Robert Rauschenberg’s art embodies the life-embracing and participatory spirit that characterizes much of American art since the 1950s. Rauschenberg recalls the valuable contacts he made at Black Mountain College, particularly with choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage, who both had a decisive influence on his thinking. Rauschenberg’s active involvement with life carries over into his painting. The combine-painting of the 1950s integrated two- and three-dimensional elements and inhabited both wall and floor space. These assemblages included discarded thrift shop-type objects such as automobile tires, stuffed birds, doors, and electric light fixtures, as well as the two-dimensional painterly surfaces reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. This intense injection of real objects into his work was translated into another medium in the early 1960s: silkscreen painting. Robert Rauschenberg: Retrospective includes important examples of the artist’s diverse and extraordinary accomplishments, tracing his development from his student years and his earliest experiments to a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.