RAUSCHENBERG
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one line, and you can't do any erasing. You feel that there is air on
this side of the line and on the other side of the line is the form.
In
watercolor, we had it again - one model we used month after month;
and it was a terra-cotta flowerpot.
I figured out, at least in the watercoloring classes, that what he
really had in mind was something like Cezanne. I found Albers so
intimidating that after six months of this, during the first year, my
whole focus was simply to try to do something that would please him.
I didn't care what I got out of class. All I wanted to do was one day
walk in there and show him something and hear him say, "That's
pretty good."
INTERVIEWER:
I have noticed that you wish to avoid historical interpreta–
tions of yourself. In general would you prefer not to say that someone
influenced you?
RAUSCHENBERG:
No, I've been influenced by painting, very much; but
if
I have avoided saying that, it was because of the general inclination,
until very recently, to believe that art exists in art. At every opportunity,
I've tried to correct that idea, suggesting that art is only a part - one
of the elements that we live with. I think that a person like Leonardo
da Vinci had not a technique or a style in common with other artists
but a kind of curiosity about life that enabled him to change his
medium so easily and so successfully. I really think he was concerned
with the human body when he did his anatomical work. His personal
curiosity, apart from any art idea, led him to investigate how a horse's
leg works so that he could do a sculpture of it.
Being a painter, I probably take painting more seriously than
someone who drives a truck or something. Being a painter, I probably
also take his truck more seriously.
INTERVIEWER:
In what sense?
RAUSCHENBERG:
In the senses of looking at it and listening to it and
comparing it to other trucks and having a sense· of its relationship
to the road and the sidewalk and the things around it and the driver
himself. Observation and measure are my business.
I think historians have tended to draw too heavily upon the idea
that in art there is development. I think you can see similarities in
anything and anything by generalities and warp.
INTERVIEWER :
They are concerned with identifying influence and, there–
hy,
continuities.
RAUSCHENBERG:
There's another thing. Now we have so much informa–
tion. A painter a hundred or two hundred years ago knew very little
about what was going on in painting in any other place except with
his immediate friends or some outstanding event. It wasn't natural
