"Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in the gap between the two.", Robert Rauschenberg, 1959
Robert Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, printmaker, and performance artist, and one of the central figures of postwar American art. Born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, he served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War, where his first visit to an art museum prompted his interest in painting, and studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Académie Julian in Paris, Black Mountain College under Josef Albers, and the Art Students League in New York. At Black Mountain in 1952 he met the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham, beginning the long collaborative relationship that would shape American art across the second half of the twentieth century.
His Combines of 1954–64, works that incorporated everyday objects, found materials, photographs, and gestural painting into single hybrid pieces, broke decisively with the dominance of late Abstract Expressionism and helped open the path to Pop Art, Neo-Dada, performance, and the broader postwar move into objecthood. He shared a studio building and a romantic partnership with Jasper Johns through the late 1950s, and the two artists are often described as the founding figures of postwar American art's break with Abstract Expressionism. He won the Grand Prize for Painting at the 1964 Venice Biennale, the first American artist to do so, and his work is held in essentially every major collection of postwar art, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Walker Art Center, and the National Gallery of Art.