A pioneer of contemporary art, Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, a multifaceted artist—painter, graphic artist, sculptor, performer, musician, and set designer—who profoundly revolutionized the postwar contemporary art landscape, anticipating and inspiring movements such as Neo-Dada, Pop Art, and Nouveau Réalisme. His work helped redefine the boundaries between different artistic languages, paving the way for a new hybrid conception of the visual arts.
In 1948, he moved to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian and met Susan Weil, who would become his wife. Returning to the United States, he studied at the renowned Black Mountain College in North Carolina, coming into contact with key figures of the American avant-garde such as Merce Cunningham and John Cage, with whom he created the first "Happenings," initiating a dialogue between visual art, music, and performance.
In 1954, she settled in New York, where she met Jasper Johns: the two artists shared a loft and collaborated extensively, designing the window displays of Tiffany & Co. and Bonwit Teller for designer Gene Moore. Their artistic closeness helped overcome the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, laying the foundations for an art more open to everyday life and mass culture.
Rauschenberg is famous for two seminal bodies of work: the Combines of the 1950s—assemblages combining painting and found objects—and the silkscreen paintings of the early 1960s, which used media images to explore the relationship between art and society. The latter would decisively influence the birth of Pop Art. After redefining the boundaries of the artwork with the Combines, Rauschenberg continued his investigation of the relationship between art and the chaos of everyday life.
At the same time, Rauschenberg also distinguished himself as a set designer and technician for the Cage and Cunningham dance companies, and as a global cultural ambassador through the ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange) project, active in the 1980s, through which he promoted artistic and technological dialogue in various countries around the world.
In 1971, he moved to Captiva Island, Florida, where he set up his own studio and devoted himself to new artistic research. This was where his Cardboards series was born, exhibited for the first time at the Leo Castelli Gallery in SoHo: works made from recycled cardboard boxes, an example of a poetics grounded in the use of humble and discarded materials.
Later, inspired by the gauze used to clean lithographic stones, he created the Hoarfrost series: compositions of unstretched fabrics, printed with images from magazines and newspapers, fixed to the wall with buttonholes and pins. These works, capable of moving at the slightest breath of air, introduce an ephemeral and performative dimension to the visual language.
In the 1980s, the interest of Swiss gallerist Ernst Beyeler relaunched his image on the European scene, drawing comparisons to the great Post-Impressionist masters. During that period, Rauschenberg experimented with silkscreen printing on treated metals—steel, aluminum, mirrored surfaces—and, consistent with his environmental commitment, developed water-based image transfer techniques, using natural pigments and biodegradable materials.
Robert Rauschenberg passed away on May 12, 2008, at his home on Captiva Island, leaving a visionary legacy that continues to influence generations of artists.
