Born in 1925 at Port Arthur, Texas. In 1942 he studied pharmacy briefly at the University of Texas, following which he served in the U.S. Marines. From 1947 to 1948 he studied various subjects at the Kansas City Art Institute, including art history, sculpture and music. During this time he did window displays, executed film sets and designed photographic studios. In 1948 he attended the Académie Julian, Paris, met Susan Weil, who was later to become his wife, and returned to the USA to study under Joseph Albers at the Black Mountain College, North Carolina. There he met the choreographer Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage in 1949 and collaborated closely with both of them. In the same year he moved to New York and studied at the Art Students' League until 1952. He did window displays for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany, had his first one-man exhibitions in 1951 and returned to Black Mountain College in 1952. He traveled in Italy, France and Spain and had exhibition in 1953 at Florence and Rome. He moved into a studio in New York in the same year and started to paint his red pictures, replacing the all-white and all-black paintings. He erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning. Between 1954 and 1965 he intensified his work for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In 1955 he moved into a studio in the same neighborhood as Jasper Johns. In 1958 he had his first exhibition at the Leo Castelli gallery and began his drawings to illustrate Dante's "Inferno". In 1959 he was represented at the documenta "2", Kassel, and at the Paris and São Paulo Biennales. In 1960 he met Marcel Duchamp. In 1962 he first used the technique of silkscreen on canvas, mixed with painting, collage and affixed objects. He also did his first litographic work, for which he was awarded the Grand Prix at Ljubljana. In 1963 he was given his first retrospective exhibition in Europe at the Galerie Sonnabend, Paris, also shown at the Jewish Museum, New York.
