Robert Rauschenberg - Art Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

View all Robert Rauschenberg 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
With the black ones [his 'Black Paintings'] I was interested in getting complexity without their revealing much – in the fact that there was much to see but not much showing. I wanted to show a painting that could have the dignity of not calling attention to itself. In both the blacks and the whites [paintings] there was none of the familiar aggressiveness of art that says, 'Well, here it is, whether you like it or not'.

Robert Rauschenberg
It's almost as if art, in painting and music and stuff, is the leftover of some activity. The activity is the thing that I'm most interested in. Nearly everything that I've done was to see what would happen if I did this instead of that.

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
Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two)

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
Albers [on Black Mountain College] was a beautiful teacher and an impossible person. He wasn't easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it. Years later, though, I'm still learning what he taught me, because what he taught me had to do with the entire visual world. He didn't teach you how to 'do art'. The focus was always on your personal sense of looking... I consider Albers the most important teacher I've ever had, and I'm sure that he considers me one of his poorest students.

Robert Rauschenberg
I didn't even know that there was art until I left Texas when I was eighteen. The only painting I knew (and I didn't know it was a 'painting' until much later) was 'Hope' [of George Frederic Watts, 1886] the woman sitting on the globe with... that green [of the painting 'Hope'] you only get in reproductions]! I think that negates the idea of a painter's relation to official – old master art. It was neutral ground – that one picture – I responded to visual things...'Hope' was just sort of visual thing there, not art.

Robert Rauschenberg
Outside the big idea that there is art I don't think of other's paintings. But I defend the idea of art and know that it is made up of all these paintings. Classic pictures are objects that may or may not influence what you're doing, just like anything else. Like the radio... But it hasn't anything to do with your own art or the artist's intention.

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

Robert Rauschenberg