Word: rauschenbergs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Thus Rauschenberg did not always get the credit he deserved?not even for his altruism, which was without recent parallel in New York art circles. It was Rauschenberg who threw his reputation, and much of his time, behind the Artists' Rights movement and its steadily strengthening lobby for artists' royalties on the resale of paintings. It was Rauschenberg who, knowing the ponderousness with which foundations disgorge grants, set up and largely endowed Change, Inc.?a fund from which artists with urgent cash trouble could get small sustaining grants within a matter of days. He could afford to help...
...Milton Rauschenberg (he changed his name to Robert as a young man) was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas, a shabby, humid oil-refinery town on the Gulf of Mexico. His father, Ernest Rauschenberg, was the son of an immigrant doctor from Berlin who had drifted to southern Texas and married a Cherokee. Port Arthur was no cultural center. Its symphony orchestra was the jukebox, the comics its museum. The nearest thing to art one could see was the cheap chromo-litho holy cards pinned up in the Rauschenberg living room (the whole family was devoutly active...
Whenever he got a pass that gave him a few days off from the cuckoo's nest, Rauschenberg would simply head for the nearest highway and start thumbing rides to anywhere. On one of these time-killing trips, Rauschenberg heard about the cactus garden at the Huntington Library in San Marino. He went there ?and found that the library had paintings in it, the first "real" paintings he had ever seen: Sir Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse and Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy. These suave, bright ghosts of Georgian culture stupefied Rauschenberg...
...Rauschenberg decided he would paint. He found some pigments and brushes. There was no privacy in the barracks, and to be seen painting would have provoked endless ridicule. One night Rauschenberg locked himself in the latrine with a scrap of cardboard on his knee and secretly made his first daub, a portrait of a Navy buddy. Thirty years later, he still thinks of that illicit first night as exemplary. "There always ought to be an element of secrecy, of criminality, about making art," he says. "But if you're successful, it's hard to maintain. We all get comfortable...
Discharged from the Navy in 1945, Rauschenberg decided to study art. He signed up as a student at the Kansas City Art Institute under the G.I. Bill of Rights. Every spare dime was set aside for a trip to Europe, the statutory voyage to Mecca, which he made in 1948. "I was certain that one had to study in Paris if one was an artist. I think I was at least 15 years late." He did study, briefly, at the Academic Julian; but since he spoke not a word of French, the instruction had little effect. He felt unfocused, self...