Rauschenberg, more than any other American artist of his generation, opened the question of what painting could include — found objects, photographs, taxidermied animals, hardware, fabric, electricity, dance, and performance — and his half-century working life made the open work, the collaborative work, and the work that crossed media into one of the foundational practices of late twentieth-century art.
Rauschenberg came to art through a remarkably indirect path. His childhood in a small Texas oil-refinery town, his Pentecostal upbringing, his Naval service in the Pacific theatre, and the chance hospital-ship encounter with reproductions of European Old Masters during the war gave him an entry into art unlike that of any of his future Abstract Expressionist peers. The decision to change his name from Milton to Robert at the start of his art training marked the formal beginning of his artistic life.
His training across several institutions gave him both technical breadth and exposure to the European avant-garde teachings of Albers and other emigrants. The Black Mountain years were the decisive period of his early formation. Albers's exacting color and design instruction provided one model; Cage's more experimental, chance-based approach to composition provided another; and the encounter with the dancers, composers, poets, and visual artists who passed through the school in the early 1950s gave him a working sense of cross-disciplinary collaboration that would define his subsequent practice.
The Combines that emerged in the mid-1950s were unlike anything else then being made in American art. By incorporating actual objects — a stuffed angora goat, a quilt, an Eisenhower campaign button, a cardboard box, a working radio — into the surface of his paintings, he turned the painting into a hybrid object that was both a picture and a thing in the world. The works pushed against the boundaries of medium, scale, and seriousness that the Abstract Expressionists had taken as given, and their effect on the next generation of American art was immediate. His parallel series of the White Paintings (1951), the Black Paintings (1951–52), and Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) had already established the pattern of conceptual rigor combined with material experimentation that would define his career.
The Venice grand prize coincided with his deepening collaborations with Cunningham's dance company, his continuing work with Cage, and the broader move into performance and stage design that he had begun at Black Mountain. He founded the company Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) with the engineer Billy Klüver in 1966, opening sustained collaborations between artists and engineers that would shape the broader 1960s art-and-technology movement.
His later career produced the Hoarfrost paintings, the Cardboards, the Jammers, the international Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), and an extensive body of prints and editioned work. He continued to exhibit prolifically and to extend his collaborative practice across continents until late in his life, and his death in 2008 was widely received as the close of one of the most generative careers in postwar American art. His position today is settled at the highest level of late twentieth-century art, alongside Pollock, Johns, and a small handful of his contemporaries.