Artist

Beginning in 1948, Rauschenberg attended Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. His work at Black Mountain reveals many of the principal themes that recur throughout his oeuvre: sequences and progressions through time, grid formats, doubling and mirroring, and a sense of human scale. During these formative years, Rauschenberg used a wide range of art-making media, including printmaking, painting, photography, drawing (in both conventional and experimental techniques), and sculpture. As would become his hallmark, he often used media in combination, blurring distinctions between artistic categories. Collaboration with other artists would also remain an impetus throughout his career, and his early work with the composer John Cage and the dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham inspired him to engage in conceptual modes and performance.

After settling in New York in fall 1949, Rauschenberg was introduced to the work of the Abstract Expressionists and began to incorporate their free brushwork into his own paintings. In the art he made both at Black Mountain and in New York, Rauschenberg expanded on the abstract idiom with the inclusion of recognizable images and materials taken from his immediate environment. He impressed gravel into the dark surfaces of his Night Blooming paintings (1951); the uninflected White Paintings (1951) became screens for light and shadow, responding to the conditions around them; and newspaper collages formed the grounds of the Black Paintings (1951–ca. 1955).

The collages and sculptures Rauschenberg made in 1952–53 while traveling with the artist Cy Twombly in Europe and North Africa contain many of his enduring motifs: body parts, modes of transportation, fine art reproductions, lettering, and diagrams. The fetishistic assemblages he made in Italy from found materials, as well as the Elemental Sculptures, begun on his return to New York in 1953, were laboratories for the later Combines.

For Rauschenberg, there was a natural progression from the Red Paintings—a series he executed at the beginning of this period—to the Combines (1954–64), as, initially, two-dimensional collage and, later, three-dimensional objects came to the fore. By summer 1954, Rauschenberg had made the first fully realized Combine, eliminating all distinctions between painting and sculpture. Expanding on Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade, Rauschenberg imbued such ordinary objects as a patchwork quilt and an automobile tire with new significance by combining unrelated items and incorporating them into the context of art. When the artist first exhibited Red Paintings and Combines at the Egan Gallery, New York, in December 1954, critics were baffled by the works, which challenged existing definitions of art.

Less than a decade later, however, Rauschenberg’s reputation as the leading artist of his generation was established following his first retrospective, held in 1963 at the Jewish Museum, New York, and his acceptance the following year of the grand prize for painting at the 32nd Venice Biennale. Among the works by Rauschenberg shown in the U.S. Pavilion in Venice were many of his now-celebrated Combines, including Bed (1955), as well as several paintings from a group of works the artist began in fall 1962, in which he used commercially produced silkscreens based on mass-media sources as well as his own photographs. 

Rauschenberg’s adoption of a commercial means of reproduction and his focus on mass-media subjects in this series led art critics to identify him with the Pop art movement that had recently emerged on the New York art scene. In comparison with the often coolly executed paintings of the Pop artists, however, Rauschenberg’s works are emphatically gestural and handmade. The silkscreen paintings have an expressive quality resulting from their hand-painted areas, the collage-like overlays of photographic images, and the intentional slippage and irregularities the artist allowed to remain uncorrected during the screening process.

Works on paper and photographs constitute some of Rauschenberg’s most significant early works: his series of collages on Italian shirt boards (1952–53); photographs taken in Europe and North Africa during his travels with the artist Cy Twombly in 1952–53; and various types of monoprints, including the cyanotypes (ca. 1949–1951) he made with his wife at the time, the artist Susan Weil, and Automobile Tire Print, which he made with the assistance of John Cage in 1953. It was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, that the found image became paramount in Rauschenberg’s visual vocabulary. Reproductions from newspapers and magazines were incorporated into his drawings and prints as he perfected techniques of solvent transfer and lithography. In his transfer drawings (largely produced simultaneously with the later Combines), found images could now be smoothly continuous with the picture surface, where he mixed them with freely drawn and painted areas. 

By 1962, Rauschenberg was exploring the transfer technique in prints. That year, he made his first lithograph at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in West Islip, New York, and in 1963, he won the grand prize at the prestigious 5th International Exhibition of Graphic Art in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. Printmaking remained central to Rauschenberg’s art-making practice thanks to the medium’s inherent reproducibility and the wide range of effects it enabled him to achieve. 

