Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. Rauschenberg had his first career retrospective, organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1963, and in 1964 he was the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale. After that time, he enjoyed a rare degree of institutional support. A memorial exhibition of photographs opened October 22, 2008, on the occasion of what would have been his 83rd birthday, at the Guggenheim Museum.