Robert Rauschenberg

The gap between art and life

Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist, born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, an oil refinery town on the Gulf of Mexico, in 1925, and died in 2008. He said he wanted to act in the gap between art and life, and almost everything he made can be read as an attempt to keep that gap open: to let the world, its objects, its noise and its accidents, into the picture.

He came to art late and by accident. Drafted into the Navy as a young man, he trained as a neuropsychiatric technician, and it was on a visit to a museum in California, seeing paintings he had known only as reproductions on playing cards, that he first understood that being an artist was possible. He studied briefly in Kansas City and in Paris, changed his name from Milton to Bob, and then enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina to study under Josef Albers. The two were frequently at odds, but Rauschenberg later called Albers his most important teacher, and Albers's insistence on the inherent properties of materials stayed with him permanently.

The paintings that emptied out

At Black Mountain and in New York he produced the bodies of work that made his reputation among artists long before the public knew of him. The White Paintings, modular canvases painted entirely white, are not blank: they register the changing light of a room and the shadows of anyone standing before them, which is precisely their subject. They provoked John Cage into writing his silent piece, and Cage acknowledged the debt.

The Black Paintings followed, made with matte and glossy paint over grounds of newspaper, and then the Red Paintings, which he undertook because red seemed to him the most difficult colour to work with. His first solo exhibition, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1951, sold nothing at all.

In 1952 he took part, at Black Mountain, in the untitled event now generally considered the first Happening, in which Cage lectured, Merce Cunningham danced through the audience, poetry was read from a ladder, and Rauschenberg played old records while his White Paintings hung overhead. That collision of disciplines set the pattern for a lifetime of collaboration with dancers, composers and engineers.

Erasure and the found world

In 1953 he asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing in order to erase it, and de Kooning, understanding the provocation, gave him a difficult one. It took nearly a month. The result stands as one of the defining gestures of postwar art: a work made entirely by subtraction, whose authorship is genuinely divided. The same year produced the Automobile Tire Print, made by driving Cage's Model A Ford, its rear tyre inked, down a long strip of paper, and his first European solo exhibition, of boxes and hanging assemblages, in Rome.

From these beginnings came the Combines, works that refuse the distinction between painting and sculpture by attaching quilts, tyres, stuffed animals and street salvage to the canvas, and later the silkscreen paintings that pulled photographic imagery from the press into the picture. He won the international grand prize in painting at the Venice Biennale in the sixties, the first American to do so. He worked extensively in printmaking, in performance and costume design for Cunningham and for Trisha Brown, and in collaborations with engineers.

What a specialist examines

Rauschenberg's output is exceptionally varied, and the tier matters more than the name. Unique Combines and silkscreen paintings occupy a level of their own. Below them sit unique works on paper and transfer drawings, then the very substantial print output, lithographs, screenprints and editioned multiples produced with major workshops over decades and issued in a wide range of edition sizes.

For prints, a specialist identifies the workshop and publisher, the edition size, the impression number and any proof designation, all of which are normally inscribed on the sheet itself and can be reconciled against the published literature on his print output.

Condition is medium specific and often complicated, because he used unstable and found materials deliberately: fabric and paper elements fade and become brittle, adhesives fail, and objects incorporated into Combines can corrode or shed, so any conservation history should be disclosed in full. On prints, look for light fade, foxing, trimmed margins and skinning at the verso from prior mounting. Ownership history through the artist's galleries, and inclusion in the documented exhibition history, weigh heavily.