Rauschenberg’s early interest in photography was renewed in 1979 with his first collaboration with the Trisha Brown Dance Company. His set design for Glacial Decoy (1979) consisted of projections of his own black-and-white photographs. Several photography projects followed, including In + Out City Limits (1979–81) and the Photem Series (1981); both reveal Rauschenberg’s preference for common, street-level subjects. From 1983 until he could no longer hold a camera after suffering a stroke in 2002, the photographic images incorporated into Rauschenberg’s work in all media were drawn from his own photographs. 

Among the collaborative ventures that brought Rauschenberg emphatically outside the confines of his studio were his experimental works combining art and technology. This interest was already evident in the early Combines that integrated working appliances such as radios, fans, electric lights, and clocks, allowing sound, motion, light, and the passage of time to be incorporated quite literally into his art.

Through his participation in the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s kinetic environment and performance Homage to New York in 1960, Rauschenberg began working with Billy Klüver, a research scientist at Bell Laboratories. In collaboration with Klüver, Rauschenberg realized some of his most ambitious technological works, including the sound-producing sculptural environment Oracle (1962–65) and Soundings (1968), a monumental light installation responsive to ambient sound. Both works were meant to be experienced by the audience in space and to appeal to the senses beyond the purely visual.

In 1966, Rauschenberg and Klüver, together with the artist Robert Whitman and the engineer Fred Waldhauer, founded Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a nonprofit organization that sought to make technology accessible to artists by arranging collaborations with engineers. In the same year, as an expression of its founders’ interest in the potential applications of technology for theater, E.A.T. produced “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering,” which brought together visual artists, dancers, choreographers, scientists, and engineers and resulted in technologically sophisticated performance works. 

While Rauschenberg’s preoccupation with technology-based art reached its height during the 1960s, the artist would continue to periodically utilize technology in his art making through the 1990s. Among his later technology-based works was the series Eco-Echo (1992–93). Made following his attendance at the Earth Summit (officially, United Nations Conference on Environment and Development [UNCED]) in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, the sonar-activated, windmill-like sculptures referred to the artist’s environmental concerns and his interest in cultivating ecologically responsible sources of power.

Performance, in its many manifestations, was at the core of much of Rauschenberg’s artistic output. His involvement with performance began at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he danced in student productions and, in August 1952, participated in the composer John Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1 (an originally untitled work that is often referred to as the first Happening). Throughout his career, Rauschenberg not only designed sets, costumes, and lighting for Merce Cunningham and other choreographers such as Trisha Brown and Paul Taylor but also choreographed and performed his own works. Moreover, theatrical elements are often integral to his nonperformance works, such as a sculpture that incorporates a hidden sound (Music Box, 1953); a Combine that includes a working clock (Third Time Painting, 1961); and a technology work that churns mud (Mud Muse, 1968–71).

Indeed, Rauschenberg often intentionally blurred the lines between his performance work and his work in other media. For example, a freestanding Combine, Minutiae (1954), was created as a stage set for a Merce Cunningham Dance Company performance, while First Time Painting (1961), another Combine, was made by the artist while on stage at the United States Embassy’s theater in Paris as part of the performance Homage to David Tudor, which also included Jasper Johns, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and the composer Tudor himself. When on tour with Cunningham, Rauschenberg frequently created scenery by spontaneously assimilating found objects and sounds, as he developed the concept of “live décor,” or scenery generated by human activity.

Rauschenberg’s artistic dialogue with Cage and Cunningham positioned the artist at the cutting edge of postmodern dance. His involvement in the early 1960s with Judson Dance Theater, New York, an experimental collective that included dancers as well as visual artists, resulted in performances free of narrative, emphasizing instead the purity of movement—sometimes conventionally dance-like, sometimes more mundane, allowing untrained performers to participate alongside professional dancers. Throughout his career, Rauschenberg found collaboration to be a productive means for pushing the boundaries of conventional art making. 

