Robert Rauschenberg: The Complete Story
Robert Rauschenberg asked de Kooning for a drawing in order to erase it, slept under his own artwork after putting his quilt in it, and glued a stuffed goat into a tire. Then he won Venice, wired art to engineers, and toured the Cold War with a paintbrush.
The dyslexic kid from a Texas refinery town spent sixty years insisting that anything, a bed, a goat, a radio, could be a painting. Mostly he was right.
Rauschenberg at a glance:
Born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1925; the navy trained him as a neuropsychiatric technician.
Erased a de Kooning drawing in 1953 with the older painter's consent.
Built the Combines from 1954 to 1964: bed, goat, eagle, radios.
First American to win the Venice Grand Prize for painting, in 1964.
Buffalo II sold for 88.8 million dollars in 2019.
Port Arthur to Black Mountain
Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on October 22, 1925, dyslexic in a family that expected a preacher.
The navy made him a neuropsychiatric technician during the war, where he discovered he could not aim a rifle at anyone but could draw.
At Black Mountain College from 1948 he studied under the disciplinarian Josef Albers, later joking that he was Albers's worst student, and met John Cage and Merce Cunningham, his lifelong co-conspirators.
1953: the erased de Kooning
In 1953 Rauschenberg knocked on Willem de Kooning's door and asked for a drawing so he could erase it. De Kooning, understanding perfectly, chose one dense with ink and crayon to make it hard.
A month and about forty erasers later, Erased de Kooning Drawing existed: a ghost sheet, now at SFMOMA, that still starts arguments about what making art means.
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Combines: the bed, the goat, the eagle
Between 1954 and 1964 he built the Combines, part painting, part junk sculpture.
Bed of 1955 is his own pillow and quilt, painted; Monogram, finished in 1959, is the angora goat in a tire that now anchors the Moderna Museet in Stockholm; Canyon of 1959 carries a stuffed bald eagle, which decades later made the work legally unsellable under eagle-protection law until it was donated to MoMA in 2012.
In 1964 he became the first American to take the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale, and Europe called it an invasion.
The myth of the prankster
Because the objects are funny, Rauschenberg gets remembered as the joker between Abstract Expressionism and Pop. His own formula was serious: he wanted to work in the gap between art and life.
He co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology with Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver in 1966, watched the Apollo 11 launch as NASA's invited artist in 1969, and from 1984 to 1991 self-funded ROCI, hauling exhibitions through Chile, China, Cuba, and the USSR at a cost of about ten million dollars of his own money.
Captiva, and where to see him
From 1970 he worked on Captiva Island, Florida, printing, assembling, and mentoring until his death there on May 12, 2008, at 82. 8 million dollars.
MoMA and SFMOMA hold the touchstones, Stockholm keeps the goat, and the Rauschenberg Foundation still runs residencies in his Captiva studios.
How a Combine holds together
Rauschenberg shopped his own street: cardboard, quilts, taxidermy, and radios entered the work in the state he found them.
The rule was adjacency, not hierarchy. Paint and object meet without one illustrating the other, which is why the Combines still refuse to settle into either category.
The technology decade
With Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver he co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology in 1966, pairing dozens of artists with engineers.
Their 9 Evenings performances misfired gloriously, and the idea stuck: the artist-engineer team became a standard studio model, from installations to today's media art.
ROCI: the self-funded world tour
From 1984 to 1991 he hauled exhibitions to Chile, China, Cuba, the USSR, and beyond, meeting artists across cold-war lines and spending about ten million dollars of his own money.
Museums thought it quixotic. He called it artist-to-artist diplomacy, and kept the receipts.
The Robert Rauschenberg questions that keep coming up
What is a Combine? His invention of the mid-1950s: a work that combines painting with real objects, quilts, ladders, taxidermy, radios, refusing the border between canvas and world.
Why did Rauschenberg erase a de Kooning? To test whether an artwork could be made by removal. De Kooning cooperated, deliberately choosing a drawing that would resist, and the erasure took about a month.
What is the story with the eagle? Canyon includes a stuffed bald eagle, protected by federal law, so the work could never legally be sold. After a famous tax standoff it was donated to MoMA in 2012.
How much is a Rauschenberg worth? Buffalo II brought 88.8 million dollars at Christie's in 2019, and the Combines are considered essentially priceless because the great ones are locked in museums.
What happened in 9 Evenings? Ten artists and thirty engineers staged technology performances in New York in 1966: sonar, infrared, wireless. Half the systems failed live, and the collaborations changed studio practice anyway.
Why is the eagle work unsellable? Canyon contains a stuffed bald eagle protected by federal law, so it could only be donated. MoMA received it in 2012 after a famous tax standoff.
More secrets to unlock
One last fact
The navy trained Rauschenberg to care for traumatized sailors, and he said the ward taught him more than art school: how much life a found object carries. The quilt on Bed was the one he actually slept under.