Robert Rauschenberg: Quotes about painting

Robert Rauschenberg was American artist. Explore interesting quotes on painting.
Robert Rauschenberg: 94 quotes1 like

“I don't crop. Photography is like diamond cutting. If you miss you miss. There is no difference with painting. If you don't cut you have to accept the whole image. You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.”

Robert Rauschenberg

1980's, I don't necessarily desire a perfect photography,' 1981

“There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself; it revolved around words like 'tortured', 'struggle'. 'pain'… I could never see these qualities in paint – I could see them in life and art that illustrates life. But I could not see such conflicts in the materials and I knew that it had to be in the attitude of the painter.”

Robert Rauschenberg

Source: 21st Century, Robert Rauschenberg, Works, Writings and Interviews, 2006, p. 37

“You could waste years arguing. All I had to do was make one [image] and ask: 'Do I like that?' 'Is there anything to say there?' 'Does that thing have any presence' 'Does it really matter that it looks bluer now, because it is late afternoon? Earlier this morning it looked quite white.' 'Is that an interesting experience to have?' To me, the answer was yes.”

Robert Rauschenberg

on his 'White Paintings'
1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

“1948 Black Mountain College N. C. Disciplined by Albers. Learned photography. Worked hard but poorly for Albers. Made contact with music and modern dance. Felt too isolated, Sue [Weil, they married soon, then] and I moved to NYC. Went to Art Students League. Vytlacil & Kantor. Best work made at home. Wht. Painting with no.'s best example. Summer 1950, Outer Island Conn. Married Sue Weil. Christoher (son) Born July 16, 1951 in NYC. First one man show Betty Parsons's”

Robert Rauschenberg

Source: 1980's, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art world of Our Time, 1980, pp. 55-56 : Autobiographic notes

“I didn't even know that there was art until I left Texas when I was eighteen. The only painting I knew (and I didn't know it was a 'painting' until much later) was 'Hope' [of George Frederic Watts, 1886] the woman sitting on the globe with... that green [of the painting 'Hope'] you only get in reproductions]! I think that negates the idea of a painter's relation to official – old master art. It was neutral ground – that one picture – I responded to visual things...'Hope' was just sort of visual thing there, not art.”

Robert Rauschenberg

1950's, Is today's artist with or against the past, (1958)

“I think the ideas [as starting point for his paintings] are based upon very obvious physical facts – notions that are also simple-minded, such as, in the 'White Paintings', wanting to know if that was a thing to do or not, or in 'Factum', wondering about what the role of accident is. Those aren't really very involved ideas.”

Robert Rauschenberg

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

“Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two)”

Robert Rauschenberg

from Selections from the Ileana and Michael Sonnabend Collection, Sam Hunter, exhibition catalogue The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1985 p. 21
1980's

“Outside the big idea that there is art I don't think of other's paintings. But I defend the idea of art and know that it is made up of all these paintings. Classic pictures are objects that may or may not influence what you're doing, just like anything else. Like the radio... But it hasn't anything to do with your own art or the artist's intention.”

Robert Rauschenberg

1950's, Is today's artist with or against the past, (1958)

“I don't feel any direct relationship between what I do and existing art. Though there is unavoidable progression: the things all paintings have in common are paint, and color, and some means of application. With the standard you can make any two pictures appear either alike of different. I don't think whether they're alike or different is really very interesting.”

Robert Rauschenberg

1950's, Is today's artist with or against the past, (1958)

“I like the aliveness of it [theater] – that awful feeling of being on the spot. I must assume the responsibility for that moment, for those actions that happen at that particular time. I don't find theater that different from painting, and it's not that I think of painting as theater or vice versa. I tend to think of working as a kind of involvement with materials, as well as rather focused interest which changes.”

Robert Rauschenberg

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

“It's almost as if art, in painting and music and stuff, is the leftover of some activity. The activity is the thing that I'm most interested in. Nearly everything that I've done was to see what would happen if I did this instead of that.”

Robert Rauschenberg

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

“It was because of the general inclination, until very recently, to believe that art exists in art. At every opportunity, I've tried to correct that idea, suggesting that art is only a part – one of the elements that we live with... Being a painter, I probably take a painting more seriously than someone who drives a truck or something. Being a painter, I probably also take his truck more seriously. In the sense of looking at it and listening to it and comparing it to other trucks and having a sense of its relationship to the road and the sidewalk and the things around it and the driver himself. Observation and measure are my business.”

Robert Rauschenberg

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

“This was my first encounter with art as art [when he saw 'Pinky' ['Sarah Barrett Moulton: Pinkie'], 1794 painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy' painted by Thomas Gainsborough.... somebody actually MADE those paintings....(it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.”

Robert Rauschenberg

Source: 1990's, Rauschenberg, Art and Live, 1990, p. 60

“I have another feeling that in working with a canvas, and with something you picked up off the street and you work on it for three or four days or maybe a couple of weeks and then, all of a sudden, it is in another situation. Much later, you go to see somebody in California, and there it is. You know that you know everything about that painting, so much more than anybody else in that room. You know where you ran out of nails... At the time I did that early piece, I didn't know it was the lower right-hand corner that had the new element – that that part would grow and that other parts would relate more to the past.”

Robert Rauschenberg

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

“He [ Jasper Johns ] and I were each other's first serious critics. Actually he was the first painter I ever shared ideas with, or had discussions with about painting. No, not the first. Cy Twombly was the first. But Cy and I were not critical. I did my work and he did his. Cy's direction was always so personal that you could only discuss it after the fact. But Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, 'I've got a terrific idea for you' and then I'd have to find one for him.”

Robert Rauschenberg

remark on his cooperative relation with Jasper Johns, to his biographer Calvin Tomkins
As quoted in Lives of the great twentieth century artists, Edward Lucie-Smith, London 1986, p. 31
1980's

“[Art is] a means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint.”

Robert Rauschenberg

Source: 1960's, The Bride and the Bachelors, (1962), p. 3

“With the black ones [his 'Black Paintings'] I was interested in getting complexity without their revealing much – in the fact that there was much to see but not much showing. I wanted to show a painting that could have the dignity of not calling attention to itself. In both the blacks and the whites [paintings] there was none of the familiar aggressiveness of art that says, 'Well, here it is, whether you like it or not.”

Robert Rauschenberg

Source: 1960's, The Bride and the Bachelors, (1962), pp. 203-204

“Every minute everything is different everywhere. It is all flowing... The duty or beauty of a painting is that there is no reason to do it nor any reason not to. It can be done as a direct act or contact with the moment and that is the moment you are awake and moving. It all passes and is never true literally as the present again leaving more work to be done.”

Robert Rauschenberg

Quote of Rauschenberg (1961), as cited in Introduction, Roberta Bernstein, from catalog 'The White and Black Paintings'
from a recording of a symposium in 1961, Larry Gagosian Gallery, New York, 1986
1960's