Musée Thyssen. Madrid

Rauschenberg´s artistic production offers special interest in the panorama of contemporary art because of the symbiosis in him of different techniques and his own personal evolution. In his youth he was a painter linked to Abstract Expressionism, but later he created a language inside the movement of Pop-Art, although he always remained faithful to the psychic automatism of the free paint. In him are different contributions of the avant-garde, like a kind of synthesis of modernity, which we can see in Express: the Cubist collage, the Futuristic dynamism (in the female nude there is a clear tribute to Duchamp), the unusual relationship of Dadaism and Surrealism. And above it the break between the water-tight compartments into which we tend to place the different arts: he himself was a designer and was linked professionally to music, dance, photography and cinema. Finally, Rauschenberg´s concern for the connection between art and technology is a demonstration of the pop mentality dominant is some artists of the movement. They are painters immersed in a developed consumer society who are aware of the cultural effects of the mass media. They are quite prepared to use pre-existent materials, such as photography, to create new relations with the art of painting. It is interesting to verify that for Rauchenberg there are no major and minor arts that the tradition separation between mechanical and manual arts finds in him an unusual combination in which none of them in is highlighted. In a statement he declared that one of the painting that had impressed him most was Leonardo´s The Annunciation, because in "this picture, the tree, the rock, the Virgin have the same importance.".