Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg’s phrase “colored air” is a sly act of praise that doubles as a jailbreak. He’s describing Abstract Expressionism’s technical thrill - paint no longer behaving like obedient pigment but like atmosphere, a medium with buoyancy, speed, accident, and weather. The line catches the period’s intoxication with touch: drips, stains, foggy veils, gestures that look less like depiction than evidence of a body moving in time. “It would be painting” lands like a dare: if paint can be this unmoored, then the category is suddenly huge, permissive, even promiscuous.

The subtext is where Rauschenberg’s own project peeks through. He’s admiring the way the Abstract Expressionists expanded the definition of painting until it almost dissolves - and you can hear him taking notes. Once paint can be “air,” it can also be dirt, newsprint, fabric, a bedspread, a goat with a tire around its waist. AbEx becomes, in his telling, a proof of concept: the authority of “painting” now comes less from subject matter than from intention and procedure. If a thin wash can count, why not a transfer, a smear, a combine?

Context matters: this is postwar New York, when painting is being sold as the high art of freedom - heroic individuality performed on canvas. Rauschenberg respects the liberation but also punctures the mythology by focusing on application, not genius. The excitement isn’t mystical; it’s material. Painting becomes a set of possibilities, and the artist becomes someone who tests the edge of what still qualifies.