Robert Rauschenberg Quotes on Art

Robert Rauschenberg was a famous American pop artist, painter, sculptor, printmaker and photographer. He is best known for his Neo-Dadaist or pop art paintings, collages, prints and combines which combined painting and sculpture. Famous Robert Rauschenberg paintings include “Canyon”, “Bed”, “Retroactive II”, “Studio Painting”, “Buffalo II”, “Monogram”, “Erased de Kooning Drawing”, “Mother of God” and “Factum I”.

Mini biography: Born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg on the 22nd of October, 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, United States of America. His mother was Dora Carolina Matson and his father Ernest R. Rauschenberg worked at a power company. Rauschenberg married artist Susan Weil in 1950 and they divorced in 1953. They had one child: Christopher. Rauschenberg was bi-sexual and had relationships with artists Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly. The artist died on the 12th of May, 2008 in Captiva Island, Florida, U.S. at the age of 82.

List of Famous Robert Rauschenberg Art Quotes

I think that in the last twenty years or so, there’s been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly. Robert Rauschenberg

It’s so easy to be undisciplined. And to be disciplined is so against my character, my general nature anyway, that I have to strain a little bit to keep on the right track. Robert Rauschenberg

I am always afraid of explaining what I am doing, because my mind works so perversely. If I know why I am doing something it immediately goes to another channel and I try not to do that anymore. So in any interview there is a possibility that I have to leave the interview and change my entire life. I think I’ll stop now and let the works answer the questions. Robert Rauschenberg

There were only five galleries in those days, and the artists really depended on each other socially, psychologically, and even critically. It’s impossible now. Business sure screwed up the art world universally. Robert Rauschenberg

I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn’t work any other way, or whether I was doing it out of choice. Robert Rauschenberg

I don’t feel any direct relationship between what I do and existing art. Though there is unavoidable progression: the things all paintings have in common are paint, and color, and some means of application. Robert Rauschenberg

I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world. Robert Rauschenberg

It’s almost as if art, in painting and music and stuff, is the leftover of some activity. The activity is the thing that I’m most interested in. Nearly everything that I’ve done was to see what would happen if I did this instead of that. Robert Rauschenberg

I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with influence because I think that one can use another man’s art as material either literally or just implying that they’re doing that, without it representing a lack of a point of view. Robert Rauschenberg

I personally like the sensual contact of collaborating. Ideas are not real estate. In collaboration one can accept the fact that someone else can be so sympathetic and in tune with what you’re doing, that through this they move into depths that might not be obvious if that person had been working alone in a studio with the door shut. Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg Self Portrait Print

More on American Pop Artist Robert Rauschenberg

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Related or similar popular artists and celebrities include: Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and other Famous US Artists.