Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning drawing, put a stuffed goat through a tyre, and spent fifty years insisting that the gap between art and life was where he worked. He came from Port Arthur, Texas, was drafted as a neuropsychiatric technician, and studied at Black Mountain College under Josef Albers, who he said taught him everything by being impossible to please. The white paintings of 1951 - blank panels that show only the shadows of viewers - directly prompted Cage's 4'33". From 1954 he made the Combines, works that are neither painting nor sculpture: Bed is his own quilt and pillow hung on the wall and painted, Monogram is the goat. He pulled newspaper photographs into silkscreen paintings from 1962 and won the Venice Biennale grand prize in 1964, the first American painter to do so, which caused an outcry in Europe. He was Merce Cunningham's designer for a decade and made sets, costumes and lighting for the company. He founded an organisation pairing artists with Bell Labs engineers, and later a project that toured his work through eleven countries at his own expense. He worked in Florida to the end. Erased de Kooning Drawing, made in 1953, exists because de Kooning agreed to give him a drawing he would miss. He shared a studio building and a relationship with Jasper Johns for six years, and the two of them together are the hinge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop. Experiments in Art and Technology, which he co-founded with the engineer Billy Kluver in 1966, ran for decades. The Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange toured from 1984 to 1991 and cost him around ten million dollars of his own money. He worked after a stroke in 2002 using his left hand.

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