Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines (1954–1964), a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance.
In the early 1950s, when Rauschenberg was living with artist Susan Weil in a one-room apartment on West 95th Street in Manhattan, they produced a series of cyanotypes—images produced without a camera, by shining an ultraviolet light on an object or nude model resting on blueprint paper, exposing the paper where the light isn’t blocked and creating a negative shadow of the object or model’s outline, similar to the way an X-ray is done. The blueprint is then washed, to “develop” it, and the final image sets in blue.
