Robert Rauschenberg attended Kansas City Art Institute, the Académie Julian in Paris and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he studied under Josef Albers. At Black Mountain, Rauschenberg formed a lasting friendship with Merce Cunningham, John Cage and David Tudor.
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
Robert Rauschenberg attended Kansas City Art Institute, the Académie Julian in Paris and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he studied under Josef Albers. At Black Mountain, Rauschenberg formed a lasting friendship with Merce Cunningham, John Cage and David Tudor. Moving to New York in 1949, he attended the Art Students League.
For Rauschenberg, painting entailed not only using a brush, but also
silkscreening, collaging, transferring and imprinting, which he
applied on a wide array of materials.
His first one-man show at
Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, took place in 1951. In 1953 he produced his first "combines," bringing real-world images and found objects into the realm of abstract painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was also involved with theater and dance, designing sets and costumes for Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown, among others. He engaged in experiments incorporating electronics in art and in 1966, with electronics engineer Billy Kluver, co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc.
In the late 1960s Rauschenberg devoted much of his time to printmaking and performance. Rauschenberg had a lifelong commitment to collaboration and frequently noted the great influence that making prints has on his art.
Among Rauchenberg's major exhibitions are those organized by the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1964; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1965; the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1966 Rauschenberg: 34 Drawings for Dante's Inferno & Soundings in 1969; the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington in 1975; and Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris in 1981. A retrospective organized by the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C., traveled throughout the United States in 1976–78. Rauschenberg traveled widely, embarking on a number of collaborations with artisans and workshops abroad, which culminated in the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) project from 1985 to 1991. In 1997, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, organized a retrospective of Rauschenberg’s work, which traveled to Houston and to two venues in Europe in 1998. Robert Rauschenberg passed away in the spring of 2008 and the Tate Museum and Museum of Modern Art collaborated on a subsequent retrospective Among Friends in 2016.
Robert Rauschenberg worked in various mediums including painting, sculpture, prints, photography and performance, over the span of six decades. He emerged on the New York art scene at the time that Abstract Expressionism was dominant and through the course of his career he challenged abstract painting and the model of the heroic, self-expressive artist championed in the 1950's.
Printmaking was Rauschenberg’s abiding interest. Early on in his career, he used a solvent to transfer photographs from contemporary magazines and newspapers onto drawing paper. The series is emblematic of a lifetime of experimentation with the ways images in modern media culture could be transfered, transmitted, transformed and reinterpreted.
