Robert Rauschenberg American, 1925-2008

American artist Robert Rauschenberg's enthusiasm for popular culture and — with his contemporary Jasper Johns — rejection of the angst and seriousness of the Abstract Expressionists led him to search for a new way of painting. A prolific innovator of techniques and mediums, Rauschenberg used unconventional art materials ranging from dirt and house paint to umbrellas and car tires.

In the early 1950s, Rauschenberg was already gaining a reputation as the art world’s enfant terrible with works such as Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), for which he requested a drawing (as well as permission) from Willem de Kooning and proceeded to rub away the original image until only ghostly marks remained on the paper. By 1954, Rauschenberg completed his first three-dimensional collage paintings — he called them “Combines” — in which he incorporated discarded materials and mundane objects to explore the intersection of art and life. “I think a picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world,” he said. In 1964, Rauschenberg became the first American to win the International Grand Prize in Painting at the Venice Biennale. The 1/4 Mile or Two Furlong Piece (1981–98), a cumulative artwork, embodies his spirit of eclecticism, comprising a retrospective overview of his many discrete periods, including painting, fabric collage, sculptural components made from cardboard and scrap metal, as well as a variety of image transfer and printing methods.