One of the greatest contemporary artist has joined the Angels... Milton Robert "Bob" Rauschenberg passed at his Captiva home last night, May 12, 2008.
Born Milton Rauschenberg in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, and raised a Christian fundamentalist, Rauschenberg wanted to be a minister but gave it up because his church banned dancing.
"I was considered slow," he once said "While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins."
He was drafted into the U.S. Navy during World War II and knew little about art until a chance visit to an art museum where he saw his first painting at age 18. He drew portraits of his fellow sailors for them to send home. When his time in the service was up, Rauschenberg used the GI. Bill to pay his tuition at art school.
Milton Rauschenberg changed his name to Bob in 1947, in a bus station in Kansas City in the middle of the night, choosing his new moniker after " making up his mind that the first person who asked him his name, he would say ‘Bob,' and if that person believed him, it would be Bob from then on." The man who took the ordinary name had not made upon his decision as a reaction to an ordinary life.
He studied painting at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1947. He later took his studies to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he studied under master Josef Albers, and alongside contemporary artists such as choreographer Merce Cunningham and musician John Cage. He also studied at the Art Students League in New York City.
Rauschenberg first paintings in the early 1950s comprised a series of all-white and all-black surfaces under laid with wrinkled newspaper. In later works he began making art from what others would consider junk — old soda bottles, traffic barricades, and stuffed birds and calling them "combine" paintings.
One of Rauschenberg's first and most famous combines was entitled "Monogram," a 1959 work consisting of a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball, and paint. In Bantam (1954), the juxtaposition of Judy Garland, a gay popular icon, with a photo of the Yankees, a group of masculine men, may reflect tension within the artist. Also interesting formally and perhaps symbolically is the literal piece of gauze glued over Ms. Garland's photograph. While this item may simply be another random element in the formal construction of this collection of objects, I much prefer to think that he is playing with his audience, pasting an obvious allusion (to those familiar anyway) onto his picture under the guise of randomness.
By the mid-1950s, he was also designing sets and costumes for dance companies and window displays for Tiffany and Bonwit Teller.
A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style.
"I like things that are almost souvenirs of a creation, as opposed to being an artwork," he said in a 1997 Harper's Bazaar interview, "because the process is more interesting than completing the stuff."
His own thoughts on death:
"I don't ever want to go," he told Harper's Bazaar in 1997 when asked of his own death. "I don't have a sense of great reality about the next world; my feet are too ugly to wear those golden slippers. But I'm working on my fear of it. And my fear is that something interesting will happen, and I'll miss it. I'm curious, It's very rewarding. I'm still discovering things every day."
If a mans worth is determined by making a difference or leaving this earth a better place then when you arrived...he was a wealthy man whose graciousness provided for many Abused Women and Family through, the Abuse Council and Treatment Center in Ft. Myers, and the creation of the Edison Community College Rauschenberg Museum to name just a few.
The below is an interview with Charlie Rose and Bob Rauschenberg, it begins at about 28 minutes. I suggest if you have time taking a break and listen. The wisdom of this man will change you, and in closing I offer my prayers to his son, Christopher, his family, Darryl Pottorf and the collection of Beautiful friends who he loved so much!
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