Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenbergwas an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1993. He became the recipient of the Leonardo...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth22 October 1925
CityPort Arthur, TX
CountryUnited States of America
My art is about paying attention – about the extremely dangerous possibility that you might be art,
Every time I've moved, my work has changed radically.
If you don't have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.
A newspaper that you're not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn't think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.
I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.
And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.
Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I've been here for four years and this is 1965.
One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone.
Curiosity is the main energy.
Basically painting is total idiocy.
There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting, and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.
A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric.
Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.
The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.