Robert Rauschenberg - Galerie Sonnabend - 1972

Robert Rauschenberg’s art has always been one of thoughtful inclusion. Working in a wide range of subjects, styles, materials, and techniques, Rauschenberg has been called a forerunner of essentially every postwar movement since Abstract Expressionism. He remained, however, independent of any particular affiliation. At the time that he began making art in the late 1940s and early 1950s, his belief that “painting relates to both art and life” presented a direct challenge to the prevalent modernist aesthetic.

The celebrated Combines, begun in the mid-1950s, brought real-world images and objects into the realm of abstract painting and countered sanctioned divisions between painting and sculpture. These works established the artist’s ongoing dialogue between mediums, between the handmade and the readymade, and between the gestural brushstroke and the mechanically reproduced image. Rauschenberg’s lifelong commitment to collaboration—with performers, printmakers, engineers, writers, artists, and artisans from around the world—is a further manifestation of his expansive artistic philosophy.

This text and the following chapter texts are adapted from an essay written by Julia Blaut, “Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective,” @Guggenheim (Fall 1997). source: Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Gallerist, collector and art patron Ileana Sonnabend was one of the most influential and provocative figures in the art world, helping to shape the course of post-war art in Europe and America. Sonnabend championed  artists who pushed the confines of the status quo and launched the careers of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and many other significant artists of our time. Sonnabend and her first husband, art dealer Leo Castelli, were at the forefront of the American art scene in New York in the 1950s, eventually opening a gallery in their Manhattan apartment in 1957. The Castellis were part of the creative avant-garde in New York, socializing with Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Sidney Janis and the young Robert Rauschenberg. After their divorce in 1959, Ileana married Michael Sonnabend and opened Galerie Sonnabend in Paris in 1962. It was in Paris that Sonnabend and Rauschenberg cemented their relationship and developed the mutual respect and admiration that would be central to their working relationship in the decades that followed. Source: stairgalleries.com