A century of Robert Rauschenberg: Blurring Boundaries, Redefining Art

When you think of artists who changed the course of 20th-century art, Robert Rauschenberg stands out not just for his revolutionary ideas, but for his fearless exploration of materials, media, and meaning. In what would have been his 100th year, we look back at his career of vivid experimentation and breaking rules – between artistic disciplines, between cultures, and between art and life.

“Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made,”

Robert Rauschenberg

From Rauschenberg’s early Abstract Expressionist infused art to his later colorful collages, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) played a pivotal role in the emergence of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Spanning five decades, his career was marked by relentless experimentation, multidimensional collaborations, and an engagement with the world around him in public performances and cultural exchanges.

Regarded as a predecessor of Pop artists, his Combines series, together with his White Paintings, and Erased de Kooning Drawing all helped to make Rauschenberg one of the most influential American artists. Exploring the boundaries and even the definition of art, he became a key figure in the Neo-Dada movement, although his art was distinctly his own and not confined to any stylistic code. Paving the way for similarly experimental future artists, his famous erasure of Willem de Kooning’s painting was typically pioneering as an act that questioned the very definition of art.

Like so many men born in the 1920s, he served in World War II before pursuing his artistic philosophy. Studies at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris followed, but it was his time at Black Mountain Collegethat shaped his art; specifically the teaching of Josef Albers. In North Carolina his artistic philosophy took shape under Albers’ guidance and through collaborations with avant-garde luminaries like composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Not merely an education in technique and history, his time at Black Mountain imprinted the defining idea that art could be anything – and could even be made from anything. Primarily attracted to Black Mountain by the presence of former Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers after reading about him in an August 1948 issue of Time magazine, it was the arrival of John Cage that allowed Rauschenberg to discover an artistic kindred spirit. Cage had similarly moved towards a more experimental approach to music and Rauschenberg participated in John Cage’s Theatre Piece No. 1 (1952); considered to be the first Happenings, a multi-media event that broke down traditional art boundaries.

Rauschenberg’s integration of the everyday incorporated painting, sculpture, prints, photography, and performance to challenge gestural abstract painting. And this mixing of artistic materials produced his landmark series of Combines (1954–64).

“I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world”

In an exciting collision of art and reality during the 1950s, Rauschenberg created what would become his most iconic body of work. His Combines were hybrids of painting and sculpture that incorporated found objects like furniture, discarded clothing, and even a stuffed goat in his piece Monogram (1955-1959). Raw, chaotic, and full of energy, Monogram features a goat encircled by a tire and placed on a canvas, as Rauschenberg turned the traditional notion of painting inside out.

Not only expanding the very definition of what constitutes art, Rauschenberg coined the term Combines for the series that obliterated artistic boundaries in a manner typical of an artist who believed that art wasn’t separate from life. It was life. “I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint,” he explained.

In one of his first Combines, Bed (1955), Rauschenberg straddles the line between painting and sculpture. Attaching his own bed linen to a large wall-mounted board and covered with graphite scrawls and Abstract Expressionist splashes of paint in the manner of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, the inclusion of items from his everyday life helps to present a more accurate portrait of Rauschenberg than the aesthetic norm of dripped paint.

Often finding discarded items while walking the streets of downtown Manhattan, Rauschenberg used “whatever the day would lay out”. One of his more unusual finds was the stuffed bald eagle used in Canyon (1959), which has garnered controversy over the years. The eagle was offered to him by his friend, the artist Sari Dienes, who had found it among objects destined for the trash. Questions over whether it fell fowl of the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act were quashed as it was claimed to have been shot by one of the last of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

“I was bombarded with television sets and magazines, by the excess of the world. I thought an honest work should incorporate all of those elements”

As the 1960s progressed, Rauschenberg’s work reflected the mass media imagery of the day. The everyday items and expressive brushstrokes were replaced with silkscreen printing and layered photos of political figures, astronauts, and commercial symbols. Regarded as a predecessor of Pop Art thanks to his incorporation of everyday items, he always resisted the categorization, but the Pop Art aesthetic is evident in Retroactive I (1964). A color washed picture of the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy sits alongside a chaotic assortment of images, which symbolize the sensory overload of modern life. Differing from the consumer culture art of Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg was more interested in the noise of everyday life.

Skyway (1964) again features JFK in a collage (twice) and continues Rauschenberg’s experimentation with silkscreen and found imagery in a piece that captures the frenetic pace of American culture to “neutralize the calamities that were going on in the outside world”. An astronaut, bald eagle, and a mechanical crane illustrate the ideals of American progress in the second half of the 20th century in a collage that also includes an image of Venus at Her Toilet (1608)by Peter Paul Rubens.

Perhaps his most potent encapsulation of the sixties is Signs (1970) and its summary of the decade’s upheaval. Images of Janis Joplin, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King lying in state, the Vietnam War, and space exploration all jostle for position to mirror a chaotic decade.

“The object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing”

Committed to pushing boundaries and relentless experimentation, Rauschenberg worked with Bell Laboratories research scientist, Billy Klüver to produce the sound-producing sculpture, Oracle (1962–65), as well as a light installation that was responsive to sound, Soundings (1968).

The collaboration with Klüver was productive, and together with artist Robert Whitman and engineer Fred Waldhauer, they founded Experiments in Art and Technology. The organization aimed to make technology accessible to artists by arranging collaborations with engineers. Producing technologically sophisticated performance works like 9 Evenings: Theater & Engineering, it brought together visual artists, dancers, choreographers, scientists, and engineers in a performance that blurred boundaries between art and life, performance and object.

A believer in the power of art as a catalyst for social change, Rauschenberg took art to the people across the world when he launched ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange) in 1984. The personal and ambitious project visited China, Mexico, Chile, and the Soviet Union in an almost diplomatic mission to make art that responds to the local culture and promote understanding through creativity.

“I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations”

Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida, until his death in May 2008. During his long artistic career, Rauschenberg received numerous awards, including the International Grand Prize in Painting at the 32nd Venice Biennale in 1964 and the National Medal of Arts in 1993.

Not just an artist, Rauschenberg remade the idea of what art could be, influencing artists like Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, while Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine are indebted to Rauschenberg’s penchant for borrowing imagery from popular media. He leaves a legacy of fearless innovation that’s present today in every creative act that dares to cross a line. His interdisciplinary approach, blending painting, sculpture, photography, technology, and performance, opened new possibilities for what art could express and how it could function in society.

Always inclusive and always experimental, Rauschenberg ushered in the era of multimedia art, performance art, and socially engaged practice. And his legacy lies beyond the canvas, as his foundation continues to support artists, climate initiatives, and open-access art education. He co-founded Artists Rights Today to lobby for artists’ royalties on re-sales of their work and in 1970 he co-founded Change, Inc, which helped struggling artists to pay their medical bills.

Rauschenberg famously stated that “painting relates to both art and life,” and that he wanted to work “in the gap between the two.” His ability to see art in the everyday is a celebration of life and the beauty surrounding us. The beauty of his canvases are mirrored in life. “I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he said “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.” And that’s an empowering gift.