Robert Rauschenberg 1996
© Chuck Close
"A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style." Read more
here.
A few quotes from the man who will forever leave a lasting impression on American Art:
It's so easy to be undisciplined. And to be disciplined is so against my character, my general nature anyway, that I have to strain a little bit to keep on the right track.
Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. 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.
I don't think there's anything really wrong with influence because I think that one can use another man's art as material either literally or just implying that they're doing that, without it representing a lack of a point of view.
I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn't work any other way, or whether I was doing it out of choice.
There were only five galleries in those days, and the artists really depended on each other socially, psychologically, and even critically. It’s impossible now. Business sure screwed up the art world universally.
I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.
"I don't ever want to go," he told Harper's when asked about dying. "I don't have a sense of great reality about the next world; my feet are too ugly to wear those golden slippers. But I'm working on my fear of it. And my fear is that something interesting will happen, and I'll miss it."
