Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

“Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two.
- 1959, from a catalogue”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“An empty canvas is full.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop, At the time that I am bored or understand - I use those words interchangeably - another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I'm not one. I'd rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can't ignore.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“A pair of stockings is no less suitable o make a painting of than wood,nails,turpentine,oil,and fabric.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.

— Robert Rauschenberg

“So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

— Robert Rauschenberg

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

— Robert Rauschenberg

“If you don't have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I don't mess around with my subconscious.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“A newspaper that you're not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn't think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

Well, I like way downtown near the Battery. I lived down there at this time and for, I guess, the following well, this is where I moved to uptown and I've been here for four years and this is 1965.

— Robert Rauschenberg

“Oracle was I had started it I guess two and a half years ago, maybe even longer than that, closer to three.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“Pollock also ... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“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.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else's aesthetics. I think you're born an artist or not. I couldn't have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“Steichen bought my first photographs that I ever sold. He recognized the style from the school of Black Mountain. After that, it was about twenty years before I sold another photograph.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I feel strong in my belief, based on my widely traveled collaborations, that a one-to-one contact through art contains potent peaceful powers, and is the most non-elitist way to share information, hopefully seducing us into creating mutual understandings for the benefit of all.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I don't really trust ideas, especially good ones. Rather I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I've not been cursed with talent, which could be a great inhibitor.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

Even at this late date, I go into my studio, and I think 'Is this going to be it? Is it the end?' You see, nearly everything terrorizes me. When an artist loses that terror, he's through.

— Robert Rauschenberg

“For me there is no difference between art and life.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I always have searched for a point of view that a participant could change.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“Most artists try to break your heart, or they accidentally break their own hearts.But I find the quietness in the ordinary much more satisfying.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“If I declare it to be so, then this is a portrait.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I'm quite taken aback when I get something that appears to be technically a good photograph, because it's not necessarily my intention.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn't work any other way, or whether I was doing it out of choice.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“A canvas is never empty.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

It's when you've found out how to do certain things, that it's time to stop doing them, because what's missing is that you're not including the risk.

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I don't like masterpieces having one-night stands in collectors' homes between auctions.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

There's a moment for everyone when you fall into your own shadow and the fact is that it's your shadow and you're forced to live in it. And this is nothing to celebrate or not celebrate. It simply is.

— Robert Rauschenberg

Basically painting is total idiocy.

— Robert Rauschenberg

“This telegram is a work of art if I say it is.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“I used to think of that line in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', about the 'sad cup of coffee' ... I have had cold coffee and hot coffee and lousy coffee, But I've never had a sad cup of coffee.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

Work is my joy ... Work is my therapy, I don't know anybody who loves work as much as I do.

— Robert Rauschenberg

“The working process is ideally freeing my mind.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

“By the time you establish your priorities, there really isn't any fun or need to interest yourself in what you're doing. And this I find disastrous.”

— Robert Rauschenberg