PrideFest America Archives

Artistic Alternatives:
The Works of Keith Haring, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschendberg, and Andy Warhol
March 20 to May 13, 2001

Robert Rauschenberg
by Dr. Amy Ingrid Schlegel, Curator, Philadelphia Art Alliance

Autobiography Listen to Commentary

Rauschenberg sought to conjure new and unexpected associations for viewers. Many of his works are like puzzles that challenge the player to figure out how the various pieces are related, if at all. From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, Rauschenberg was deeply involved with dance, theater, and performance art (a excerpt of his 1966 performance "Linoleum" is on view here), in addition to his painting practice, which expanded to include silkscreening, especially photographs and appropriated images (transferred onto many kinds of surfaces) and lithography.

The vision underlying Rauschenberg's remarkable body of work is absolutely consistent: meaning is created through accidental, improvised, and even illogical juxtapositions and associations. One might say that Rauschenberg's life-long project as an artist has been to represent the "truth" of reality - that it is fractured, fleeting, and highly contingent.

Robert Rauschenberg was born in 1925 at Port Arthur, Texas. In 1942 he studied pharmacy briefly at the University of Texas before enlisting in the U.S. Marines. From 1947 to 1948 he was enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute, and in 1948 he attended the AcadEmie Julian in Paris. He then studied at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, a hotbed of avant-garde activity. He was married to fellow American artist Susan Weil, whom he had met in Paris, from 1950 to1952; they had a son in 1951. He spent time in New York City intermittently from 1949 to 1953, the year he moved into a studio in a downtown loft building. He had his first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1951.

In 1954 he met Jasper Johns, with whom he was closely associated until 1961. They had studios one floor apart in the same building. Rauschenberg had his first exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery 1958, and regularly thereafter for more than 30 years. In 1962, he began silkscreening with photographs at the same time Andy Warhol began using stenciled silkscreens based on appropriated images. 1964 was a pivotal year for Rauschenberg: he won the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale, the event that catapulted him to art world fame. He has had touring retrospective exhibitions every decade since then.

Robert Rauschenberg lives on Captiva Island, Florida and in New York City.