Word: rauschenberg
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...main achievement was undoubtedly in the realm of collage, which he picked up where Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell had taken it. Rauschenberg's Combines, as he called them, were made of large-scale junk, his "palette of objects," linked or partly effaced by slathers of paint and often provoked by a single key find. In Canyon, 1959, it was a stuffed eagle that had belonged to an old veteran of the Spanish-American War, an emblem of flight and power that Rauschenberg combined with a photo of a small child gesturing upward and another of distant galaxies. Considerately...
...Rauschenberg was a Texas boy, two parts Anglo, one part German, one part Cherokee. He was born in 1925 in one of the most art-free zones of America, Port Arthur, a bayou oil-refinery town on the Gulf of Mexico. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians, and as a teenager he thought of becoming a preacher. Luckily for American art, and perhaps for the ministry too, he ditched the notion on realizing that the Church of Christ forbade dancing. He did a stint in the Navy, as a male psychiatric nurse--which confirmed him as a lifelong pacifist. He dabbled...
...modernism, however, came at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, under the abrasive tutelage of the former Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers. The friendships he formed at Black Mountain--with painters Franz Kline and Cy Twombly, composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham--continued when he settled in New York City. Rauschenberg has always had the strongest possible sense of creative community; his generosity with ideas, resources, support and money became an art-world legend, growing over the years...
...also, without living peer, the artist of free association. Within the languages of art, Rauschenberg started more hares than he could possibly chase, including performance. His work with Cunningham and Cage, always under the influence of Marcel Duchamp, made artistic collaboration seem feasible, after the image of the artist had been monopolized by the go-it-alone individualists of the New York School. Younger artists of every kind latched on to his work, which meant that, particularly from the '50s to the '70s, there was hardly an area of "advanced" American art that didn't contain some...
...then, Rauschenberg had stopped making his work from actual objects and was using overlays of silk-screened photos, an idea he got from Andy Warhol. The paintings--like Estate, 1963--that won him the grand prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, with their high, bright color and rapid shuttle of images, conveyed an extraordinary impression of the electronic image glut that comes from TV. Through silk screen, Rauschenberg could now compress fragments of events as well as things into his work, giving it a heightened, broken-up documentary flavor--history painting for channel surfers...