Robert Rauschenberg is one of the landmark figures of 20th century art. He was born in Port Arthur, Texas. At 16, Rauschenberg gained admittance to the University of Texas, Austin, where he studied pharmacology. He was drafted into the United States Navy in 1944 but remained based in California. Later, Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and Academie Julian in Paris. In 1948 he decided to attend the widely influential Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There he studied under Bauhaus exile Josef Albers, but went straight against his disciplined forms of work. Rauschenberg instead fruitfully collaborated with musician John Cage. 

During his career Rauschenberg worked in a wide range of mediums, such as painting, sculpture, prints, photography, and performance. His emergence came at the time of Abstracts Expressionism’s dominance. He challenged the gestural abstract paintings and the model of a heroic, self-expressive artist which underpinned that movement.  

In his landmark series of Combines (1954–64) he mixed the materials of artmaking with ordinary things, writing, “I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint.”

His work, alongside that of Jasper Jones, has often been labeled ”Neo Dadaist”, and Rauschenberg said that his ambition was to ”work in the gap between life and art", reminiscing the key questions raised by Dada pioneer Marcel Duchamps in Fountain. 

Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida, until his death from heart failure on May 12, 2008.