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 Pop
Artist Robert Rauschenberg Dies
by The Associated Press
Posted: May 13, 2008 - 12:30 pm ET
(Tampa, Florida) Robert Rauschenberg, whose
use of odd and everyday articles earned him a reputation as a pioneer in pop art
but whose talents spanned the worlds of painting, sculpture and dance, has died,
his gallery representative said Tuesday. He was 82.
Rauschenberg died Monday, said
Jennifer Joy, his representative at Pace Wildensteins.
Rauschenberg, who first gained
fame in the 1950s, didn't mine popular culture wholesale as
Andy Warhol did with Campbell's soup cans and Roy Lichtenstein
did with comic books.
Instead, 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.
Among Rauschenberg's most
famous works was "Bed," created after 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.
Not to be limited by paint,
Rauschenberg was a sculptor and choreographer and 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."
Rauschenberg's more than 50
years in art produced a varied and prolific collection that
that filled both Manhattan locations of the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum during a 1998 retrospective.
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 own art and those of his friends.
"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, 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 first paintings in
the early 1950s comprised a series of all-white and all-black
surfaces under laid 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 entitled "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.
By the mid-1950s, he 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 when asked about dying. "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."
©365Gay.com 2008
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