In 1946 and 1947 Robert Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute. He then left America and moved to Paris. There he continued his art studies at the Académie Julian in 1947. The following year he returned to America and attended Black Mountain College until 1949. There he was a student of the German-American painter and designer Josef Albers. He also studied at the Art Student's League with the American painter and art writer Robert Motherwell, the Polish-born painter Jack Tworkov and the American painter Franz Kline.

Rauschenberg was inspired by the Dadaist works of the German painter, sculptor and poet Kurt Schwitters, by the ready-mades of the French artist Marcel Duchamp and by the style of the American composer John Cage; This resulted in "white" and "black" pictures in the first half of the 1950s. Rauschenberg then made his collages in an expressionist painting style, which he combined with textile materials or photographs. Already in these works the connection to his later Combine Paintings was clearly noticeable. In the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg made his debut with the first works of this kind - he combined his expressionist paintings with everyday objects from mass production such as radios, clocks, bottles and light bulbs.

In this connection, the three-dimensional objects appeared alienating and strange. His best-known work, "Monogram", comes from a series made between 1955 and 1959 and depicts a ram with a car tire. These works had a strong influence on the pop art movement of the 1960s. With his three-dimensional works of art, Rauschenberg helped a new realism to break through against the prevailing Abstract Expressionism. Especially through his use of images of personalities in American life such as John F. Kennedy in the work "Retroactive I" (1964), Rauschenberg intended to bring art closer to reality. At the beginning of the 1960s, Rauschenberg tried his hand at screen printing black and white series images.

Then he put on some multimedia shows in collaboration with John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. The artist's aim was to expand the existing possibilities of traditional art forms. In the 1970s and 1980s, Robert Rauschenberg returned to the collage technique and also produced lithographs and other graphics. For example, in the early 1970s he created cardboard wall works using packing boxes and returned to a more abstract formal language. In 1981 he created the work "Rauschenberg Photographs", a work with photographs on which he concentrated during this time. From 1985 to 1991, Rauschenberg went on the exhibition tour "ROCI" - "Rauschenberg Oversaes Culture Interchange", which took him through international countries.

In 1993 he received the USA National Medal of Art. A major Rauschenberg retrospective followed from September 1997 to March 1999, which was shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Menil Collection, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa. A large solo exhibition followed from December 2005 to May 2007, which was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Musée national d'art moderne, Center Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm was shown.

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