Top 70 Robert Rauschenberg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The artist’s job is to be a witness to his time in history.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

2. “Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

Featured in: Momentum Quotes

3. “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

4. “Curiosity is the main energy.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

5. “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

6. “I don’t think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I’ve found to get along with myself.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

7. “It is impossible to have progress without conscience.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

Featured in: Progress Quotes

8. “I don’t really trust ideas, especially good ones. Rather I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

9. “Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

10. “I want my paintings to look like what’s going on outside my window rather than what’s inside my studio.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

11. “Success is a worn down pencil.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

12. “Having to be different is the same trap as having to be the same.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

13. “A canvas is never empty.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

14. “People ask me, ‘Don’t you ever run out of ideas?’ In 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

15. “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

16. “You begin with the possibilities of the material.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

17. “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made – I try to act in the gap.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

18. “I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t. I want it to look like something it is.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

19. “I feel strong in my belief, based on my widely traveled collaborations, that a one-to-one contact through art contains potent peaceful powers, and is the most non-elitist way to share information, hopefully seducing us into creating mutual understandings for the benefit of all.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

20. “A newspaper that you’re not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn’t think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

21. “I don’t mess around with my subconscious.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

22. “Every time I’ve moved, my work has changed radically.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

23. “A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

24. “An empty canvas is full.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

25. “You can’t make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined. That’s what makes the adventure of painting.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

26. “Photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

27. “I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

28. “I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out the real world.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

29. “For me there is no difference between art and life.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

30. “I’m quite taken aback when I get something that appears to be technically a good photograph, because it’s not necessarily my intention.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

31. “It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

32. “The working process is ideally freeing my mind.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

33. “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

34. “You wait until life is in the frame, then you have the permission to click. I like the adventure of waiting until the whole frame is full.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

35. “While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

36. “I’m sure we don’t read old paintings the way they were intended.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

37. “There’s a moment for everyone when you fall into your own shadow and the fact is that it’s your shadow and you’re forced to live in it. And this is nothing to celebrate or not celebrate. It simply is.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

38. “I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the WORK is the word. Action is seen less clearly through reason. There are no shortcuts to directness.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Even at this late date, I go into my studio, and I think ‘Is this going to be it? Is it the end?’ You see, nearly everything terrorizes me. When an artist loses that terror, he’s through.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

42. “Basically painting is total idiocy.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

43. “And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

44. “With me, it’s much more a matter of accepting whatever happens, accepting all these elements from the outside and then trying to work with them in a sort of free collaboration.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

45. “You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

46. “Sometimes I have taken photographs and just felt so excited that I could barely hold the camera steady, and the photo was boring.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

47. “I refuse to be in this world by myself. I want an open commitment from the rest of the people.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

48. “I wouldn’t use the same color in a picture in more than one place.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

49. “There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of abstract expressionism – as though the man and the work were the same – that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction.”

— Robert Rauschenberg

50. “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