Robert Rauschenberg

American artist (1925–2008), inventor of the "Combine" and a pivotal bridge from Abstract Expressionism to Pop and beyond.

Rauschenberg dissolved the boundary between painting and object, incorporating photographs, fabric, and found material into works that reopened what art could be made of — a defining influence on the postwar American avant-garde.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: contemporary. Rauschenberg studied at Black Mountain College, the experimental North Carolina school where R. Buckminster Fuller taught in the summers of 1948 and 1949 and made his first geodesic-dome experiments with the students. He belonged to the same intensely cross-disciplinary community — alongside Cage, Cunningham, and the Alberses — in which Fuller's ideas circulated, which places him among Fuller's contemporaries of that formative milieu rather than as a direct collaborator.

See Also

• We Are All Astronauts (We Are All Astronauts) — catalog surveying Fuller's presence in the postwar art world
• Josef Albers (Josef Albers) — his teacher at Black Mountain College

Sources

• Ruth Asawa (source reference) — situates Rauschenberg in the Black Mountain College art community