ROBERT
RAUSCHENBERG

American painter (Port Arthur, Texas, 1925 – Captiva Island, Florida, 2008). A leading figure in Neo-Dadaism and Pop Art, in the 1950s R. created his first combine paintings, works in which the presence of everyday objects became the central focus of his artistic exploration. These experiments made his art the most significant example of what is known as American New Dada.

In contrast to the formal finiteness of commodified Pop Art objects, R. proposed the use of lived-in, discarded items—old junk that finds no place in the consumer world—as interpretive vehicles, approached with irony and a Dadaist sensibility, to reflect on reality. This gave rise to the provocative nature of his Combines: the tattered umbrella in Allegory (1959–60); the chair affixed to the canvas in Pilgrim (1960); the stuffed goat in Monogram (1959).

From these explorations came his positioning on a different yet parallel plane to that of Pop Art. Having broken the traditional relationship with painting, he redefined it through a powerful ability to personalize and invent his own expressive tools, employing a form of painting that was both violent and sensitive, aggressive and introspective.