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
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.
I refuse to be in this world by myself. I want an open commitment from the rest of the people.
Everybody thought I was being elitist, ... I wanted the best, to get variety.
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.
By the time you establish your priorities, there really isn't any fun or need to interest yourself in what you're doing. And this I find disastrous.
The working process is ideally freeing my mind.
And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It's something quite extraordinary