Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs: 1949-1962
Robert Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement. Well known for his “Combines” of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations leveraging his skills as a painter and a sculptor. He also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance art. Rauschenberg was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1993, and received the Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts in 1995 in recognition of his more than 40 years of fruitful artmaking.
Robert Rauschenberg’s engagement with photography began at Black Mountain College in North Carolina under the tutelage of Hazel Larsen Archer in the late 1940s. The experience was so great that Rauschenberg was unsure whether to pursue painting or photography as a career. Instead, he chose both, and found ways to fold photography into his Combines, maintained a practice of photographing friends and family, documented the evolution of artworks and occasionally dramatized them by inserting himself into the picture frame. As Walter Hopps wrote, “The use of photography has long been an essential device for Rauschenberg's melding of imagery... [and] a vital means for Rauschenberg's aesthetic investigations of how humans perceive, select and combine visual information. Without photography, much of Rauschenberg's oeuvre would scarcely exist.” The artist himself affirmed, “I've never stopped being a photographer.”
Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs: 1949-1962 includes portraits of friends such as Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, studio shots, photographs used in the Combines and Silkscreen paintings, photographs of lost artworks and works in process, offering glimpses into his social milieu of the 1950s and early 60s.
Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City as well as on Captiva Island, Florida until his death from heart failure on May 12, 2008.
Books on Robert Raushenberg’s Photography & Painting
