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Whenever he got a pass that gave him a few days off from the cuckoo's nest, Rauschenberg would simply head for the nearest highway and start thumbing rides to anywhere. On one of these time-killing trips, Rauschenberg heard about the cactus garden at the Huntington Library in San Marino. He went there —and found that the library had paintings in it, the first "real" paintings he had ever seen: Sir Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse and Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy. These suave, bright ghosts of Georgian culture stupefied Rauschenberg. He had never in his life looked at a work of art as art, and the first thing that struck him was "that someone had thought these things out and made them. Behind each of them was a man whose profession it was to make them. That just never occurred to me before."
So Rauschenberg decided he would paint. He found some pigments and brushes. There was no privacy in the barracks, and to be seen painting would have provoked endless ridicule. One night Rauschenberg locked himself in the latrine with a scrap of cardboard on his knee and secretly made his first daub, a portrait of a Navy buddy. Thirty years later, he still thinks of that illicit first night as exemplary. "There always ought to be an element of secrecy, of criminality, about making art," he says. "But if you're successful, it's hard to maintain. We all get comfortable in the end. That's what happens to rascals."
Discharged from the Navy in 1945, Rauschenberg decided to study art. He signed up as a student at the Kansas City Art Institute under the G.I. Bill of Rights. Every spare dime was set aside for a trip to Europe, the statutory voyage to Mecca, which he made in 1948. "I was certain that one had to study in Paris if one was an artist. I think I was at least 15 years late." He did study, briefly, at the Academic Julian; but since he spoke not a word of French, the instruction had little effect. He felt unfocused, self-indulgent and queasy, surrounded by an already academized modern tradition that he could not grasp.
But in the school he met his future wife, an American student named Susan Weil. They went back together to the U.S. in the fall of 1948. Rauschenberg had read a TIME article about the pioneer abstractionist Josef Albers, the veteran of the Bauhaus who was teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Albers was held in awe as a theorist and a disciplinarian: an inspired Junker. Discipline was what Rauschenberg felt he needed.
Rauschenberg turned out to be one of the most successful artists Albers ever taught, but Albers loathed his work. "I don't want to know who did that," he would say as he entered the classroom, pointing at Rauschenberg's latest effort. Years later, when questioned about Rauschenberg, the old maestro snapped: "To date I have had something like 600,000 students; I can't be expected to remember all of them." Rauschenberg, in turn, was alarmed by his teacher. His unsystematic, jackdaw mind could not come to grips with Albers' imposing and