Robert Rauschenberg, Odalisk, 1955-1958, Museum Ludwig, Cologne

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has taken the unprecedented and very promising step of relaxing its copyright restrictions and endorsing the fair use of its images. This means that for most educational or academic purposes, like teaching or publishing, reproduction of the Foundation’s images of artworks by Robert Rauschenberg is free, legal, and actually encouraged.

One of the most important postwar American artists, Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) emerged in the 1950s to challenge the prevailing current of Abstract Expressionism in the US. His works revived some of the ideas Dada had introduced earlier in the 20th century, and set the stage for the Pop art of the 1960s. It seems fitting that an artist like Rauschenberg–who unabashedly appropriated and incorporated “found objects” made by someone else into his own work–should lead the way towards the free and legal use of copyrighted images.