Watch Robert Rauschenberg talk about his work

One of the giants of American art, Robert Rauschenberg was a prolific experimenter who, throughout his long career, never stood still. With Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Jasper Johns he first relaunched and developed a cooler, impersonal Dada spirit in American art in reaction to the autobiographical dynamics of the Abstract Expressionists. Endlessly, unevenly inventive, he can also be seen as the precursor of many subsequent movements in art — Assemblage Art, Junk Art, Happenings, Random Art and Pop Art. He was, too, a leading figure in the development of printmaking into a prime art medium.

His aim — to work “in the gap between art and life” — is perhaps most famously summed up by his Bed of 1955, where part-painted coverlet and pillow above it hang on the wall, uniting actuality and painting but leaving interpretation open to the spectator. Like much of his best work, it was an exuberantly messy collision — between painting and sculpture, art and reality — which opened up unexpected avenues of meaning. Rauschenberg found beauty in the mundane — stuffed goats, tyretracks and Coke bottles — and by doing so became a pivotal figure in this great age of American art, blurring the divisions between the era’s artistic currents, reacting against abstraction without returning to traditional realism.

Milton Rauschenberg was born in 1925, in the oil refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas. (He changed his given name to Bob while an art student, later to Robert). His father was employed by the local light and power company, Gulf States Utilities, and family life was austere, as both his parents were members of a fundamentalist sect, the Church of Christ. Milton had an unhappy childhood and adolescence, being weak both scholastically and at sports.

After a brief period in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Austin (expelled for refusing to dissect a living frog) he was drafted into the US Navy as a neuro-psychiatric technician at California Naval Hospital from 1942 to 1945; there he learnt, he said, “how little difference there is between sanity and insanity, and I realised that a combination is essential”. Stationed in San Diego, he had his first significant experience of art when he discovered by chance the collection of 18th-century English portraits in the Huntingdon Library near Pasadena.

Demobilised in 1945 and returning to Port Arthur, Rauschenberg found that his family had moved without telling him; he remained in California in a series of menial jobs. A friend suggested that he could study under the GI Bill of Rights, at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design; this he did from 1946 to 1947, using money earned from part-time jobs to finance a trip to Paris, where he enrolled at the Academie Julian. However, he found the atmosphere there not to his liking, and along with his future wife, Susan Weil, he returned to Black Mountain College, North Carolina, to study under Joseph Albers from 1948 to 1949. Though Albers disliked Rauschenberg’s “frivolity”, Rauschenberg subsequently regarded him as his most important teacher.

In 1949 Rauschenberg enrolled at the Art Students‘ League school in New York, under Morris Kantor; he and Susan Weil married in 1950 and experimented together with large-scale photographic blueprints. This led to a commission for a window display which was followed by an article in Life magazine in April 1951, and a showing of one blueprint at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Rauschenberg had his first one-man show in May 1951, at the Betty Parsons Gallery. He showed mainly white paintings with black numbers or figurative symbols. These were followed by a series of all-black paintings covered with crushed newspapers coated with black enamel, to give an irregular surface. These led to “combine paintings”, where objects or photographs were combined with the painted surface.

These combine paintings pursued Rauschenberg’s aim to act in the gap between art and life; an artistic method later labelled “neo-Dada” and much influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s attempts to produce an experience which by-passed matters of taste, by choosing “ready made” objects with which to work. Dada’s rather ironic, anti-cultural approach was developed in a more life-affirming direction by the composer John Cage; Rauschenberg had met him, and the dancer-

choreographer Merce Cunningham, at Black Mountain College, and the improvised performance Theatre Piece No.1 in which Cage and Rauschenberg collaborated, is generally regarded as the precursor of Happenings.

After divorcing in 1952, Rauschenberg left for Europe with a fellow artist, Cy Twombly, paying his way with exhibitions in Rome and Florence; returning, he set up in a loft in Fulton Street in New York, where he began to design sets and costumes for Merce Cunningham’s dance company.

In 1954 Rauschenberg met Jasper Johns, then working in a bookshop; and they developed an intense personal and artistic relationship which has been compared to that of Picasso and Braque in the early years of Cubism. They were each other’s first serious critics, Rauschenberg has said, and traded ideas for each other’s work. They formed a freelance window display partnership and moved into studios on two floors of the same building in Pearl Street.