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
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 don't crop. Photography is like diamond cutting. If you miss you miss. There is no difference with painting. If you don't cut you have to accept the whole image. You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.

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
[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
My whole area of art activity has always been addressed to working with other people... You see, I personally like the sensual contact of collaborating. Ideas are not real estate. In collaboration one can accept the fact that someone else can be so sympathetic and in tune with what you're doing, that through this they move into depths that might not be obvious if that person had been working alone in a studio with the door shut.

Robert Rauschenberg
[Art is] a means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint.

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
You could waste years arguing. All I had to do was make one [image] and ask: 'Do I like that?' 'Is there anything to say there?' 'Does that thing have any presence' 'Does it really matter that it looks bluer now, because it is late afternoon? Earlier this morning it looked quite white.' 'Is that an interesting experience to have?' To me, the answer was yes.

Robert Rauschenberg
I am always afraid of explaining what I am doing, because my mind works so perversely. If I know why I am doing something it immediately goes to another channel and I try not to do that anymore. So in any interview there is a possibility that I have to leave the interview and change my entire life. I think I'll stop now and let the works answer the questions. To much information is an obstacle to seeing. My works are created to be seen.

Robert Rauschenberg
I don't feel any direct relationship between what I do and existing art. Though there is unavoidable progression: the things all paintings have in common are paint, and color, and some means of application. With the standard you can make any two pictures appear either alike of different. I don't think whether they're alike or different is really very interesting.

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
On the use of photo-silkscreens:
I was bombarded with TV sets and magazines, by the excess of the world. I thought an honest work should incorporate all of these elements, which were and are a reality.

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
I find it nearly impossible free ice to write about jeep axle my work. The concept I plantatarium struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed to the logical continuity lift tab inherent in language horses and communication. My fascination with images open 24 Hrs. is based on the complex interlocking of disparate visual facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a chance to electric service become its own cliche. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object Freight-ways by this, I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built-in..

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
He [Jasper Johns] and I were each other's first serious critics. Actually he was the first painter I ever shared ideas with, or had discussions with about painting. No, not the first. Cy Twombly was the first. But Cy and I were not critical. I did my work and he did his. Cy's direction was always so personal that you could only discuss it after the fact. But Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, 'I've got a terrific idea for you' and then I'd have to find one for him.

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

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
A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric.

Robert Rauschenberg
It is my own personal psychosis that it is only by the background that you can see what is in front of you. Only be accepting all that surrounds you can you be totally self-visualized. And at the same time, your self-visualization is a reflection of your surroundings. Albers was right about that. That's why I like Cezanne so much. Matisse said, you have to read between the lines. When he would stop a line, say, at the ear, and beginning it again at the neck, he was really exercising the viewer's mind to fill in the blanks [parts].

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
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
Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

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
It was because of the general inclination, until very recently, to believe that art exists in art. At every opportunity, I've tried to correct that idea, suggesting that art is only a part – one of the elements that we live with... Being a painter, I probably take a painting more seriously than someone who drives a truck or something. Being a painter, I probably also take his truck more seriously. In the sense of looking at it and listening to it and comparing it to other trucks and having a sense of its relationship to the road and the sidewalk and the things around it and the driver himself. Observation and measure are my business.

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 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
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