[Deathwatch] Robert Rauschenberg, artist, 82

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg dies in Fla. at 82

By MITCH STACY, 
May 13

Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg's mediums knew few bounds.

One of his most famous works or "combines" was "Bed," created when he
woke up in the mood to paint but had no money for a canvas. His
solution was to take the quilt off his bed and use paint, toothpaste
and fingernail polish for his creation. He was also a sculptor and a
choreographer.

Rauschenberg died Monday of heart failure at 82, it was announced
Tuesday by Jennifer Joy, his representative at PaceWildenstein gallery
in New York. His use of odd and everyday articles earned him regard as
a pioneer in pop art, first gaining fame in the 1950s.

"The most famous thing he said was that he worked in the gap between
art and life," said John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and
sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art. "I think what he meant by
this is life was his materials as much as art was his materials."

Rauschenberg didn't mine popular culture wholesale as Andy Warhol
(Campbell's Soup cans) and Roy Lichtenstein (comic books) did, but his
combines ? incongruous combinations of three-dimensional objects and
paint ? shared pop's blurring of art and objects from modern life.

He also responded to his pop colleagues and began incorporating
up-to-the-minute photographed images in his works in the 1960s,
including, memorably, pictures of John F. Kennedy. He even won a 1984
Grammy Award for best album package for the Talking Heads album
"Speaking in Tongues."

"I'm curious," he said in 1997 in one of the few interviews he granted
in later years. "It's very rewarding. I'm still discovering things
every day."

Nan Rosenthal, who curated "Robert Rauschenberg: Combines," a joint
exhibition by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, called Rauschenberg a "tremendously
imaginative artist."

Rosenthal said she believed Rauschenberg would be best remembered for
his series of all-white, all-black and all-red paintings, as well as
the combines. The Met owns about 25 Rauschenberg paintings and about 75
drawings and prints.

"A lot of the time he was tremendously ebullient, a kind of
irrepressible person," who was also "quite a wonderful host and cook,"
she said.

Rauschenberg's more than 50 years in art produced such a varied and
prolific collection that it consumed both uptown and downtown locations
during a 1998 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, in his book "American Visions,"
called Rauschenberg "a protean genius who showed America that all of
life could be open to art. ... Rauschenberg didn't give a fig for
consistency, or curating his reputation; his taste was always facile,
omnivorous, and hit-or-miss, yet he had a bigness of soul and a
richness of temperament that recalled Walt Whitman."

Rauschenberg split his time between New York and Captiva Island in
Florida, where he kept a house stocked with his and his friends' art.

"I like things that are almost souvenirs of a creation, as opposed to
being an artwork," he said in a 1997 Harper's Bazaar interview,
"because the process is more interesting than completing the stuff."

He studied painting at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1947. He later
took his studies to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he
studied under master Josef Albers (who supposedly hated his work), and
alongside contemporary artists such as choreographer Merce Cunningham
and musician John Cage. He also studied at the Art Students League in
New York City.

Rauschenberg's first paintings in the early 1950s comprised a series of
all-white and all-black surfaces underlaid with wrinkled newspaper. In
later works he began making art from what others would consider junk ?
old soda bottles, traffic barricades, and stuffed birds and calling
them "combine" paintings.

One of Rauschenberg's first and most famous combines was titled
"Monogram," a 1959 work consisting of a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a
police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball, and paint.

"Initially, these were thought to be ugly and unpleasant, but as
happens ... in time they are perceived as being beautiful," Elderfield
said. "It's more than that these things were beautiful" but that he was
using them to tell stories.

"Not in the way we are used to having stories told in narration, but
more like the contents of a person's purse, you could tell the
personality from the objects collected," he said.

By the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg was also designing sets and costumes for
dance companies and window displays for Tiffany and Bonwit Teller.

He met Jasper Johns in 1954. He and the younger artist, both destined
to become world famous, became lovers and influenced each other's work.
According to the book "Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists,"
Rauschenberg told biographer Calvin Tomkins that "Jasper and I
literally traded ideas. He would say, `I've got a terrific idea for
you,' and then I'd have to find one for him."

Born Milton Rauschenberg in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, and raised a
Christian fundamentalist, Rauschenberg wanted to be a minister but gave
it up because his church banned dancing.

"I was considered slow," he once said "While my classmates were reading
their textbooks, I drew in the margins."

He was drafted into the U.S. Navy during World War II and knew little
about art until a chance visit to an art museum where he saw his first
painting at age 18. He drew portraits of his fellow sailors for them to
send home.

When his time in the service was up, Rauschenberg used the GI Bill to
pay his tuition at art school. He changed his name to Robert because it
sounded more artistic.

In recent years he founded the organization Change Inc., which helps
struggling artists pay medical bills.

"I don't ever want to go," he told Harper's Bazaar in 1997 when asked
of his own death. "I don't have a sense of great reality about the next
world; my feet are too ugly to wear those golden slippers. But I'm
working on my fear of it. And my fear is that something interesting
will happen, and I'll miss it." 

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary