Robert Rauschenberg Bed

Lively piano music voiceover.

Robert rauschenberg bed. If all you knew of him was the. Robert rauschenberg s enthusiasm for popular culture and with his contemporary jasper johns his rejection of the angst and seriousness of the abstract expressionists led him to search for a new way of painting. It was very simply put together because i actually had nothing to paint on except it was summertime and it was hot. Bed is one of rauschenberg s first combines a.

A prolific innovator of techniques and mediums he used unconventional art materials ranging from dirt and house paint to umbrellas and car tires. She made the family s clothes from scraps a practice that embarrassed her son. The robert rauschenberg foundation fosters the legacy of rauschenberg s life and work. R obert rauschenberg 1925 2008 is america s leonardo ceaselessly inventive a mind in perpetual revolution.

We re on the 4th floor of the museum of modern art in new york and we re looking at robert rauschenberg s bed this is a combine not quite a sculpture not quite a painting from 1955. Robert rauschenberg is widely regarded as a predecessor of the pop artists because of his incorporation of the stuff of everyday life including anything that caught his imagination from rubber tires to light bulbs into his wide ranging work in many of his works like bed he merged elements of postwar abstract painting with found objects. Milton ernest robert rauschenberg october 22 1925 may 12 2008 was an american painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement. His mother dora was a devout christian and a frugal woman.

Robert rauschenberg created bed at a time when he was struggling to make it as an artist. One of rauschenberg s first combines bed transcends the line between painting and sculpture through its dadaist assemblage of traditional materials and the detritus of everyday life. Rauschenberg is well known for his combines of the 1950s in which non traditional materials and objects were employed in various combinations rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the combines are a combination. In 2006 rauschenberg recalled what led him to use a quilt and a pillow as a basis for this work.

Here he framed a well worn pillow sheet and quilt scribbled on them with pencil and splashed them with paint in a style reminiscent of abstract expressionism. Rauschenberg coined the term combine to describe a series of works from the 1950s and 1960s that literally combine the media of painting and sculpture within a single three dimensional art object. Bed is one of robert rauschenberg s first combines works in which he affixed cast off items such as tires or old furniture to a traditional support. That is the revelation of this exhilarating show.