With his move in 1970 from New York to Captiva, an island off the Gulf Coast of Florida, Rauschenberg cleared his palette. Retreating from urban imagery, he began to favor a more abstract idiom and the use of natural fibers, such as textiles and paper. The Cardboards (1971–72) and the Venetians (1972–73) reveal his fascination with the inherent color, texture, and history of found materials. The beautiful and disparate effects of fabric, ranging from cotton to satin, are explored in the Hoarfrosts (1974–76) and the Jammers (1975–76). Collaborations with paper mills in France and India resulted in works in which paper pulp itself was elevated to an art form. 

A midcareer retrospective was mounted by the National Collection of Fine Arts (now Smithsonian American Art Museum), Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., in 1976, when Rauschenberg was selected as the artist best suited to honor the country’s bicentennial. Having the opportunity to reexamine his early work, Rauschenberg returned to past concerns. His Spreads (1975–83) and Scales (1977–81) incorporate transferred and screened images as well as assemblage, sometimes in room-sized installations.

During the 1980s, Rauschenberg undertook two long-term projects. The first, The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece, was begun in 1981 and completed in 1998. The multipart work consists of 191 components and spans even further than the quarter mile of its title. Retrospective in character, the work is replete with references to Rauschenberg’s life and art.  

The second project, the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), was the most tangible expression of Rauschenberg’s belief in the power of art and artistic collaboration to bring about social change. Traveling around the world with ROCI, Rauschenberg explored diverse cultures and local art-making practices, giving rise to an extraordinarily diverse body of work. As an example, in Chile for ROCI in 1985, the artist painted and screened on copper; that experience led, over the next decade, to his use of metal as a support for paint, patinas, enamel, and screenprinted images in series such as Urban Bourbons (1988–96) and Night Shades (1991). The Gluts, begun in 1986, were made from pieces of scrap metal, such as gas-station signs and automobile parts, whose original identities were often masked when they were transformed into wall-hung and freestanding sculptures.

Rauschenberg’s belief in the power of art as a catalyst for positive social change was at the heart of his participation in numerous international projects. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he collaborated with papermakers in France, India, and China as well as with artisans at a ceramic factory in Japan. Through his travels, Rauschenberg collected a store of materials to use when he returned to his studio in Captiva, Florida, including photographs, objects, textiles, and printed matter. The resulting works were inevitably informed by his newly acquired understanding of another culture, yet the admixture of imagery and materials was always distinctly Rauschenbergian.

The Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), the artist’s primary preoccupation between 1984 and 1991, was a tangible demonstration of his long-term commitment to human rights and to the freedom of expression. Rauschenberg financed the ROCI project himself and traveled to ten countries, exploring diverse cultures and local art-making practices and mounting an exhibition of his work in each country, often where artistic expression had been suppressed. His purpose with ROCI was to spark dialogue and promote mutual understanding through the creative process. 

In his late work, Rauschenberg continued to approach his art with the spirit of invention and to seek out new materials and technologies. Beginning in 1992, he used an Iris printer to make digital color prints of his photographs. This technology allowed for the high-resolution images and luminous hues of two series of large-scale works on paper, Waterworks (1992–95) and Anagrams (1995–97). In 1996, Rauschenberg transferred the Iris prints to wet plaster in the Arcadian Retreats (a fresco series that provided him with an entirely new avenue of exploration) and to polylaminate panels in his last three bodies of work, Short Stories (2000–2002), Scenarios (2002–6), and, finally, Runts (2006–8).

Despite his use of new materials and methods, much of Rauschenberg’s later work looks back at his earlier art and is autobiographical in nature. With the retrospective exhibition organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1997, which traveled to venues in the United States and Europe, the artist had the opportunity to view the full scope of what had been, at that point, a fifty-year career. During that same year, Rauschenberg created glass sculptures of some of his iconic subjects: a tire, a pillow, a shovel, and a broom, each dignified by a silver-plated platform. His monumental Mirthday Man (1997), from the Anagram (A Pun) series, was made on the occasion of his seventy-second birthday and includes a reproduction of the life-size X-ray of the artist that he first used in the print Booster (1967), while the imagery in the editioned Ruminations series (2000) refers to important moments and figures in the artist’s life.

Following a stroke in 2002 that left his right hand partially paralyzed, the artist continued to work, undeterred, but now with his left hand. During this final decade, he continued his collaborations with performers and printmakers and his commitment to humanitarian causes.