Arts in 1993.