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.
Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.
I still have a struggle reading (dyslexia, fh) and so I don't read much.. ..Probably the only reason I'm painter is because I couldn't read yet I love to write, but when I write I know what I'm writing, but when I'm reading I can't see it, because it goes from all sides of the page at once. But that's very good for printmaking.
There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting, and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.
Curiosity is the main energy.
And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.
Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I've been here for four years and this is 1965.
I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realised they were not so artificial.
And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission
I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended
And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway
I wouldn't use the same color in a picture in more than one place
I refuse to be in this world by myself. I want an open commitment from the rest of the people.
So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design