Birth Year : 1925
Death Year :
Country :
Robert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas. He studied art at
the Kansas City Institute from 1946 to 1947, at the Académie Julian
in Paris in 1947, at Black Mountain College with Josef Albers from 1948
to 1949, and at the New York Art Students League with Vytlacil and Kantor
from 1949 to 1950. Rauschenberg traveled to Italy and North Africa in 1952-53
and designed and executed stage sets and costumes for Merce Cunningham's
dance troupe from 1955 until 1964, the year in which he won the grand prize
at the Biennale in Venice. Rauschenberg was a member of a young group of
artists who sought new ways of creating images of the life and civilization
around them. He may be classified as an symbolic psychological painter
of the Abstract Expressionist School. His works break down the previous
distinction between painting and sculpture, and he himself calls his construction-collages
"combines." The combines depend on the tension between freely handled paint
and real objects, the latter almost invariably "found" and usually in states
of partial or complete decay. The sources of his inspiration may be the
found-object sculpture of Picasso and the works of Marcel Duchamp, but
the choice of objects is his own. The earliest ones have high associative
value and may refer to nostalgic recollections of his childhood: the later
ones refer to New York urban life. He often uses the objects in such a
way that their true identify is difficult to discern, but they spring from
universal sensibilities and when attached to canvas they pose questions
about the ways we interpret our existence. After working on series of white,
then black, then red combines, in 1963 Rauschenberg began to eliminate
collage and to reproduce photographs directly on canvas by the silk-screen
process. Thus, with the addition of paint, he created a new two-dimensional
combination of images from life and artistic forms. Each of his paintings
is an entire statement in itself, a psychological problem that the artist
has solved to his own satisfaction.
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Robert
Rauschenberg
Rebus
Robert
Rauschenberg
Summer
Rental No. 2
Robert
Rauschenberg
Retroactive
I
Robert
Rauschenberg
Bicycle,
National Gallery
Robert
Rauschenberg
Allegory,
1959-60
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