ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
American
Robert Rauschenberg has often been quoted as say-
ing that his paintings act in the gap between art and
life. The same can be said for photography, which
snatches small bits of life and represents them as
works of art. Rauschenberg’s use of photographs in
his paintings, then, redefines the two polarities in a
way that suggests that the differences between art
and life are not so great, the gap not too wide to
cross, certainly not in one imaginative leap.
Among the first to use photographs in painting,
Rauschenberg began incorporating a variety of ele-
ments into his work in the early 1950s, around the
same time that he began experimenting with blue-
prints and photograms. As he moved from paint-
ings that embedded photographs into the picture
plane under a blanket of translucent paint, he con-
tinued to use objects to represent that space bet-
ween art and life, even as the objects became bigger
and more three dimensional. A chair or a pillow
that is painted on but hangs outside the frame is not
an image from life, as Magritte’s famous pipe, but is
the object itself. Experience is no longer one step
removed through the act of art, but becomes the
work itself.
The paintings he called his Combines evolved from
canvases primed by newsprint to found-object assem-
blages that dissolved the boundaries of painting.
Rauschenberg’s 1955 Combine paintingSatellitefea-
tures a stuffed pheasant standing atop the frame-like
perch; in his 1959 pieceCanyon, a stuffed raven
emerges from a box balanced on a narrow board,
from which a hanging pillow almost reaches the
floor. He created an international stir in 1955 when
he drew and painted on bedding and a pillow,
mounted it on a wall, and called itBed. Perhaps his
most famous piece isMonogram (1955–1959)—a
stuffed Angora goat encircled by an automobile tire
that stands on a painted collage pasture.
The invention of photography altered the trajec-
tory of painting, freeing it from the servitude of
merely recording appearances and giving it the
liberty of abstracting expression. So also did open-
ing painting to include found objects redefine the
role of art. Including a five-by-even photograph on
a five-foot painting—as Rauschenberg did inLe-
vee—demands that we, as viewers, change our
focus. We are forced to pay closer attention as
our focus shifts to a level of intuitive rather than
literal understanding. Rauschenberg’s work was at
the center of a movement away from the aesthetics
of painting to the ethics of art. Like contemporaries
Jackson Pollack, Jasper Johns, and Willem de
Kooning, Rauschenberg applied a nonliteral logic
to move beyond the familiar.
He had met Jasper Johns in New York in 1954
and John Cage when studying photography and
painting at Black Mountain College in North Car-
olina in 1948. Cage characterized their meeting as
‘‘understanding at first sight’’ and has said that he
composed his seminal work 403300 after viewing
Rauschenberg’s series of all-white paintings. Speak-
ing of Johns, Rauschenberg has said, ‘‘It would be
difficult to imagine my work at that time without
his encouragement.’’ De Kooning was also a friend
whose work Rauschenberg admired. Rauschenberg
took some of the first steps in American conceptual
art when he erased a de Kooning drawing, framed
it, and exhibited it as his own work in 1953, titled
Erased de Kooning Drawing. He worried that the
piece might be misconstrued as ‘‘anti-painting,’’
although de Kooning had given Rauschenberg the
drawing with full knowledge of his intentions,
bestowing a collaborative air to the work. Critic
Leo Steinberg, who knew both artists, said that de
Kooning chose a particularly dark crayon and pen-
cil drawing to give to Rauschenberg, saying, ‘‘We
might as well make it harder for you.’’
With one gesture, Rauschenberg made it clear
that the fruit of an artist’s work need not be
an object, while at the same time clearing the way
for all artists whose talents lay outside of drawing.
He began collaborating in the 1960s with Cage
and choreographer Merce Cunningham to produce
dance pieces; he designed one piece, calledDark
Horse, that featured 23 turtles with lights on their
backs to produce what he called ‘‘organic lighting.’’
Helen Molesworth, Baltimore Museum of Art cura-
tor of contemporary art, has said, ‘‘One could argue
that it was Rauschenberg who made installation art
itself possible.’’
In the 1960s, Rauschenberg also began experi-
menting with overlays of silk-screened photo-RAUSCHENBERG, ROBERT