Where Would We Be Without Robert Rauschenberg? Jeff Koons, Jason Wu, and More Weigh In
By Julia Halperin
Jasper Johns once said that Robert Rauschenberg “invented more than any artist since Picasso.” Rauschenberg, who was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on Oct. 22, 1925, was a voracious traveler who refused to limit his artistic output to a single medium and relished collaborations with choreographers, dancers, designers, and scientists. Through his “Combines,” he collapsed the boundary between painting and sculpture and brought real-world objects—ranging from a pillow to a stuffed eagle—into his art.
The celebrations of the artist’s centenary, which began this fall and stretch into 2026, are just as interdisciplinary, sprawling, and ambitious as his oeuvre. There are no fewer than eight major institutional presentations of the artist’s work around the world, a book of the artist’s writings published by Yale University Press, and a national tour of the Trisha Brown Dance Company and the Merce Cunningham Trust, featuring Rauschenberg’s sets and costumes.
To explore the artist’s wide-ranging influence, CULTURED asked artists across disciplines to reflect on his legacy.
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Mark Bradford
[...] “Rauschenberg is a big inspiration to me. The messiness, the activism, the sheer relentlessness of his practice. His work really opened the door for me to find my own way into abstraction. With his ‘Combines,’ he was always pulling the real world in, not keeping it out. That was radical, the way he drew in elements that seemed foreign to the art world at the time. It gave me a model for how to work with the materials around me, to see social realities as inseparable from aesthetic ones. He always dealt in pluralities, and I love that. He made, he protested, he experimented, often all at once. He could work from this formally rigorous place while allowing different histories to float in and out—art historical, social, personal, you name it—without tidying them up or sanitizing them first. That’s what I take from him: art as something alive to its surroundings.”
