RAUSCHENBERG, A HUGE INFLUENCE ON THE ART WORLD AND ME TOO!

Robert Rauschenberg 

The University of South Florida drew some of the finest art professors from across the United States and we also attracted many wonderful guest speakers.  I had the opportunity to personally meet Josef Albers and Carl Sandberg.  The art department was all about what was happening in New York in the art scene, trying to stay as current and up to date as possible.  AND RAUSCHENBERG WAS HAPPENING! Also Jasper Johns, Roy Litchenstein and many, many others. New York was the center of the art world and an exciting creative place. The end of the 60's and the beginning of the 70's were formative years in the art world in the New York. And our professor's were trying their best to keep us abreast of the latest in NYC art world.

Robert Rauschenberg first pursued being a minister, then a pharmacist, but it wasn't until 1947 when in the Marines he found he had a skill for drawing and an artistic representation of the everyday.  He studied in Paris on the G.I. bill, but later left Europe for Black Mountain, North Carolina where there was an beginning art movement just in its embryonic stages.  The country's most visionary thinkers were teaching at Black Mountain College.  There Merce Cunningham(Dance), and John Cage( Music) and Rauschenberg(Art) began what would be an artistic revolution.  But, North Carolina life was soon to small for Rauschenberg who left for NYC.  And it was there he would find amid the excitement of city life, the full extent of what he would bring to the art world through his paintings.

Popular culture became an emphasis for him, as he moved away form the angst of the abstract expressionist world.  He found a new way of painting, by using materials traditionally outside of the artists reach.  He would use house paint, use a car wheel to make a print, or used found objects in his work. He created what he called his COMBINES which were meant to show the finding and forming of combinations in three dimensional collage.  These works cemented his place in art history.

Popular culture became an emphasis for him, as he moved away form the angst of the abstract expressionist world.  He found a new way of painting, by using materials traditionally outside of the artists reach.  He would use house paint, use a car wheel to make a print, or used found objects in his work. He created what he called his COMBINES which were meant to show the finding and forming of combinations in three dimensional collage.  These works cemented his place in art history.

‘I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.’

— John Cage

John Cage was a creative, innovative master of music. He was one of the original Black Mountain School of Arts in the Blue Ridge.  Black Mountain School was in the 1940-1950's was filled with artists who would later become famous on the national and international scene. 

Founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and other former faculty members of Rollins College, Black Mountain was experimental by nature and committed to an interdisciplinary approach, attracting a faculty that included many of America's leading visual artists, composers, poets, and designers, like Buckminster Fuller, who invented the geodesic dome.

Operating in a relatively isolated rural location with little budget, Black Mountain College inculcated an informal and collaborative spirit and over its lifetime attracted a venerable roster of instructors. Some of the innovations, relationships, and unexpected connections formed at Black Mountain would prove to have a lasting influence on the postwar American art scene, high culture, and eventually pop culture.^{[citation needed]} Buckminster Fuller met student Kenneth Snelson at Black Mountain, and the result was the first geodesic dome(improvised out of slats in the school's back yard); Merce Cunningham formed his dance company; and John Cage staged his firsthappening^[3] (the term itself is traceable to Cage's student Allan Kaprow, who applied it later to such events).

Not a haphazardly conceived venture, Black Mountain College was a consciously directed liberal arts school that grew out of theprogressive education movement.  Source, Wikipedia, Black Mountain School of Arts

I went to a University that was at the beginning of its creation.  University of South Florida was  patterned after UCLA to be innovative and progressive.  Many professors and speakers are drawn to a new university and mine was no exception.  I had the wonderful privilege to have many innovative professors and hear exceptional national speakers.  Two I will always remember were Joseph Albers and Carl Sandburg.  Both were remarkable men that influenced me the rest of my life.  Joseph Albers was one of the founders and administrators of Black Mountain School of Arts.   Another of my favorite artist that taught at Black Mountain was Robert Rauschenberg.