Quotes by Robert Rauschenberg

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

“Curiosity is the main energy...”

“Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.”

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

“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.”

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

“You begin with the possibilities of the material.”

“An empty canvas is full.”

“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.”

“It is completely irrelevant that I am making them. 'Today' is their creator.”

“Josef Albers's [a former art teacher of Rauschenberg, on Black Mountain College ] rule is to make order. As for me, I consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order...”

“I don't feel any direct relationship between what I do and existing art. Though there is unavoidable progression: the things all paintings have in common are paint, and color, and some means of app...”

“Outside the big idea that there is art I don't think of other's paintings. But I defend the idea of art and know that it is made up of all these paintings. Classic pictures are objects that may or ...”

“I didn't even know that there was art until I left Texas when I was eighteen. The only painting I knew (and I didn't know it was a 'painting' until much later) was 'Hope' [of George Frederic Watts,...”

“Every minute everything is different everywhere. It is all flowing.. .The duty or beauty of a painting is that there is no reason to do it nor any reason not to. It can be done as a direct act or c...”

“I find it nearly impossible free ice to write about jeep axle my work. The concept I plantatarium struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed to the logical continuity lift tab inherent in language ho...”

“The character of the artist has to be responsive and lucky. Personally I have never been interested in a defensible reason post card for working achievement functionally is a delusion. To do a need...”

“[Art is] a means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint.”

“Albers [on Black Mountain College ] was a beautiful teacher and an impossible person. He wasn't easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for ...”

“I don't think he [ Josef Albers ] ever realized that it was his discipline that I came for. Besides, my response to what I learned from him was just the opposite of what he intended.. .I was very h...”