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
I like photographs of anything uninteresting. Maybe just two doors on a wall... The point is to be uninteresting.
Photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts.
Success is a worn down pencil.
While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins.
I don't like masterpieces having one-night stands in collectors' homes between auctions.
I was much happier when I had less responsibility... when my only responsibility was to my work and to myself.
I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.
I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn't work any other way, or whether I was doing it out of choice.
A canvas is never empty.
Having to be different is the same trap as having to be the same.
I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.
It's when you've found out how to do certain things, that it's time to stop doing them, because what's missing is that you're not including the risk.
With me, it's much more a matter of accepting whatever happens, accepting all these elements from the outside and then trying to work with them in a sort of free collaboration.
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