Who Was Robert Rauschenberg and Why Was He So Important?

Rauschenberg was born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg into a Christian fundamentalist family in Port Arthur, Texas, a roughneck oil town on the Gulf Coast where his father worked at the local utility company. He was of German/Dutch lineage but also professed Cherokee blood, a notion more fanciful than factual. At 18, he enrolled at the University of Texas, Austin, to study pharmacology but dropped out due to dyslexia. Drafted into the Navy in 1944, he served as an orderly at a military hospital in San Diego.

Rauschenberg enjoyed drawing throughout his life but didn’t resolve to become an artist until a trip to the Huntington Library collection in Los Angeles, where he saw Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (1770). The encounter was galvanizing, and he soon started painting. Discharged from the Navy, he entered the Kansas City Art Institute in 1947. His education proved peripatetic, as over the next six years he attended the Académie Julian in Paris, the legendary Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, and the Art Students League in New York.

During this period, he met people who would become mentors and collaborators: Susan Weil, who, in addition to being an artist, was Rauschenberg’s wife and mother to their son, Christopher (they divorced after Rauschenberg fell in love with the painter Cy Twombly); Twombly, whom he met at the Art Students League and with whom he traveled to Italy and North Africa between 1952 and 1953; Josef Albers, the painter, color theoretician, and ex-Bauhaus instructor who was rector of Black Mountain College; and the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham, whom Rauschenberg had also encountered and worked with at Black Mountain.

It was in and around these studies that Rauschenberg produced his first notable works and had his first exhibitions—including a solo show in 1951 at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. Among these initial efforts were cyanotypes co-produced with Weil in 1950. She introduced him to the process, in which objects laid on blueprint paper would leave ghostly silhouettes when exposed to light, a technique similar to the photograms that Man Ray (1890–1976) and László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) had pioneered during the 1920s. Unlike those efforts, which were small and required a darkroom, Weil and Rauschenberg worked openly in the studio, creating full-figure images of Weil lying on the floor. In 1951, Life Magazine documented one such piece in progress, while a blueprint titled Female Figure (ca. 1950) was featured in “Abstraction in Photography,” a group exhibition at MoMA curated by Edward Steichen.

Rauschenberg attended Black Mountain College in 1948 (after which he moved to New York) and again in 1951 and 1952. During his first stay, he clashed with the formidable Albers, though Rauschenberg always considered Albers’s teachings pivotal to his artistic formation.

During his second sojourn at Black Mountain, Rauschenberg produced three series of paintings that marked the beginning of his career. “Night Blooming,” comprised predominantly black compositions with gravel or dirt pressed into the pigment. Next came monochromatic canvases in glossy or matte black paint covering substrates of newsprint (a method later adopted by Johns). More significant, perhaps, were a group of all-white canvases done with housepaint. Meant to capture light and shadow on unmarred surfaces, these “White Paintings” were arranged as modular panels that prefigured Minimalism and Conceptual Art.

Back in New York, Rauschenberg pursued similarly reductive strategies with two self-evidently titled works on paper: Erased de Kooning Drawing and Automobile Tire Print (both 1953). Somewhat counterintuitively, each affirmed his continuing connection to Abstract Expressionism.

Rauschenberg was a habitué of New York’s Cedar Tavern, hub of the AbEx scene and ground zero for voluble discussions on art that occasionally led to fisticuffs. It was there that he approached Willem de Kooning and asked if De Kooning was willing to give up a drawing that Rauschenberg could erase; surprisingly, De Kooning agreed. While the result has been interpreted as an effacement of Abstract Expressionism itself, the piece stemmed from Rauschenberg’s admiration for De Kooning, an homage of sorts that also referred back to the White Paintings’ elision of pictorial space.

Likewise Tire Print, created with John Cage, was a nod to De Kooning. It involved Cage piloting his car carefully along a narrow, 24-foot-long scroll after rolling through a pool of black paint that Rauschenberg had poured on the street. The outcome resembled an elongated brush mark evoking De Kooning’s paintings as well as the long, leisurely drives he took to find inspiration for them.

Rauschenberg, though, was always more maximalist than minimalist, and in 1954 he embarked on the combines that would occupy him for the next decade. These pieces were as loud as the White Paintings were mute—as action-packed as any action painting by Jackson Pollock and just as assaultive on the eye.

Indeed, barraging the viewer with imagery was the point. “I was bombarded with TV sets and magazines, by the refuse, by the excess of the world,” Rauschenberg said. “I thought that if I could paint or make an honest work, it should incorporate all of these objects, which were and are a reality.” The combines included wall-hung compositions as well as freestanding assemblages, with Bed (1955) and Monogram (1955–59) being the most indelible.

Bed started out as the solution to a problem: Rauschenberg didn’t have a canvas he could use. So he tucked together sheets, a pillow, and a quilt donated by the artist Dorothea Rockburne, presenting the ensemble vertically to afford an overhead view of the object. Rauschenberg covered Bed’s upper half with penciled scribbles and splashes of paint and later joked that someone might try to crawl into it. Bed was interpreted as another jape at Abstract Expressionism but was actually, through referencing the artist’s personal life, a self-portrait of sorts. Moreover, its association with sleep evoked AbEx’s debt to Surrealism’s probing of the subconscious.

