Robert Rauschenberg, art's eclectic master, dies at 82

Robert Rauschenberg, who as one of the foremost American artists of the 20th century helped break down aesthetic barriers between the exalted and the everyday, died Monday at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82.

According to his New York gallery, PaceWildenstein, the cause of death was heart failure.

Mr. Rauschenberg's restless, playful, highly assimilative style helped pave the way for Pop, conceptual, and Minimalist art.

The art critic Robert Hughes once described Mr. Rauschenberg as "a protean genius who showed America that all of life could be open to art." Hughes added that Mr. Rauschenberg's "taste was always facile, omnivorous, and hit-or-miss, yet he had a bigness of soul and a richness of temperament that re called Walt Whitman."

In his art, Mr. Rauschenberg scorned both pretense and category. "I work in the gap between art and life," he liked to say, and many of his best-known works might seem as suited to thrift shop as art museum.

Among Mr. Rauschenberg's most celebrated creations were his "combines," three-dimensional assemblages that incorporate painting, sculpture, and found objects: a frozen choreography of the mundane and the inspired. "Monogram" (1959), perhaps his most famous work, includes a stuffed goat, a tire, a police barrier, a shoe heel, a tennis ball, and paint.

"Bed" (1955) consists of a pillow, sheet, and quilt, with pencil markings and thick slatherings of paint, toothpaste, and fingernail polish. The bedclothes came from Mr. Rauschenberg's bedroom. Supposedly, he awoke one day eager to paint but without a canvas handy and unable to afford one, so he used what he had.

"You begin with the possibilities of the material," Mr. Rauschenberg once remarked. "I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out of the real world."

It's a mark of his extraordinary eclecticism that the influences he cited on his combines were the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci (in which all elements have equal pictorial weight), the collages of Kurt Schwitters, and the found-object sculptures of Marcel Duchamp.

Youthful looking and gregarious, Mr. Rauschenberg spurned artistic solemnity. He studied at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s with Josef Albers, a famously severe product of Germany's Bauhaus. Mr. Rauschenberg called him "the most important teacher" he ever had, in part because he learned to do "exactly the reverse" of what Albers taught.

Mr. Rauschenberg was the creator of what was probably the most notorious practical joke in art history, "Erased de Kooning Drawing" (1953), which was just what the title said it was.

"Erased" might be seen as emblematic of Mr. Rauschenberg's view of Abstract Expressionism, the school to which Willem de Kooning (who had given the drawing to Mr. Rauschenberg) belonged. Brooding seriousness and majestic aspirations were anathema to Mr. Rauschenberg and his art. "You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself," he once said, "in order to be a good Abstract Expressionist."

Where Abstract Expressionism brought American art to new heights, Mr. Rauschenberg presented it with new opportunities. Vigorously prolific, he did extensive work in photography, collage, printmaking, lithography, and drawing. The most notable example of the latter are his 34 illustrations for Dante's "Inferno," which was printed in a limited-edition book. Mr. Rauschenberg often worked on a very large scale; his "1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece," an installation, consists of 195 parts and is nearly 1,000 feet in length.

Mr. Rauschenberg mounted highly influential performance pieces in the 1960s, such as "Pelican" (1963) and "Open Score" (1966), which employed chance operations. In doing so, he recalled the work of composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, friends whom he first met at Black Mountain.

He also at various times provided costumes, set designs, and lighting for Cunningham's company. He occasionally danced with it, too. (Mr. Rauschenberg's exuberance extended well beyond the studio. He also founded a charitable organization for impoverished artists, Change Inc., in 1970.)

Mr. Rauschenberg's most important artistic collaboration was with the painter Jasper Johns, in the mid-'50s. Not since Picasso and Braque had jointly invented Cubism a half century earlier had two artists worked together as closely, or momentously. The two men shared a studio, became lovers, and supported themselves by doing window displays for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany & Co. under the nom de fenetre Matson Jones. (There is an intriguing parallel between those window displays and Mr. Rauschenberg's combines: Both involved the arresting arrangement of diverse items in a three-dimensional display that is meant to be scrutinized.)

"Jasper and I literally traded ideas," Mr. Rauschenberg once told The New Yorker's Calvin Tomkins. "He would say, 'I've got a terrific idea for you,' and then I'd have to find one for him."

In his markedly more austere way, Johns was turning to the everyday, too, employing such commonplace subjects as flags, targets, and beer cans in his art. But as his work turned increasingly inward, Mr. Rauschenberg went his own expansive, extroverted way.

In 1997, New York's Guggenheim Museum put on a retrospective of Mr. Rauschenberg's work that was the largest exhibition in its history, consisting of some 400 objects.

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on Oct. 22, 1925, the son of Ernest Rauschenberg, a utilities executive, and Dora (Matson) Rauschenberg. In the late '40s he changed his first name because he felt that Robert sounded more artistic.

Mr. Rauschenberg suffered from dyslexia. "I was considered slow," he told an interviewer. "While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins." He studied pharmacy at the University of Texas, but was expelled when he refused to dissect a frog.

Drafted into the US Navy, Mr. Rauschenberg was serving as a Marine medical technician at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego, when he visited the Huntington Library, with its collection of paintings by such English masters as Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. He resolved to become an artist (he had been drawing portraits of his fellow Marines for them to send home) and used his GI Bill benefits to study at the Kansas City Art Institute and at the Académie Julian in Paris.

In France, Mr. Rauschenberg met a fellow art student, Susan Weil. They went to Black Mountain together and married in 1950. They had a son, Christopher, who survives Mr. Rauschenberg. The couple divorced in 1952.

After Black Mountain, Mr. Rauschenberg studied at the Art Students League in New York. He had his first gallery show in 1951. Mr. Rauschenberg's considerable impact on the New York art scene was soon felt abroad. In 1964, he became the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale. Some 20 years later, he earned another unique distinction for an American artist of his stature: a Grammy Award, for best album package for "Speaking in Tongues" by Talking Heads.

"I'm curious," Mr. Rauschenberg said in a 1997 interview. "I'm still discovering things every day."

In addition to his son, Mr. Rauschenberg leaves a companion, Darryl Pottorf.

Material from wire services was used in this report.