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
An empty canvas is full only if you want it to be full.
I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings
I want my paintings to look like what's going on outside my window rather than what's inside my studio.
I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.
I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is.
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.