Page !

Robert Rauschenberg: the Gap between Art and Life

Ellie Shackelford
ART 351: History of Art and Architecture II
Dr. Matthew Milliner
3 May 2017
 Page !2

“The function of art is to make you look somewhere else—like into your own life and see the

secrets that are in the shadows, or in the way light falls somewhere.”

Robert Rauschenberg1

Rauschenberg: Art and Life

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture,2 Jonathan A. Anderson and William W. Dyrness

write, “Modern art is not simply any work made in the modern age; rather it is artwork that is

self-consciously responsible and critical with respect to its own social situation and its

participation in the (aesthetic) operations of modernity.” The critical study of art reveals truths

about the human experience, including our understanding of beauty and the relevance of daily

life. Robert Rauschenberg is one such modern artist who presents a radical stylistic philosophy

of art and exercises responsibility within his social situation.

Mary Lynn Kotz’s biography, Rauschenberg: Art and Life, surveys the work, lifestyle,

and philosophy of Robert Rauschenberg, a famous modern artist working between the

movements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Kotz has enjoyed a thirty-year journalism

career writing on a variety of subjects and has become a contributing editor to ARTnews and

best-selling author. This book was written over the span of five years in which Kotz interviewed

dozens of people who knew Rauschenberg, dove deep into museum and personal archives for

works and letters, and spent time with the artist himself in his home and studios. She has given

over seventy illustrated lectures regarding Rauschenberg’s work at museums and festivals and

1 Kotz, Mary Lynn, Rauschenberg, Art and Life (New York: H.N. Abrams, 2004) 22.
2Jonathan A. Anderson and William A. Dyrness, Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious
Impulses of Modernism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016).
 Page !3

released a new edition of the biography in 2005. Overall, her writing presents Rauschenberg as

the influential and inventive artist he was, revealing to her audience his philosophy of mediums,

collaboration, and the power of art as driving forces in his art and life.

Robert Rauschenberg was born is Port Arthur, Texas, an oil refinery town, in 1925 to a

blue-collar, fundamentalist Christian family. He attended University of Texas for pharmacy, his

father’s choice, but quickly flunked out and served in the military. Foundations of his career as

an artist were laid while growing up creatively cramped in a small town, as he became involved

in town dance and sketched his fellow soldiers. 3 After meeting Pat Pearman, swimsuit designer

in California where he served at a Navy hospital, he decided to attend Kansas City Art Institute,

and following that, Académie Julian. The Parisian college was not all he dreamed of and Kotz

quotes him saying of his time there, “‘Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, and Giacometti had become

classics…The students at the Académie were now discussing Freud, Jung, and the psychology of

art, which was not for me.” His education there was dissatisfying, but there he met Susan Weil,

who he followed to Black Mountain College in North Carolina and to whom he was later briefly

married. Black Mountain College was famous for its abstract and theoretical emphases as well as

its disciplinarianism, producing artists such as John Cage and Cy Twombly, and employing Josef

Albers and Morris Kantor as instructors. The College became a vibrant artistic community for

Rauschenberg and many other modern artists working at the time within Abstract Expressionism

and the Neo-Dada movements, employing Rauschenberg and others as instructors after further

study and maturing in their artwork. The training Rauschenberg received influenced him,

whether in favor of or against his teachers, and his work, and connected him with many of the

3 As
discussed in this paragraph, Kotz writes of Rauschenberg’s childhood and beginnings as an artist in
Anderson and Dyrness, Rauschenberg, Art and Life, 55-61.
 Page !4

big New York names once he moved there. Rauschenberg’s art reveals an intensely personal

touch, not necessarily present in either the familiar drip paintings of Pollock or Warhol’s iconic

screen prints, though he made use of both methods. His subjects and inspirations include his

upbringing in a Texan refinery town, the news events of the day, friends and family, and his

cultural and travel experiences, especially engaging his loves of photography and screenprint.

