The American painter and printmaker Robert Rauschenberg (born 1925) experimented freely with avant-garde concepts and techniques. His wild inventiveness and frank eclecticism were tempered by his almost unerring sense of color and design.

Robert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas, of German and Cherokee lineage. He attended the local public schools before becoming a naval corpsman. He began his formal art education at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1946. The following year he went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian.

In 1948 Rauschenberg returned to America to study with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Albers stressed design as a discipline, and Rauschenberg felt he needed such training. He later admitted that Albers was the teacher most important to his development. About 1950 Rauschenberg began to paint his all-white, then all-black, paintings. From these ascetic exercises in total minimalism he turned to making...