Artist Profile

American born artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) studied pharmacology at the University of Texas, Austin before being drafted into the United States Navy to serve as a neuropsychiatry technician in the Navel Hospital of San Diego.  In 1947, Rauschenberg enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute and traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian.  The following year Rauschenberg returned to the United States to study at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina with Josef Albers and took classes at the Art Students League in New York.  In the 1950s, the artist began creating his most recognized works, the “Combines” (a term he coined) for which he gathered all kinds of non-traditional materials to construct innovative compositions straddling the border between painting and sculpture.  In late 1953, Rauschenberg met Jasper Johns, another influential artist who reacted against Abstract Expressionism.  The two artists had neighboring studios and regularly exchanged ideas about their work until 1961.  Within the next two years, Rauschenberg began to silkscreen paintings and had his first career retrospective organized by the Jewish Museum in New York.  In 1964, he was the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale.  He spent much of the remainder of the 1960s dedicated to more collaborative projects including printmaking, performance, set design, and art-and-technology works. In 1966, he co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology, an organization that sought to promote collaborations between artists and engineers.  The artist lived and worked in Captiva, Florida since 1970.  In 1997, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, exhibited the largest retrospective of Rauschenberg’s work to date.