Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg was born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, to a fundamentalist Christian household, and dropped out of a pharmacology program at the University of Texas rather than dissect a frog, only later learning he was dyslexic. The Navy drafted him in 1944 and put him to work as a neuropsychiatric technician in a California hospital. After his discharge he studied art in Kansas City and Paris, where he met fellow student Susan Weil and started going by Robert, then landed at Black Mountain College in 1948 to study under the painter Josef Albers. Albers' rigor never took — Rauschenberg later called himself Albers' dunce. What he found at Black Mountain instead was the composer John Cage, whose experimentalism fit him far better than his teacher's discipline did.

In 1953 he asked Willem de Kooning, already a leading Abstract Expressionist, for a drawing to erase — and de Kooning, understanding exactly what was being proposed, gave him one deliberately hard to remove. The finished blank sheet argued that erasure itself could be the artwork. From there Rauschenberg built the Combines, paintings that absorbed real objects — a stuffed goat, a taxidermied eagle, his own quilt and pillow — until painting and sculpture stopped being different things. He won the top prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, the first American to do so in decades, then spent his later career on silkscreen transfers, dance collaborations with Merce Cunningham, and a self-funded seven-year world tour of exhibitions called ROCI, trading commercial success for cultural exchange.

The Combines made his reputation, but Rauschenberg supported himself through much of the 1950s designing department-store window displays with his onetime partner Jasper Johns, working under the shared pseudonym Matson Jones so neither name would taint their gallery careers. His relationships with Cy Twombly and then Johns went unacknowledged in public for decades, in an art world and a country where being open about it carried real professional risk. Financial security came late and unevenly: in 1973, a taxi magnate resold two of his early paintings, bought for 900 and 2,500 dollars, for 85,000 and 90,000 dollars at auction, and Rauschenberg received nothing from the markup. He spent the following years lobbying Congress for artist resale royalties and won a partial victory only in California, in 1976.

He settled on Captiva Island, Florida, in 1970 and worked there for decades, funding a program that gave one-time emergency grants to artists in financial need — the kind of help he had once needed himself. By the time he died in 2008, the market had caught up: a 1960s Combine sold for 11 million dollars in 2010, and a 1964 silkscreen sold for 88.8 million dollars in 2019, a record for his work. Tate Modern gave him a full retrospective in 2016, traveling to New York and San Francisco, and centenary shows followed in 2025 and 2026. The artist once dismissed as Albers' dunce is now taught as the hinge between Abstract Expressionism and everything after it.

Robert Rauschenberg's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Erased de Kooning Drawing artwork
  A Willem de Kooning drawing, erased with his permission 1953
• Bed artwork
  A quilt, sheet and pillow with paint applied — an early Combine 1955
• Monogram artwork
  A stuffed angora goat set inside a tire, the best-known Combine 1959
• Barge artwork
  A 32-foot silkscreen and oil painting made in about 24 hours 1963
• Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange other
  Self-funded seven-year touring exhibition across ten countries 1984
• Robert Rauschenberg Foundation company
  Funds artist emergency grants and philanthropic causes 1990

• 1944 aged ~19 Drafted into the Navy as a neuropsychiatric technician
• 1948 aged ~23 Studies under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College Meets John Cage, who becomes a lifelong collaborator.
• July 16, 1951 aged 25 His son Christopher is born to Susan Weil, whom he married the year before
• 1953 aged ~28 Erases a Willem de Kooning drawing
• 1959 aged ~34 Completes Monogram after four years of revision
• 1964 aged ~39 Wins the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale
• Fall 1970 aged ~45 Makes Captiva Island, Florida his permanent home and studio
• 1993 aged ~68 Receives the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton
• May 12, 2008 aged 82 Dies of heart failure on Captiva Island

• Jasper Johns b. 1930
  Painter and printmaker whose Flag and Target paintings bridged Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. partner and window-display collaborator
• Willem de Kooning 1904–1997
  Abstract expressionist whose gestural paintings helped define the New York School. gave him the drawing he erased
• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. pushed him toward silkscreen
• Buckminster Fuller 1895–1983
  Popularized the geodesic dome and promoted resource-efficient structural design. crossed paths with at Black Mountain College