Word: rauschenbergs
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...Rauschenberg's student years sound like the mishaps of the sorcerer's apprentice. His photography became better known than his painting. He fiddled with exposing blueprint paper, and LIFE ran a "Speaking of Pictures" page of them in 1951. He married briefly. When that broke up, he wandered to North Africa, where he made fetishlike sculptures out of sticks, stones, boxes and rope, which he took to Italy. A Florence art dealer halfheartedly exhibited them, and a Florence art critic wholeheartedly panned them, suggesting that he throw the whole bunch into the river. Not uncharacteristically, Rauschenberg went...
Returning to Manhattan loft life, Rauschenberg scoured the streets and junk shops for objects to add to his paintings. Stuffed roosters, pillows, Coke bottles, clocks and a telephone book popped out in his work. He even made his bed into a painting; having run out of canvas, he decided to paint on his quilt. "I just couldn't get the paint to overcome the geometric patterns of the quilt," explains the artist. "I decided I've got to admit it's a quilt." One admission led to another, so he added his pillow, and then some sheets...
Another such adventure in the gap between art and life concerns a stuffed Angora goat with a tire around its tummy. Such agglomerations of oils and objects Rauschenberg calls "combines," for they bridge the gap without being either side...
Frottage. Recently, Rauschenberg has stopped incorporating objects into his work. He uses images of them from newspapers, color comics and magazine pictures. He squirts lighter fluid on the pictures, presses them on his drawing paper, and transfers the images by rubbing on them with an inkless ballpoint pen-a technique called frottage. For big oils such as Tracer, he uses the silk-screen stenciling process to print photographs that strike him. "I feel it's so wasteful not to use the images you find around you," he says. In 1960 he finished 34 delicate frottage drawings to illustrate Dante...
When he takes time off from painting, Rauschenberg is usually with the avant-garde Merce Cunningham ballet company. Ballet is an art form that he likes because "my scale has always been in sympathy with theatrical values." He designs costumes, props and sets for them, even choreographed his own ballet, called Pelican, in which he wears a parachute and roller skates...