Robert Rauschenberg

Born in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg served in the United States Navy from 1942 to 1945 before studying art, first at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1947–48, then briefly in Paris, at the Académie Julian, in the summer of 1948. That fall he enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in order to study with Josef Albers, the renowned Bauhaus teacher, designer, and painter. Rauschenberg moved to New York City in fall 1949 and enrolled at the Art Students League, where he took classes intermittently through 1952. He also returned to Black Mountain for several shorter sessions. The experiences he had at Black Mountain and the friendships he formed there influenced the improvisational use of materials and collaborative approach that would define his career.   

As early as 1960, Rauschenberg began experimenting with printmaking, creating painterly prints using newspaper and magazine clippings. Like the combines for which he is well known, his prints often incorporated elements of everyday life and common forms like water rings left by a glass or traced outlines of a cane. Rauschenberg’s creative approach pushed fine art printmaking in a new direction. He collaborated with talented printers and stretched the limits of methods and materials, radically re-thinking traditional approaches to lithography, screenprinting and intaglio, and printing on unconventional materials like cardboard, fabric and plastic.  

[Source: Museum Staff]