Rauschenberg did not limit himself to any one message, much like his lack of limitations on his

medium, and sought rather to embrace his work not just as a representation of life but an

aesthetic fusion of his work and life, as he once wrote in the Sixteen Americans catalogue,

“Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the

two.)”4

Rauschenberg is most famous f5 or his collage work, called “combines,” which blend

mediums, incorporating sculpture, painting, photography, and screen print, a variety of materials

joined just as he attempted to join art and life. His combines incorporate trash and personal

mementos, newspaper clippings, prints of Old Masters paintings, and innumerable other found

objects from the streets of his homes, New York and Florida, and travels. His method of making

hopes to make art that collides with life affirmatively, as his friend John Cage once said about

art, it “[should be] an affirmation of life—not an attempt to work to bring order out of chaos nor

to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to very life we’re living.”

Rauschenberg shared this belief and referenced Cage in his own writings and interviews, and it

can be seen beginning within his earliest works.

4 Ibid., 89.
5 Quoted in ibid.
 Page !5

Some of these pieces were created with Susan Weil during their time at Académie Julian

in 1949 and the following years. The two had found some blueprint paper and decided to create a

piece with Susan’s younger brother because he fit on the page. Blueprint paper is light-

responsive, so the material allowed subjects to become inverse subjects within the work. This

piece spurred on others, including Female Figure (Figure 1) and Light Borne in Darkness

(Figure 2), and were successful works in New York and featured in Life magazine6.

Rauschenberg’s other famous early works include the White Paintings series which he began

while at Black Mountain College. The first of these was White Painting with Numbers or 22 The

Lily White (Figure 3), which he painted in Morris Kantor’s life class, ignoring the model and

scratching numbers into thick, white, wet paint. He created several other White Paintings, which

he called “abstract allegorical cartoons,” notably Crucifixion and Reflection (Figure 4), Trinity,

Mother of God (Figure 5), and Garden of Eden, all obviously religiously titled, referencing his

family’s devout fundamental Christianity, and perhaps his own efforts to understand faith.

He created the ultimates of the White Paintings as pristine, multi-paneled works, first

shown at the college in 1952 as part of a collaboration with John Cage (Figure 6). The artworks

became the stage pieces, used to project upon and backdrop the scenes. This show precluded the

celebrated happenings of the Neo-Dada movement, and John Cage credits Rauschenberg with

inspiring him to write the soundless 4’ 33’’ piece. Both Cage’s piece and Rauschenberg’s White

Paintings were met with ridicule and frustration as they redefined “art,” but many critics saw the

merits in the ideas and questions raised by the seemingly “empty” pieces. Both the blueprint

paper works and White Paintings were created with materials which record moments of time in a

6 Kotz writes of the early career of Rauschenberg, especially at Black Mountain College. See ibid., 69-76.
 Page !6

state of becoming. The blueprints were made with the long exposure of a figure, surrounded by

flora as in Female Figure, and capture layers of exposure revealed as the subject and her

surroundings shifted. Both Cage and Rauschenberg were captured by the White Paintings ability

to reveal air particles, document the number of people in the room, time of day, and weather

through their reflection of light and reception of shadow.7 In his letter to Betty Parsons in pursuit

of a second gallery show featuring more White Paintings, he writes,

“…they are not Art because they take you to a place art has not been. […] Dealing with

the suspense, excitement and body of an organic silence, the restriction and freedom of

absence, the plastic fullness of nothing, the point a circle begins and ends. They are a

natural response to the current pressures of the faithless and a promoter of intuitional

optimism. It is completely irrelevant that I am making them—Today is their creator.” 8

Rauschenberg saw absence and void as a subject of the the human experience. Early on, his

artwork attempted to record the subtlety of the present through simplicity, growing more

complex as “art as an ‘affirmation of life,’” began to include objects from everyday

surroundings, like newsprint.

The Black Paintings succeeded the White, layered with thick, black, crumpled

newspaper, and in great contrast to the White Paintings. The use of newspapers in the Black

Paintings activated “a ground so that even the first strokes in a painting had their own unique

position in a gray map of words,”9 and soon enough the newspaper became just as much a

subject as the paint for Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg continues this in his later work made from

7 Ibid., 76.
8 Ibid., 78.
9 Ibid., 83.
 Page !7

found objects, personal items, and public images, seeing art in his everyday surroundings. In his

thinking, for those materials to become art, they had to start as art. Therefore, his work, his

action upon those limited materials, creates relationships between them by juxtaposition of

multiple individual, artistic realities. He continues those thoughts with The Red Paintings,

including Charlene (Figure 7). These works mark a transition from the White and Black voids

and are some of Rauschenberg’s first combines. Charlene incorporates fabric, wood, a parasol,

postcards, comic strips, drugstore reproductions of paintings, and a light bulb, and Kotz writes of

it, “His use of composition reflected some of Cage’s ideas about Zen: Rauschenberg consciously

placed his materials without ‘meaning,’ in a way that none was subservient to another. Nor did

his collage make a ‘picture’: each part of the whole retained its own past identity.”10

