Top 30 Robert Rauschenberg Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Robert Rauschenberg Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.
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’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
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
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
But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.
Robert Rauschenberg
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
The artist’s job is to be a witness to his time in history.
Robert Rauschenberg
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
I wouldn’t use the same color in a picture in more than one place.
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
You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.
Robert Rauschenberg
Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.
Robert Rauschenberg
An empty canvas is full.
Robert Rauschenberg
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
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
Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.
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
If you’re going to paint extremely, you need a big piece of canvas.
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
I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.
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
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
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 don’t mess around with my subconscious.
Robert Rauschenberg
I’m sure we don’t read old paintings the way they were intended.
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
And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.
Robert Rauschenberg
Pollock also… wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.
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