ABSTRACT: PROFILE of artist Robert Rauschenberg, 38. Together with Jasper Johns, who is 5 years younger, he has often been referred to as the co-founder of the pop-art school, which has brashly turned its back on the Abstract Expressionist painting that made New York the center of the postwar international art world and is pursuing an art that takes its highly realistic subject matter from commercial advertising, comic strips & mass-produced commodities. A majo retrospective exhibition of his work since 1948, opened last spring at the Jewish Museum on upper Fifth Ave. He has spent most of the last ten years living & working in the poorer sections of lower Manhattan, making little money until recently. He depended for his materials partly on what he came across in the course of his day's activity. He thinks the salvaged objects are beautiful. Very recently he abandoned the use of concrete objects in favor of a technique involving the use of silk-screened images applied to canvas. He is now one of a small group of American painters whose new work is sold even before it reaches their dealers at prices ranging from five thousand to fifty thousand dollars. He spent the first 18 yrs. of his life in Port Arthur, Tex. His grandfather, a Berlin doctor, settled in Texas & married a full-blooded Cherokee His family regularly attended the Church of Christ, an austere denomonination. He studied painting briefly in Paris at Black Mountain College in N. C. & at the Art Students League in N.Y. He has dabbled in photography; been interested in avant-garde music & done dancing & choreography.
