Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg-And His Influences ‘Robert’ Rauschenberg was born Milton Rauschenberg in 1925 with parents, Ernest and Dora Rauschenberg. ... When he was ten, Rauschenberg painted ‘fleur-de-lis’ patterns all over his room, only to receive threats of a severe whipping from his father, whose own passion was hunting. ... Rauschenberg developed such a creative impulse and found that he could use this in theatre. ... He is still shy, yet his exuberance is often still cited by friends and family, “He has that big-spirited, funny, crazy, fearless quality that Texans have” Rauschenberg has suggested that the size of Texas has influenced the size of his work. ... That’s my idea in art, too” Rauschenberg’s work shows strong evidence of his southern up bringing, with homely objects such as screen doors, tyres, buckets, wooden ladders, old straight chairs, the goats and the chickens. Rauschenberg says, “Having grown up in a very plain environment, if I was going to survive, I had to appreciate the most common aspects of life”. Rauschenberg used common objects regularly, but where did this idea come from? ... Rauschenberg and other artists of the time may never have had the idea of portraying everyday images as fine art had it not been for the Dada movement. ... Rauschenberg was influenced, also, by Josef Albers, who reduced form and colour to their basic structures, regularly painting basic shapes, such as a square or rectangle, with basic a colour, a red or green, for example. But Rauschenberg also tried to get around the problem of the opposite extreme of painting with Abstract Expressionism and action painting. ... Rauschenberg deeply admired de Kooning’s brushstrokes and there are traces of these in certain Rauschenberg paintings, such as, Tabernacle Fuss and Estate. ... Like Rauschenberg and the Dadists, Johns used everyday objects in his art. ... A work by Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Erased de Kooning Drawing’, is highly symbolic of how this new generation made their presence felt and went against the generation that preceded it. ... De Kooning had no objection to this piece; in fact, he provided the drawing to Rauschenberg himself! ... Jasper Johns moved into the same studio neighbourhood as Rauschenberg in the middle of 1955, is generallt seen as being the second most important figure of pre-Pop art in New York. ... Although both had started out from Abstract Expressionism, Johns and Rauschenberg went very different ways. ... Rauschenberg combined different techniques. ... Light-hearted methods of presentation became a definite aspect on the paintings of artists such as Rauschenberg, who started to use rubbish and organic waste in their collages and assemblages. ... The first was the pre-Pop phase, in which Johns and Rauschenberg took their leave of Abstract Expressionism.