After the Red Paintings, the majority of Rauschenberg’s art can be categorized as (a)

combine (combines?). He explored photography, screen printing, dozens of transfer and printings

techniques, ceramics as well as sculpture with found objects. The combines marry objects in

relationships, challenging viewers’ categorical understandings and asking them to reimagine the

possibilities of high art by isolating quotidian images or objects and juxtaposing them in new

environments, within the art itself and within the gallery. Two of the most dramatic of these

works are sculptures (Untitled and Untitled) of two glass-blown, used tires (Figure 8) and a glass

broom (Figure 9).11

It is no surprise that Rauschenberg was obsessed with collaboration, after his extreme

interdisciplinarity and interest in art’s union with life. He founded Experiments in Art and

10 Ibid., 83.
11 Ibid., 294.
 Page !8

Technology (EAT) and the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Exchange (ROCI) in order to

expand the scope of art and actively involve people outside of the bubbled artist-gallery-museum

world in the creation of art. EAT was an organization founded by Rauschenberg in 1959 and

active until 1998 which paired thousands of artists and scientists together to produce elaborate

installations based on scientific phenomena and technology. He created Soundings (Figure 10), a

light- and voice-activated piece within this project with engineer L. J. Robinson. By involving

scientists, Rauschenberg was able to capture the powers of science and technology in his

artwork; just another aspect, like the Sunday paper, of representing daily life as art in his

philosophy of creating. ROCI was an international residency and exhibition, beginning in 1984,

Rauschenberg planned for himself in eleven countries with oppressive governments including

Malaysia, China, Cuba, Tibet, and Israel. Within this seven-year project, Rauschenberg learned

about the cultures and art-making processes of the communities he worked in, used found

materials from the cities, took photographs which he used in his work until his death, planned an

exhibition which drew thousands, and donated pieces to the countries’ art museums. The

combines he created from these different countries and with people of the communities in which

he stayed reflect some of his observances about daily life, aesthetic tradition, and native

materials of the regions and many come with stories about with whom he worked. An example of

a piece which most involved the people of the visited country would be Individual (Figure 11) a

combine made with handmade paper and fabric, featuring Chinese characters. Rauschenberg

developed modifications of ancient, traditional hand-made paper techniques with the craftsmen

of the Xuan mill in Jiangxian, China, producing nearly 500 collages in his residency there.
 Page !9

His goal for ROCI to unify cultures and free people came from his belief in “the power of

art to communicate beyond language and to break down the barriers of isolation.”12 He thought

that “the artist must be engaged in deterring the fate of the earth, that the artist cannot stand aloof

as an observer.” Rauschenberg firmly believed in the artist as an indispensable element of society

who is held responsible as a force of change and justice. Because of art’s power, its collision with

everyday life is vital to its relevance, exemplified in Rauschenberg’s combine style and

collaboration. Kotz highlights this pursuit of justice and union of art and life as Rauschenberg’s

chief motivations, showcasing his many works involving familiar found objects and used as

posters in social justice or government outreach programs. 13

Criticism

Within this lengthy biography, Kotz gives an extremely thorough account of

Rauschenberg’s upbringing, artistic career, and personal life, but falls short in her critical

analysis of his work and oddly left out specific details of his personal life. Ann Lee Morgan

criticized several biographies published in 1990 including Rauschenberg: Art and Life in Art

Journal, published by College Art Association,14 saying about all of them, “They proceed more

or less chronologically and generally group artworks around episodes in the artist’s life story.”

