Top 94 Robert Rauschenberg Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I don't think there's anything really wrong with influence because I think that one can use another man's art as material either literally or just implying that they're doing that, without it representing a lack of a point of view.
Robert Rauschenberg
#3. 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
#4. I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the WORK is the word. Action is seen less clearly through reason. There are no shortcuts to directness.
Robert Rauschenberg
#6. 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
#7. Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.
Robert Rauschenberg
#8. 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
#9. 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
#11. 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
#12. Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement.
Robert Rauschenberg
#13. I refuse to be in this world by myself. I want an open commitment from the rest of the people.
Robert Rauschenberg
#14. 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
#16. Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.
Robert Rauschenberg
#18. 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
#19. I think maybe chance works better in a situation like music because music exists over a period of time, and you don't maintain constantly the you can't refer back from one area to another area.
Robert Rauschenberg
#20. 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
#22. I was much happier when I had less responsibility ... when my only responsibility was to my work and to myself.
Robert Rauschenberg
#23. Oracle was I had started it I guess two and a half years ago, maybe even longer than that, closer to three.
Robert Rauschenberg
#24. 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
#25. (Art is) a means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint.
Robert Rauschenberg
#26. I always have searched for a point of view that a participant could change.
Robert Rauschenberg
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.
Robert Rauschenberg
#31. And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It's something quite extraordinary.
Robert Rauschenberg
#32. People ask me, 'Don't you ever run out of ideas?' Well, on the first place, I don't use ideas. Every time I have an idea, it's too limiting and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven't run out of curiosity.
Robert Rauschenberg
#33. 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
#35. 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
#36. Work is my joy ... Work is my therapy, I don't know anybody who loves work as much as I do.
Robert Rauschenberg
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. I don't like masterpieces having one-night stands in collectors' homes between auctions.
Robert Rauschenberg
#41. The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.
Robert Rauschenberg
#42. 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
#44. It's so easy to be undisciplined. And to be disciplined is so against my character, my general nature anyway, that I have to strain a little bit to keep on the right track.
Robert Rauschenberg
#45. There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting,
Robert Rauschenberg
#47. I want my paintings to look like what's going on outside my window rather than what's inside my studio.
Robert Rauschenberg
#48. 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
#50. I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.
Robert Rauschenberg
#51. 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
#54. It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.
Robert Rauschenberg
#56. Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.
Robert Rauschenberg
#57. I did a twenty foot print and John Cage is involved in that because he was the only person I knew in New York who had a car and who would be willing to do this.
Robert Rauschenberg
#60. I like photographs of anything uninteresting. Maybe just two doors on a wall ... The point is to be uninteresting.
Robert Rauschenberg
#61. While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins.
Robert Rauschenberg
#62. With me, it's much more a matter of accepting whatever happens, accepting all these elements from the outside and then trying to work with them in a sort of free collaboration.
Robert Rauschenberg
#63. 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
#66. I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't. I want it to look like something it is.
Robert Rauschenberg
#67. 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
#68. I prefer images that are less specific, so there is room for everyone's imagination.
Robert Rauschenberg
#69. You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.
Robert Rauschenberg
#70. I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realised they were not so artificial.
Robert Rauschenberg
#71. You can't make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined. That's what makes the adventure of painting.
Robert Rauschenberg
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.
Robert Rauschenberg
#78. There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.
Robert Rauschenberg
#79. One can see that a canvas is six feet by eight feet, say, quite accurately. But you can spend two minutes and think it's five, or thirty seconds and it's just a different bed for activities there.
Robert Rauschenberg
#81. 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
#86. I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.
Robert Rauschenberg
#87. A pair of stockings is no less suitable o make a painting of than wood,nails,turpentine,oil,and fabric.
Robert Rauschenberg
#88. 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
#89. This was my first encounter with art as art (he saw 'Pinky' painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence and 'The Blue Boy painted by Thomas Gainborough) ... somebody actually MADE those paintings ... (it) was the first time I realized you could be an artist.
Robert Rauschenberg
#90. 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
#91. I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.
Robert Rauschenberg
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