Robert Rauschenberg's Almanac

Robert Rauschenberg's Almanac

Born on October 22nd 1925 in the oil-refining city of Port Arthur, Texas neè Milton Ernest Rauschenberg, he later renamed himself Robert after his Grandfather. Rauschenbergs father was one of the many blue coloured workers in the oil refineries whilst his mother worked as a telephone operator. He first studied art during his final years at high school but this was quickly cut short when in 1943 he entered the local University of Texas to study Physics only to be expelled in his first year due to learning difficulties, dyslexia, which was then not recognised and so from there he

entered into military service with the navy for one year working in the hospitals as he “did not want to kill anyone” and here his antiwar feelings only became stronger.

He did not enrol into art education again until 1947 when he joined Kansas’s art school, which took him on a short and unmemorable study period to Paris, because he felt no use there for it’s time had already been and gone. It was moving back to America and onto the Black Mountain College in North Carolina where Rauschenberg began to come into his own. Studying alongside key Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline he began to reject the way that the purely emotional movement worked believing that colours didn’t represent emotions but colour.

In 1951 Rauschenberg broke away on his own with his first solo show, although that same year he did exhibit alongside 60 other New York Abstract Expressionist artists including Pollock and Kooning and became part of the ‘New York School’ that was founded. But during the fifties he and his working partner Jasper Johns had the Abstract

Expressionists in outrage as Rauschenberg began to fill the surface of his paintings with objects that included stuffed goats and chickens, coca cola bottles and newspapers he began to bring subject matter back into paintings and his work bridged the gap between abstraction and representation. According to Time critic Robert Hughes this pioneering work helped to “set free the attitudes that (eventually) made pop art seem culturally acceptable”

Rauschenbergs Almanac includes all the beliefs that the artist was firmly about when he reached the sixties. Experimentation; never content with one style Rauschenberg preferred to be forever forging ahead with new mediu...

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Overall Almanac is an array of strong linear images; factory buildings, the New York City skyline, the lunar bug diagram, a mathematical grid combined with the contrasting natural forms; the seascapes, a pair of hands, a pot plant and a flower combined with the free flowing brush strokes of paint that bring the pictures together and yet keep each one individual. The images used would have shaped the erratic happenings of 1962 for both Rauschenberg and other Americans. Most of his work was limited to strictly American material, material that would have been forcing itself everyday into millions of American households, as Rauschenberg quoted they were being “bombarded with TV sets and magazines.” Almanac is just one glimpse of the Western world during a rapidly technologically changing period, when art forms and their acceptability were being

rethought. It is one of the many ‘combines’ that Rauschenburg created during his and Jasper Johns fantastically influential period on the booming New York art world of the mid 20th Century.

Arresting images from the everyday and making a “commentary on contemporary society using the very images that helped to create that society”