Monogram, meanwhile, is perhaps Rauschenberg’s signature work. Its centerpiece, a stuffed angora goat with a tire around its midsection, stands on a large, prone canvas set on casters, allowing it to be hauled around like a child’s pull-toy on steroids. Rauschenberg had spotted the goat in the window of a secondhand furniture store and purchased it with all the money he had at the time—$15. Monogram went through two iterations—the first with the animal placed sideways on a shelf mounted to a painting; the second with it placed on a small platform, a vertical panel attached to its behind—before taking its final form at the suggestion of Johns.

The goat’s face was splashed with multicolored splotches, while the tire’s tread was painted white, reversing, as it were, the black used in Tire Print. While Rauschenberg said he’d been focused on the way the tire and goat were yoked together like letters in a monogram, some observers linked the piece to his homosexuality, claiming it referenced The Scapegoat (1854–1856), a meditation by the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Hunt (1827–1910) on the Hebrew tradition of expiating guilt by symbolically laying it on the titular creature. In this reading, Monogram signified the pariah status of gay men in midcentury America with its depiction of a goat (synonymous with randiness) penetrating an anus-like tire.

On the other hand, the combines sparked debates over the efficacy of trying to decipher Rauschenberg’s meaning at all, with one such argument involving a piece titled Canyon (1959). Like Monogram, it incorporated taxidermy in the form of a golden eagle perched with its wings outstretched on an empty carton under a mix of paint, cardboard, newspapers, and a snapshot of Rauschenberg’s son as a baby. This led one critic to opine that Canyon was a send-up of Rembrandt’s The Rape of Ganymede (1635), a mythological scene of the Greek deity Zeus in raptor guise abducting the eponymous infant to serve as cupbearer to the gods. Other critics pooh-poohed this notion, ascribing purely formal intentions on Rauschenberg’s part. (Clearer were federal laws against stuffing a protected species, which prohibited the heirs of its original owner, the gallerist Ileana Sonnabend, from selling Canyon; ultimately it was donated to the Museum of Modern Art with a zero valuation.)

As previously noted, Rauschenberg was an inveterate genre-hopper. His forays into performance, choreography, and stage design dated back to his days at Black Mountain, where he participated in Theater Piece No. 1 (1952), a collaboration between Cage and Cunningham that’s considered to be the first “Happening.” It included Rauschenberg’s White Paintings mounted on the ceiling, and the artist himself playing records during an evening of music, dance, and lectures by Cage. In 1961, Rauschenberg limned First Time Painting live on stage at the American embassy in Paris in an event organized with Johns and Nouveau Réalisme artists Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely. For his most remembered performance, Pelican (1963), Rauschenberg zoomed around a roller rink on skates while towing a parachute.

Rauschenberg loved technology and gadgetry in all forms. He incorporated working appliances into some of his combines—a radio for Broadcast (1959), a pair of electric fans for Pantomime (1961)—and anchored his composition for Booster (1967), a nearly six-foot-tall lithograph, with a full-body X-ray of himself. His kinetic “Revolver” sculptures (also from 1967) consisted of silk-screened images on Plexiglas discs mounted one behind the other on a motorized metal base; viewers could rotate them with a controller to create kaleidoscopic effects.

More ambitious attempts to merge art and technology were made with the help of Billy Klüver, a research scientist at Bell Laboratories. Among these was Rauschenberg’s enormous Soundings (1968): a 36-foot-long row of illuminated display cases, each containing multiple layers of Plexiglas silk-screened with photos of chairs, that would turn on and off in response to ambient noise. Rauschenberg’s Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an initiative that sought to pair artists with engineers, came out of this period, which also corresponded to his rise as a celebrity.

Rauschenberg’s output was so large that it’s difficult to unpack it all; it’s easier to gauge, perhaps, through the numerous stylistic innovations that transformed his practice over six decades. He formulated a method of transferring newspaper and magazine images to paper by soaking them in solvent, rubbing them facedown with an empty ballpoint pen, then lifting them off to leave ephemeral remnants of the originals. He repeatedly used this approach, applying it, for example, to diaphanous veils of silk, chiffon, and satin for his 1974–75 “Hoarfrost” series. Like Andy Warhol, he began to use silk screen on canvas for works such as Retroactive I and Retroactive II (both 1963), which combined pictures of an astronaut and President Kennedy to reflect atomic age anxiety. Rauschenberg’s other political themes included the civil rights and environmental movements of the 1960s and ’70s.

Rauschenberg’s work was largely representational, but his emphasis on materiality sometimes led him in directions that were almost abstract. His “Cardboards” (1971–72), for instance, relied on found boxes in various stages of deconstruction, while “Jammers” (1975–76) comprised arrangements of sewn fabrics and rattan poles.

In 1964, Robert Rauschenberg became the first American artist to take the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale, the awarding of which, according to some European critics, was rigged with help from the United States government. In 1976, Rauschenberg appeared on the cover of Time magazine, cementing his place in the public imagination.

In 1968, Rauschenberg bought 35 acres of property on Captiva Island off the western coast of Florida near Fort Myers. He moved there permanently in 1970, and over the decades until his death grew into the role of art-world éminence grise, his place in art history secured. Like the late work of many artists, Rauschenberg’s settled into a mellower groove than previously, but he never lost his faith in the aesthetic magic that could be gleaned from life’s ordinary things. “I put my trust in the materials that confront me,” he said, “because they put me in touch with the unknown.”