Robert Rauschenberg (1925-) is a painter, sculptor, and graphic artist known for helping to redefine American art in the 1950s and '60s, providing an alternative to the then-dominant aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism. Rauschenberg realized his talent with drawing when he turned 22 in the Marines.
Born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg on October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris, before enrolling in 1948 at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There his painting instructor was the renowned Bauhaus figure Josef Albers, whose rigid discipline and sense of method inspired Rauschenberg, as he once said, to do "exactly the reverse" of what Albers taught him.
More often, Rauschenberg's early works reflected the aesthetic of his friend, composer John Cage, another member of the Black Mountain faculty, whose music of chance occurrences and found sounds perfectly suited Rauschenberg's personality. The "white paintings' produced by Rauschenberg at Black Mountain in 1951, while they contain no image at all, are said to be so exceptionally blank and reflective that their surfaces respond and change in sympathy with the ambient conditions in which they are shown, "so you could almost tell how many people are in the room," as Rauschenberg once commented. The White Paintings are said to have directly influenced Cage in the composition of his completely "silent" piece titled 4'33" the following year.
