Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement.

Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines (1954–1964), a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture.

[12][13] At 18, Rauschenberg was admitted to the University of Texas at Austin where he began studying pharmacology, but he dropped out shortly after due to the difficulty of the coursework—not realizing at this point that he was dyslexic—and because of his unwillingness to dissect a frog in biology class.

[17][18] At Black Mountain, Rauschenberg sought out Josef Albers, a founder of the Bauhaus in Germany, whom he had read about in an August 1948 issue of Time magazine.

[22] Although Rauschenberg considered Albers his most important teacher, he found a more compatible sensibility in John Cage, an established composer of avant-garde music.

Cage provided Rauschenberg with much-needed support and encouragement during the early years of his career, and the two remained friends and artistic collaborators for decades to follow.

[19] From 1949 to 1952 Rauschenberg studied with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor at the Art Students League of New York,[23] where he met fellow artists Knox Martin and Cy Twombly.

Duchamp's Dadaist influence can also be observed in Jasper Johns' paintings of targets, numerals, and flags, which were familiar cultural symbols: "things the mind already knows.

"[34] At Black Mountain College, Rauschenberg experimented with a variety of artistic mediums including printmaking, drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, and theatre; his works often featured some combination of these.

In the very same year he made full body blueprints in collaboration with Susan Weil in his New York apartment, which "they hope to turn [...] into screen and wallpaper designs".

[36] To Rauschenberg's surprise, a number of the works sold; many that did not he threw into the river Arno, following the suggestion of an art critic who reviewed his show.

[37][38] Upon his return to New York City in 1953, Rauschenberg began creating sculpture with found materials from his Lower Manhattan neighborhood, such as scrap metal, wood, and twine.

[39] Throughout the 1950s, Rauschenberg supported himself by designing storefront window displays for Tiffany & Co. and Bonwit Teller, first with Susan Weil and later in partnership with Jasper Johns under the pseudonym Matson Jones.

In a famously cited incident of 1953, Rauschenberg requested a drawing from the Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning for the express purpose of erasing it as an artistic statement.

After a visit to Andy Warhol's studio that year, Rauschenberg began using a silkscreen process, usually reserved for commercial means of reproduction, to transfer photographs to canvas.

Rauschenberg had experimented with technology in his artworks since the making of his early Combines in the mid-1950s, where he sometimes used working radios, clocks, and electric fans as sculptural materials.

Where his previous works had often highlighted urban imagery and materials, Rauschenberg now favored the effect of natural fibers found in fabric and paper.

He printed on textiles using his solvent-transfer technique to make the Hoarfrost (1974–76) and Spread (1975–82) series; the latter featured large stretches of collaged fabric on wood panels.

Rauschenberg created his Jammer (1975–76) series using colorful fabrics inspired by his trip to Ahmedabad, India, a city famous for its textiles.

The imageless simplicity of the Jammer series is a striking contrast with the image-filled Hoarfrosts and the grittiness of his earliest works made in New York City.

His Love Hotel [Anagram (A Pun)] from 1998, and made out of vegetable dye transfer on polylaminate, is included in the permanent collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, in Florida, the artist's home state for nearly forty years.

Instead of perceiving them to be without content, however, John Cage described the White Paintings as "airports for the lights, shadows and particles";[55] surfaces which reflected delicate atmospheric changes in the room.

"[23] His Combine series endowed everyday objects with a new significance by bringing them into the context of fine art alongside traditional painting materials.

His transitional pieces that led to the creation of Combines were Charlene (1954) and Collection (1954/1955), where he collaged objects such as scarves, electric light bulbs, mirrors, and comic strips.

Because of the intimate connections of the materials to the artist's own life, Bed is often considered to be a self-portrait and a direct imprint of Rauschenberg's interior consciousness.

[61] Rauschenberg was close friends with Cunningham-affiliated dancers including Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, and Steve Paxton, all of whom featured in his choreographed works.

In 1965, when Life magazine commissioned him to visualize a modern Inferno, he did not hesitate to vent his rage at the Vietnam War and other contemporary sociopolitical issues, including racial violence, neo-Nazism, political assassinations, and ecological disaster.

In 1998, the Vatican commissioned a work by Rauschenberg in honor of the Jubilee year 2000 to be displayed in the Padre Pio Liturgical Hall, San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy.

A ROCI exhibition went on view at the National Gallery of Art, D.C., in 1991,[78] concluding a ten-country tour: Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, China, Tibet, Japan, Cuba, U.S.S.R., Germany, and Malaysia.

Rauschenberg took up his fight for artist resale royalties (droit de suite) after the taxi baron Robert Scull sold part of his collection of Abstract Expressionist and Pop art works for $2.2 million.