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
Pollock also... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.
Oracle was I had started it I guess two and a half years ago, maybe even longer than that, closer to three.
But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.
I did a twenty foot print and John Cage is involved in that because he was the only person I knew in New York who had a car and who would be willing to do this.
I think maybe chance works better in a situation like music because music exists over a period of time, and you don't maintain constantly the you can't refer back from one area to another area.
One can see that a canvas is six feet by eight feet, say, quite accurately. But you can spend two minutes and think it's five, or thirty seconds and it's just a different bed for activities there.
I don't think that we have the strength over a period of years to see things always as though we hadn't ever looked at them before to see them new.
And if I see in the superficial subconscious relationships that I'm familiar with, cliches of association, I change the picture.
I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else
Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.
My art is about paying attention – about the extremely dangerous possibility that you might be art,
Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.
This was my first encounter with art as art (he saw 'Pinky' painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy" painted by Thomas Gainborough).. ..somebody actually MADE those paintings.. ..(it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.
There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself; it revolved around words like 'tortured', 'struggle'. 'pain''.. ..I could never see these qualities in paint - I could see them in life and art that illustrates life. But I could not see such conflicts in the materials and I knew that it had to be in the attitude of the painter.