Born into a family of fundamentalist Christians on October 22, 1925, Milton Ernst Rauschenberg or Robert Rauschenberg was one of America’s most prolific and important artists. He obtained artistic training from him at the Kansas City Art Institute and at the Art Students League of New York. Robert Rauschenberg’s hands worked in various creative styles and media, including photography, printmaking, papermaking, performance, and dance. He gained fame in the 1950s for his atypical transition from ‘Abstract Expressionism’ to ‘Pop Art’. Robert Rauschenberg is well known for his “Combines”, especially “Canyon”, an innovative and somewhat chaotic compilation of painting and sculpture, using eclectic everyday items and supplies.
Robert Rauschenberg’s “Canyon” (1959), a ‘Combine’ mural, is a set of buttons, photographs, a stuffed bald eagle, wearing a rope attached to a pillow rising from the main panel and tied to a rope . The 87″ x 70″ x 24″ mural is quickly lowered to the ground with a soft landing assured. “Canyon” is a gentle hint at Rembrandt’s ‘The Rape of Ganymede’ (1635). To maintain an unforgiving relationship between the pictorial With themes in “Canyon”, Rauschenberg went very deep to bring out new elements, such as sheet metal and enamel on wood. The artist once said, “I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made from the real world.” .
Attractive and interesting art, created out of the banal, formed the core and emphasis of Robert’s creation on beauty, a fact well borne out through his “Canyon”. The ‘Combine’ used a wide spectrum of elements, including oil, house and tube paints, pencil, paper, metal, photographs, fabric, wood on canvas, buttons, mirror, stuffed eagle, cardboard box, pillow, and nails. This diverse work, with multiple connotations, unifies a single creative philosophy, that of free and independent chance. To clarify his understanding of art, Robert once commented: “It is not Art for Art’s sake, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art which has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with it.” with life, but it has nothing to do with art”.
Throughout his artistic journey, Robert Rauschenberg urged to communicate with the audience through objects and elements that played as representational aids, giving contemporary American art and sculpture a new meaning and look. Other famous Robert Rauschenberg assemblages besides “Canyon” are ‘Gloria’ (1956), ‘Summer Rental III’ (1960) and the famous ‘Monogram’ (1959). Master of creative experimentation Robert Rauschenberg passed away on May 12, 2008 of cardiac arrest on Captiva Island, Florida. His ‘Contemporary Art’ piece “Canyon” currently graces the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
