Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg is swatting away the myth of the lightning-bolt masterpiece. “I’m not so facile” reads like modesty, but it’s also a manifesto: the artist who looks too smooth is suspect, because smoothness implies closure. He frames painting not as a single statement to be perfected, but as an ongoing investigation where each work is a trial, a partial map of a much larger territory. The repetition - “what I want to know or explore,” “possibilities,” “a way of making a painting” - turns the canvas into a lab bench. A painting isn’t the destination; it’s one data point.

That stance sits squarely in the postwar moment Rauschenberg helped define, when American art was prying itself loose from the heroic, singular gesture of Abstract Expressionism. His Combines, silkscreens, and scavenged materials weren’t just stylistic mash-ups; they were methods for staying unfinished, for keeping the world’s mess inside the frame. The quote’s quiet resistance is to the market and the museum alike: they want signature clarity, a recognizable “Rauschenberg.” He insists on process over brand, sequences over icons, curiosity over fluency.

Subtextually, he’s arguing that “finding out” matters more than “finding.” Knowledge here is experimental and cumulative; failure is baked in, even useful. If one or two paintings can’t contain the search, that’s not a weakness - it’s a demand that art remain a living practice rather than a neatly solved product.