For this edi­tion of Time Travel Tues­day, I present to you the work of Robert Rauschen­berg, an Amer­i­can artist whose pop­u­lar­ity rose in the 1950’s with the tran­si­tion between abstract expres­sion­ism and pop art.

Some clas­sify Rauschenberg’s style as “Neo-Dadaist”. He wanted to work in the gap between life and art. Unlike the Dadaists, how­ever, he seemed to cham­pion the role of the cre­ator in art’s mean­ing, whereas Dadaists ques­tioned the dis­tinc­tion between art objects and every­day objects.

Rauschen­berg reached for mate­ri­als that were tra­di­tion­ally out­side an artist’s avail­abil­ity. This included house paint and screen print­ing inks, him even going as far to ink the wheel of a car for a draw­ing. His over­ar­ch­ing respect for for­mal paint­ing was still observed through these works and experimentation.

With Pop Art on the hori­zon, he moved from abstract works to “com­bines”, a term he coined refer­ring to find­ing objects and form­ing a 3D col­lage. One of his first com­bines incor­po­rated a stuffed goat, a tire, a ten­nis ball, and paint. While the idea of notic­ing and cre­at­ing com­bi­na­tions was never absent from his point of view, Rauschen­berg began to cre­ate more two dimen­sional work as the 1960’s wore on. He exper­i­mented with screen print­ing and mag­a­zine pho­tographs, com­bin­ing this with paint­ing. From there, he con­tin­ued to exper­i­ment with prints, using unlikely mate­ri­als in his images, and work­ing in new processes until his death in 2008.

First image via Con­tem­po­rary Art, all other images via Hir­sh­horn Museum and Sculp­ture Gar­den.