Born Miltin Ernest Rauschenberg on October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg studied at a Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian inside Paris, before enrolling in 1948 at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There his painting teacher was a far-famed Bauhaus figure Josef Albers, whose rigid discipline and feel of method inspired Rauschenberg, when he when said, to wash "exactly the reverse" of what Albers taught him.

Other typically, Rauschenberg's early works reflected a esthetic of his friend, composer John Cage, another member of the Black Mountain faculty, whose music of risk occurrences & witnessed sounds perfectly suited Rauschenberg's personality. A "white paintings' produced by Rauschenberg at Black Mountain in 1951, while they contain no image at all, are said to be so exceptionally blank and reflective that their surfaces respond and change in sympathy with the ambient conditions in which they are shown, "so that you can most tell how else numbers of population come in the room," as Rauschenberg once commented. The White Paintings are said to have directly influenced Cage in the composition of his completely "silent" piece titled ''4'33"'' a as a consequence season.

Around 1952 Rauschenberg began his series of "Black Paintings" and "Red Paintings," in whichBig, expressionistically brushed areas of color were combined with collage and found objects attached to the canvas. These therefore-supposed "Combine Paintings" in a end come to include such theretofore un-painterly objects as a stuffed goat & the creative person's have bed, breaking down traditional boundaries between painting & sculpture, & reportedly prompting 1 Abstract Expressionist painter to remark, "If this is Modern Art, then I quit!" Rauschenberg's Combines provided inspiration for the generation of creative person looking for choice to traditional artistic media. (Watch Assemblage, Arte Povera.)

Rauschenberg's approach was another time known as "Neo-Dada," a label he shared using a painter Jasper Johns, with whom he experienced an extended artistic & personal relation. Rauschenberg's oft-repeated quote that he wanted to operate "in the gap between art and life," suggested the inquiring of the distinction between piece & everyday objects evocative of the issues raised per infamous "Fountain" of Dada pioneer Marcel Duchamp. At a equivalent period, Johns' paintings of number, flags, & a such as, were reprising Duchamp's message of the role of the observer around creating art's meaning.

By 1962, Rauschenberg's paintings were beginning to incorporate not merely encountered objects however obtained images besides--pic transferred to the canvas by means of the silkscreen process. Antecedently utilized exclusively within commercial applications, silkscreen allowed Rauschenberg to location a multiple duplicability of images, & a resultant flattening of personal experience that that implies. In that respect, his operate is exactly contemporaneous therewith of Andy Warhol, & two Rauschenberg and Johns come oftentimes cited when significant forerunners of U.s. Pop Art.

Additionally to painting & sculpture, Rauschenberg's hanker career has as well involved important contributions to printmaking & Performance Art. When of 2003 he continues to work from either his residence & studio within Captiva, Florida.