Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

52 Sourced Quotes

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself; it revolved around words like 'tortured', 'struggle'. 'pain'... I could never see these qualities in paint – I could see them in life and art that illustrates life. But I could not see such conflicts in the materials and I knew that it had to be in the attitude of the painter.

Robert Rauschenberg
For the first time, I wasn't embarrassed by the look of beauty, of elegance, because when you see someone who has only one rag as their property, but it happens to be beautiful and pink and silk, beauty doesn't have to be separated... I have always said that you shouldn't have biases, you shouldn't have prejudices. But before that [before his trip to India, c. 1975] I'd never been able to use purple, because it was too beautiful.

Robert Rauschenberg
There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of Abstract expressionism – as though the man and the work were the same – that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction.

Robert Rauschenberg
This was my first encounter with art as art... somebody actually MADE those paintings.... [it] was the first time I realized you could be an artist.

Robert Rauschenberg
I feel a conscious attempt to be more and more related to society. That's what's important to me as a person. I'm not going to let other people make all the changes; and if you do that, you can't curt yourself of... I'm only against the most obvious things, like wars and stuff like that. I don't have any particular concept about an utopian way things should be. I have a prejudice or a bias, it is that there shouldn't be any particular way. Being a complex human organ, we are capable of a variety; we can do so much. The big fear is that we don't do enough with our senses, with our activities, with our areas of consideration; and these have got to get bigger year after year.

Robert Rauschenberg
Josef Albers's [a former art teacher of Rauschenberg, on Black Mountain College] rule is to make order. As for me, I consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense.

Robert Rauschenberg
1948 Black Mountain College N. C. Disciplined by Albers. Learned photography. Worked hard but poorly for Albers. Made contact with music and modern dance. Felt too isolated, Sue [Weil, they married soon, then] and I moved to NYC. Went to Art Students League. Vytlacil & Kantor. Best work made at home. Wht. Painting with no.'s best example. Summer 1950, Outer Island Conn. Married Sue Weil. Christoher (son) Born July 16, 1951 in NYC. First one man show Betty Parsons's

Robert Rauschenberg
[we gave] permission to do what we wanted.... It would be hard to imagine my work at that time [c. 1956 – 1960] without his [Jasper John's] encouragement.

Robert Rauschenberg
Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

Robert Rauschenberg
I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.

Robert Rauschenberg
I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed.

Robert Rauschenberg
The character of the artist has to be responsive and lucky. Personally I have never been interested in a defensible reason post card for working achievement functionally is a delusion. To do a needed work short changes art. It seems to me that a great part Indian moccasins of urgency in working lies in the fact that one acts freely friends and associates may become more closely allied with you real soon.

Robert Rauschenberg
On his retreat to Captiva where he started his studio and a print studio:
I got so depressed that I went to an astrologer.... everybody I knew was breaking up. Everything was falling apart. There was such an abundance of bad news.

Robert Rauschenberg
I still have a struggle reading [dyslexia] and so I don't read much... Probably the only reason I'm painter is because I couldn't read yet I love to write, but when I write I know what I'm writing, but when I'm reading I can't see it, because it goes from all sides of the page at once. But that's very good for printmaking.

Robert Rauschenberg
I could not design forms and colors that would achieve some preconceived result... I wasn't going to hire them. I was more interested in working WITH them than in their working for me.

Robert Rauschenberg
I already see things backwards! You see, in printmaking everything comes out backwards so printing is an absolute natural for me. It is difficult for a lot of artists to do prints because they draw one way and can't imagine it the other way. I always had trouble reading as a child. Every few minutes my mind would shift and I would pick out all the o's, than all the letter a's on a page.

Robert Rauschenberg
I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world.

Robert Rauschenberg
Work is my joy... Work is my therapy, I don't know anybody who loves work as much as I do.

Robert Rauschenberg
One gets as much information as a witness of activity from a fleeting glance [in the photo], like a quick look, sometimes in motion, as one does staring at the subject. Because even if you remain stationary your mind wanders, and it's that kind of activity that I would like to get into the photograph – a confirmation of the fact that everything is moving.

Robert Rauschenberg
[I have] various tricks to actually reach that solitary point of creativity. One of them is pretending I have an idea. But that trick doesn't survive very long because I don't really trust ideas – especially good ones... Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown. It is then that I begin to work.... when I don't have the comfort of sureness and certainty. Sometimes Jack Daniels helps too. Another good trick is fatigue. I like to start working when it's almost too late.... when my sense of efficiency is exhausted.

Robert Rauschenberg
I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.

Robert Rauschenberg
I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'', about the 'sad cup of coffee'... I have had cold coffee and hot coffee and lousy coffee, But I've never had a sad cup of coffee.

Robert Rauschenberg
It's because I wait, I wait until it's there again. Whatever is there [in the eye of the camera] is a truth, but a truth you have to believe in. What you see in front of you is a fact. You click when you believe it's the truth. The information is waiting to become in essence a concentration, concentrated so clearly that it can be projected back into real life, into your recognition. It could be any size.

Robert Rauschenberg
Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement.

Robert Rauschenberg
I like the aliveness of it [theater] – that awful feeling of being on the spot. I must assume the responsibility for that moment, for those actions that happen at that particular time. I don't find theater that different from painting, and it's not that I think of painting as theater or vice versa. I tend to think of working as a kind of involvement with materials, as well as rather focused interest which changes.

Robert Rauschenberg