Robert Rauschenberg : Phaidon Focus

Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008) was one of the most prolific and innovative artists of the post-war period, whose work, ranging across a number of disciplines, has had a profound influence on avant-garde art since the 1950s.

By working in what he called ‘the gap between art and life’, Rauschenberg aimed to bring a new scale and physicality to his paintings. Early on in his career, Rauschenberg produced groups of monochrome paintings, white, followed by black, and red. The White Paintings (1951), canvases painted with white latex house-paint, function as hypersensitive surfaces that register changes in their surroundings. This new emphasis encouraged viewers to attend to phenomena ordinarily ignored when looking at a painting, such as the play of shadows across its surface.

In his Combines, works melding painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg brought elements of popular culture and everyday life into his art through the process of collage, integrating a staggering array of materials into his compositions. His first and most famous combines was titled Monogram, a 1959 work that consisted of a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball, and paint. Rauschenberg’s ‘gap’ became the site of more than half a century of endeavours through which he redefined not only what materials could comprise a work of art but what a work of art could be. From the Combines, Rauschenberg branched out into printmaking, silkscreen paintings, performance, works involving technology and many other activities.

Widely illustrated with Rauschenberg's works and photographs of the artist in performance and in his studio, this book also examines Rauschenberg's extensive involvement in the performing arts, tracing his connections to avant-garde dance in America and addressing his own performances and work with the well-known choreographers Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown.

Catherine Craft's interest in Rauschenberg's art emerged from her involvement as a research assistant for an exhibition of his work at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC in 1992.

An independent scholar specializing in modern and contemporary art, she was a contributing author to the exhibition catalogue Robert Rauschenberg: Haywire – Major Technological Works of the 1960s in 1997, and is also the author of An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism (2012).

Additionally, she has written articles on newly discovered, unpublished writings by Rauschenberg, published in Art in America and The Burlington Magazine. She is the Adjunct Assistant Curator for Research and Exhibitions at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas.