Robert Rauschenberg and the rise of Pop Art - by Giuseppe Alletto visual artist

Robert Rauschenberg and the rise of Pop Art - by Giuseppe Alletto visual artist During his long career, the American painter, sculptor, printmaker, designer, photographer, composer and experimental artist Robert Rauschenberg drew heavily on early 20th century modern artforms such as “found“ objects (objets trouvés), collage and assemblage - pioneered by Picasso, Georges Braque, Kurt Schwitters and others - as well as conceptualist techniques initiated by Marcel Duchamp and Dada, to create his own unique blend of multi-media art, also known as junk art. Along with his friend Jasper Johns, and to a lesser extent other American artists like Joseph Cornell and Andy Warhol, he is seen as one of the most influential figures in Neo-Dada art which signalled a break away from Abstract Expressionism, which had dominated art in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. In effect, he was a link between the action-painting of Jackson Pollock and the emergence of 1960s modern art movements like Pop an