Painter, born in Port Arthur, Texas,
USA. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute (1946–7), the Académie Julien,
Paris (1947), and with Josef Albers and
John Cage at Black Mountain College, North
Carolina (1948–50). Travelling widely, he was based in New York City from 1950,
where he and Jasper Johns paved the way for pop art of the 1960s. He worked with
the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, New York, as costume and stage designer
(1955–64). An imaginative and eclectic artist, he used a mix of sculpture and
paint in works he called ‘combines’, as seen in The Bed (1955). From the
late 1950s he incorporated sound and motors in his work, such as Broadcast
(1959), and silk-screen transfers, as in Flush (1964). Throughout the
1980s and 1990s, he experimented with collage and new ways to transfer
photographs. In 1997 the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York City, staged a
major exhibition of his works, showcasing the breadth and beauty of his work and
its influence over the second half of the century
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