Robert Rauschenberg: The Complete Story
Robert Rauschenberg was the American artist who blew open what a painting could contain. He glued tyres, stuffed birds, road signs, pillows and a whole stuffed goat onto his canvases, calling the results Combines.
He wanted to work in the gap between art and life, and he dragged ordinary life right into the frame.
His most famous gesture was to take a drawing by a great painter and rub it out.
Born: Port Arthur, Texas, 1925
Known for: the Combines, Erased de Kooning Drawing, silkscreen paintings
Died: Captiva, Florida, 2008
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Painting that grew into the room
Rauschenberg's Combines refuse to stay flat. Monogram is a stuffed angora goat with a car tyre around its middle, standing on a painted board. Bed is his own quilt and pillow, hung on the wall and splashed with paint. See what is abstract art.
He treated the canvas as a place to collect the world, not depict it. Junk became material, and the line between painting and sculpture simply dissolved.
The famous act of erasing
In 1953 Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing, then spent weeks rubbing it out. He exhibited the nearly blank sheet as Erased de Kooning Drawing, a work made by undoing someone else's.
It sounds like a prank, but it asked a real question: can removal be creation? The piece became a cornerstone of conceptual art.
Pictures pulled from the newsfeed
In the 1960s he turned to silkscreen, printing photographs of astronauts, presidents, city streets and old masters straight onto his canvases. The result looks like a mind flooded with media. See Pop art.
He blurred the news, sport and history into restless collages, anticipating the image overload of the decades to come.
Art, dance and silence
Rauschenberg worked far beyond painting. He designed sets and costumes for the choreographer Merce Cunningham and collaborated with the composer John Cage.
His all white paintings, blank canvases that catch passing shadows, helped inspire Cage's silent piece. For Rauschenberg, the audience and the room were part of the work.
Rauschenberg, briefly answered
What is Robert Rauschenberg famous for?
His Combines, artworks fusing painting with real objects, and Erased de Kooning Drawing.
What is a Combine?
His term for a work that mixes painting with found three dimensional objects.
Did he really erase a de Kooning?
Yes, he rubbed out a drawing de Kooning gave him and showed the blank page as art.
When did he die?
In 2008, in Florida.
Why the goat still matters
Rauschenberg tore down the wall between high art and everyday stuff, and almost everything since, from installation to collage culture, walks through the gap he opened. A goat in a tyre turned out to be a doorway.
One last detail. Late in life he launched a project to make art across many countries and gave much of his fortune to support other artists. The man who collaged the world spent his last decades trying to connect it.