Robert Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing, then rubbed it out
In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg persuaded Willem de Kooning to hand over a drawing so he could erase it, and called the result art. The Texan who dropped out of pharmacology went on to fuse painting with junk, radios and silkscreened photographs, winning Venice's top painting prize in 1964.
He was born Milton Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1925, to Fundamentalist Christian parents; his father worked for a power company. A spell studying pharmacology at the University of Texas ended quickly, partly because the work was hard for someone who did not yet know he was dyslexic and partly because he refused to dissect a frog. The Navy drafted him in 1944 and he served as a neuropsychiatric technician in a California hospital. Afterwards he studied in Kansas City and at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he met Susan Weil and started calling himself Robert.
In 1948 the pair enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina so he could learn from Josef Albers, the Bauhaus founder he hoped would tame his messiness. He later described himself as Albers' dunce, finding a kindred spirit instead in the composer John Cage, who became a lifelong friend and collaborator. Rauschenberg and Weil married in 1950 and divorced in 1953; later partners included Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, and for his last 25 years he lived with the artist Darryl Pottorf.
His Combines, made between 1954 and 1964, pulled everyday objects into paintings until the line between canvas and sculpture dissolved; some even contained working clocks, fans and radios. To pay the bills in the 1950s he and Johns dressed shop windows for Tiffany and Bonwit Teller under the joint alias Matson Jones. After seeing Andy Warhol's studio in 1962 he began silkscreening photographs onto canvas, which is why critics linked him to Pop art. Barge, 32 feet long, was made mostly in a single day and night.
Technology fascinated him. With the Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver he founded Experiments in Art and Technology in 1966 to pair artists with engineers, and NASA invited him to watch Apollo 11 lift off in 1969, prompting his Stoned Moon lithographs. From 1970 he worked on Captiva Island, Florida, favouring cardboard, sand and fabric, and in 1984 he launched a largely self-funded cultural exchange touring ten countries. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1993 and died on Captiva in 2008.
Source: Robert Rauschenberg
