Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg was born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, and was in the Navy from 1943 to 1945. In 1946/7 he studied at the Kansas City Art Instituzte. and for a brief period at the Académie Julian in Paris, but more formatively at Black Mountain College under Josef Albers. In the early 1950s he created monochromatic white, black and red paintings. Later he embarked on his innovative “combine paintings“, which were assemblages of trash and found objects, such as the stuffed goat with a tyre round its middle. He was associated with his friend Jasper Johns in New York in the early 1960s in the creation of Pop Art with works including paintings, collages, and Coca Cola tins. He also took part in “happenings“ with the musician John Cage, and acted in his own theatrical pieces. For a short time in 1966 he managed and was stage designer for, and technical director of, the Merce Cunningham Dance Theatre, and in 1985 he put together an exhibition of his work to encourage World Peace, which toured Mexico, Cuba, China, Tibet and Malaysia, ending in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Robert Rauschenberg died in 2008 at the age of 82 at his home in Florida.

Posters by Robert Rauschenberg