rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg (American, b. 1925)

From 1973, the first year of the newly created Art Galleries and Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program at the California State University, Long Beach, through 1999, when the then-newly acquired print Preview (1974) was on display, the work of Robert Rauschenberg has enlivened the University Art Museum. Many University Art Museum exhibitions provided the opportunity to explore his art, which was among the most innovative of the 20th century, including The Altered Print (1973), Rauschenberg, Performance 1954–1984 (1985), The Great American Pop Art Store: Multiples of the Sixties (1997),and Graphic Abstraction in America: A View from the First Century (1998). Having built the bridge from Abstract Expressionism in the first half of the century to Pop Art, which informed the second fifty years, Rauschenberg is also credited with initiating the most far-reaching advances in printmaking. He was the first to create lithographs on a scale with the monumental paintings of the 1950s and 1960s, and he developed photo-transfer techniques that wove the vernacular world into his art and infused his signature style.

Born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, Robert Rauschenberg originally studied Pharmacology at the University of Texas before his draft into the military. It was during his military service that Rauschenberg developed his artistic interests often sketching what he saw around him. After his discharge 1947, he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the following year at the Academie Julian in Paris. On his return to the United States he enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The faculty at Black Mountain consisted of artists such as Merce Cunningham, Joseph Albers, Robert Motherwell, and the composer John Cage. It was here that Rauschenberg took to the experimental nature of Cage’s performances and musical compositions. While at Black Mountain, Rauschenberg painted the monochromatic white paintings in 1951. Rauschenberg left Black Mountain in 1952 for Europe, returning to New York in 1953. This same year Rauschenberg meets Jasper Johns both of whom worked in rejection of the previous abstract expressionist generation. The two became very close, holding neighboring studios and often exchanging ideas about their art until the friendship ended in 1961.

Throughout the 1950s Rauschenberg sought out new methods of paintings using non-traditional art materials on the canvas like newspaper, dirt, tissue, and other found objects that were soon termed by Rauschenberg as his “Combines.” The most famous of these was Monogram, in which Rauschenberg uses a stuffed angora goat, a tire, and paint. In keeping with the rejection of abstract expressionism, Rauschenberg chose to look to the outside world exploring what he saw as gap between “art and life.” He combined objects found in everyday life and brought it into the high art realm, similar to methods of Marcel Duchamp, and so Rauschenberg has been categorized during this era as Neo-Dada.

With the 1960s and the rise of Pop, Rauschenberg’s work transitioned away from the combines and sculptural works to silkscreens. Rauschenberg used overlapping images from popular culture and fine art that reflected a sense of random order, calling attention to how images function in modern society. It was during the 1960s that Rauschenberg was given his first retrospective at the Jewish Museum, and was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale for painting in 1964. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Rauschenberg continued to produce silkscreens as well as work on various collaborative projects and performances. Between 1985 and 1990 he worked on ROCI, Rauschenberg’s Overseas Cultural Interchange where he teamed with international artists to produce a body of work that reflected the art and life of cultures from around the world. In 1997 the Guggenheim Museum, New York, held its largest retrospective of Rauschenberg’s work that traveled to Europe and Houston. Rauschenberg currently lives and works in Florida and New York, and continued to exhibit his work internationally.