Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008)
American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s.
Albers was a beautiful teacher and an impossible person. He wasn’t easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it. Years later, though, I’m still learning what he taught me, because what he taught me had to do with the entire visual world. He didn’t teach you how to ‘do art’. The focus was always on your personal sense of looking.. ..I consider Albers the most important teacher I’ve ever had, and I’m sure that he considers me one of his poorest students.
There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of abstract expressionism – as though the man and the work were the same – that personally always put me off because at that time (around 1950, fh) my focus was in the opposite direction.