"But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable"
About this Quote
A young Robert Rauschenberg arrives in New York and is overwhelmed by the scale, ambition, and velocity of the New York School. Painters like Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, and Kline were moving paint with a grandeur that seemed to seize history itself, and the center of the art world had just shifted from Paris to Manhattan. Awe, for Rauschenberg, signals not simply admiration but ignition. Being new sharpened his senses; he saw both the power of the reigning language and its limits, and he set about expanding the definition of painting rather than abandoning it.
His trajectory after Black Mountain College, where he absorbed Josef Albers’s rigor and the experimental ethos of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, shows how reverence can evolve into invention. The White Paintings turned the canvas into a mirror of ambient light and dust, relocating meaning from the artist’s hand to the viewer’s environment. Erased de Kooning Drawing both honors and dismantles AbEx authority, a gesture that reads as gratitude and critique at once. The Combines took the flatbed picture plane, later theorized by Leo Steinberg, into everyday life, merging paint with quilts, newspapers, and a taxidermied goat. The intensity he admired in gestural abstraction reappears in his own work as a different kind of energy: collage, chance, and collaboration.
To say the painting was unbelievable is to acknowledge a threshold moment. He recognized the heroic myth of the lone painter, then redirected that heroism into porous boundaries between art and life, painting and sculpture, studio and street. Even the commercial arenas he and Jasper Johns explored, designing department-store windows under a pseudonym, fed the idea that visual culture could flow freely across contexts. Awe becomes the engine of transformation. He entered New York humbled by its painters and helped change what painting could be.
His trajectory after Black Mountain College, where he absorbed Josef Albers’s rigor and the experimental ethos of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, shows how reverence can evolve into invention. The White Paintings turned the canvas into a mirror of ambient light and dust, relocating meaning from the artist’s hand to the viewer’s environment. Erased de Kooning Drawing both honors and dismantles AbEx authority, a gesture that reads as gratitude and critique at once. The Combines took the flatbed picture plane, later theorized by Leo Steinberg, into everyday life, merging paint with quilts, newspapers, and a taxidermied goat. The intensity he admired in gestural abstraction reappears in his own work as a different kind of energy: collage, chance, and collaboration.
To say the painting was unbelievable is to acknowledge a threshold moment. He recognized the heroic myth of the lone painter, then redirected that heroism into porous boundaries between art and life, painting and sculpture, studio and street. Even the commercial arenas he and Jasper Johns explored, designing department-store windows under a pseudonym, fed the idea that visual culture could flow freely across contexts. Awe becomes the engine of transformation. He entered New York humbled by its painters and helped change what painting could be.
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| Topic | Art |
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