The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has embarked on an ongoing project to create a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings and sculptures. 

The first installment, comprising 122 works made between 1948 and 1953, is now online. After spending three semesters at the Kansas City Art Institute and the summer of 1948 abroad, Rauschenberg, at age twenty-two, returned to the United States determined not to be “the kind of painter I was going to be if I just kept making street paintings in Paris.” Over the next five years, moving back and forth between New York City and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, with a noteworthy interlude in Italy and North Africa, he discovered that he did not want to be the kind of painter who simply emulated the Abstract Expressionists, either, however much he may have admired them. Instead, he would “try to find some other way to do things.”

The 122 works in this first installment of the first catalogue raisonné devoted to Rauschenberg represent the artist’s earliest attempts to define his own radical approach to making paintings and sculptures, laying the groundwork for decades of unfettered creativity, experimentation, and collaboration. Full of rarities and seminal research, the catalogue is a revelatory reintroduction to one of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century. 

PRINT EDITION COMING WINTER 2027

Robert Rauschenberg: Paintings and Sculptures, 1948–1953 
Edited by Eric Banks, Julia Blaut, and Susan Davidson, with contributions by Catherine Craft, Giorgio Di Domenico, Leah Dickerman, Darby English, Helen Molesworth, Jennifer L. Roberts, and Terry Winters
Published by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Gregory R. Miller & Co.
Distributed worldwide by ARTBOOK | D.A.P.