Morgan says Kotz portrays Rauschenberg as two-dimensional, on the one hand “breezy…’days

12 Ibid., 148.
13Specifically, Earth Day (1970) and Sky Garden (1969). Printed and explicated by Kotz in ibid.,176,
178.
14Bradford R. Collins, Ann Lee Morgan, Naomi Rosenblum, and Marjorie Munsterberg, “Book
Reviews,” Art Journal 51, no. 1 (1992): 93-115.
 Page !10

filled with merriment’”15 and on the other egotistical and having a drinking problem that should

have concerned his friends more. Of artistic interpretation, Morgan says, “Kotz does not often

venture into hermeneutics”—noticeable as a sore thumb in this 300-page monograph. Her

interpretation is sadly lacking, perhaps because Rauschenberg was so prolific and attention to

each piece would thrust this book into unreadable territory. Morgan also notes that Rauschenberg

became less inventive later in his career and received little critical attention, despite Kotz’s claim

of “the artist’s unceasing originality.” 16 One other notable absence is any mention of

Rauschenberg’s homosexual orientation, a seemingly relevant point to his mentioned divorce

from Susan Weil and “deep artistic relationships” with Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, both of

which he was involved with romantically. Ultimately, Morgan’s concluding assessment is one I

can agree with, having consulted other biographical sources including Rauschenberg by Andrew

Forge17 and Man At Work:18 “Kotz evenhandedly covers all major aspects of Rauschenberg’s

career.”

Jonathan A. Anderson in his chapter of Modern Art and the Life of a Culture on “North

America in the Age of Mass Media” focuses on Rauschenberg’s White Paintings and his

understanding of them as reflectors and a void which is “not an experience of absence…and

provokes heightened sensitivities to the sheer hereness of everything.”19 Anderson’s

interpretation of Rauschenberg’s later combines insists on religious themes continuing

15 Ibid., 101.
16 Ibid., 103.
17 Andrew Forge, Rauschenberg (New York: Meridian Books, 1978).
18 Robert Rauschenberg: Man at Work, documentary, directed by Chris Granlund, (1997).
19 Anderson and Dyrness, Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, 305.
 Page !11

throughout as religious imagery, including monks, donation envelopes, and evangelism tracts. It

seems reasonable to me that Rauschenberg continued to consider theology and institutionalized

religion throughout his career, and certainly Hans Rookmaker’s assessment of it “as allegories of

‘a shabby world in which all things are of equal value, but no great values persist” is not a

thorough assessment. My understanding of Rauschenberg leads me to believe that the theological

themes discussed in Modern Art and the Life of a Culture’s feature are present, but no mention of

religious affiliation or spiritual commitment was included in accounts by Kotz, Forge, or the

documentary.

Rauschenberg worked across mediums and included everyday objects and images in

order to rediscover life through art and vice versa. The appeal of used tires and cardboard boxes

was in their reality, their identity: their power lies in how we recognize them. When we see an

object, like a Coke bottle or handmade shirt, in the context his work provides, it gains meaning

through its relationship to other objects included. Its reality confronts other realities in

juxtaposition. Rather than the work of the surrealists, like Dali or Magritte which manipulated

objects into almost believable contexts, Rauschenberg isolates objects we know and asks us to

consider them together, whether they harmonize or clash. He hands us neither a surreal, warped

reality, nor Duchamp’s cynical ready-mades: he appropriates images into contexts which seek to

inspire us to not live as bystanders in the world and to challenge our understanding of art.
 Page !12

Works Cited

Anderson, Jonathan A. and William A. Dyrness. Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The
Religious Impulses of Modernism. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016.

Collins, Bradford R., Ann Lee Morgan, Naomi Rosenblum, and Marjorie Munsterberg. “Book
Reviews.” Art Journal 51, no. 1 (1992): 93-115.

Forge, Andrew. Rauschenberg. New York: Meridian Books, 1978.

Kotz, Mary Lynn. Rauschenberg, Art and Life. New York: H.N. Abrams, 2004.

Robert Rauschenberg: Man at Work, directed by Chris Granlund, (1997).


 Page !13

Images Cited

Figure 1. Female Figure. 1949. Figure 3. White Painting with Numbers or 22

the Lily White. 1950.

Figure 4. Crucifixion and Reflection. 1950.

Figure 2. Light Born in Darkness. 1951.

 Page !14

Figure 5. Mother of God. 1950. Figure 7. Charlene. 1954.

Figure 8 and 9. Untitled and Untitled. 1997.

Figure 6. The artist and the Untitled White

Paintings. 1953, Stable Galley, NY.

 Page !15

Figure 10. Soundings. 1968.

Figure 11. Individual, ROCI/China.1982.