Featured Artist

Robert Rauschenberg was born Milton Rauschenberg on October 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas. In 1947, after serving in the U.S. Navy, he enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute and traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian the following year.

In fall 1948, Rauschenberg returned to the United States to study under Josef Albers (1888–1976) at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. While taking classes at the Art Students League, New York, from 1949 to 1951, Rauschenberg was offered his first solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery.

Rauschenberg was quoted as saying that he wanted to work "in the gap between art and life" suggesting he questioned the distinction between art objects and everyday objects.

A period of vigorous experimentation in 1953 culminated in two of his most controversial, now iconic works: Erased de Kooning Drawing and Automobile Tire Print (both 1953). His best known body of work, the Combines (1953–64), paired representational elements, such as magazine and newspaper clippings, fragments of clothing, and construction debris and other items gathered in the streets of New York, with compositional strategies explored by the Abstract Expressionists. Blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and collage, these works earned Rauschenberg international acclaim by the mid-1960s.

The 1960s saw Rauschenberg become increasingly active politically, with particular emphasis on global humanitarian and environmental issues. At the end of the decade, he moved permanently to Captiva Island, Florida where he continued to mix art materials and disciplines in provocative ways.

Rauschenberg’s nontraditional art practice and creative energy generated an enduring influence that impacted generations of artists, as noted by art historian Branden W. Joseph: “Rauschenberg’s was a position with which artists across the board were confronted and to which they almost necessarily had to respond… Rauschenberg’s work served as a stimulus, an impetus and a challenge.”

His work has been described variously as a precursor to Pop art, Minimalism, process art, Conceptualism, and performance, testifying to the revolutionary effects that his cross-disciplinary and iconoclastic approach had on the field of American art in the postwar period.

Rauschenberg died from heart failure on May 12, 2008.