St Louis Symphony Orchestra

Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg (1925 Ð 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement. He is well known for his collage-like prints layering multiple printed, painted, drawn, stamped or scratched-in images often with many different mediums in one piece. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Academie Julian in Paris. In 1948 Rauschenberg attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina where Josef Albers, a founder of the Bauhaus, became Rauschenberg's painting instructor. Albers' preliminary courses relied on strict discipline that did not allow for any "uninfluenced experimentation". Rauschenberg described Albers as influencing him to do "exactly the reverse" of what he was being taught.Rauschenberg's approach was sometimes called "Neo Dadaist," a label he shared with his friend, painter Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg was quoted as saying that he wanted to work "in the gap between art and life." A pioneer in using silkscreen printing as a pop art medium, where previously it was used only in commercial applicationsÑ it allowed him to address the multiple reproducibility of images, and the consequent flattening that lends. .