Innovative Mind Found Art in the Unwanted

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The Works of Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg, who died Monday, May 12, 2008 at age 82, was a pioneer in the pop art world.

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"The strongest thing about my work, if I may say this," he later said, "is the fact that I chose to ennoble the ordinary."

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Tex., on Oct. 22, 1925. He grew up in a strict religious household and for a time contemplated becoming a minister in the Church of Christ.

Rauschenberg's youthful dyslexia was so severe that he "excelled in poor grades," but he managed to enroll at the University of Texas to study pharmacology. He later said he was expelled when he refused to dissect a frog.

In the Navy during World War II, he served in a psychiatric hospital in California and made his first visit to an art museum. He used his GI Bill benefits to study at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he changed his name from Milton to Robert, because he thought it made him sound more like an artist.

During a brief sojourn in Paris, he met artist Susan Weil. They were married after returning to the United States, and she was the mother of his only child, Christopher. (They were divorced in 1952.)

In 1948, Rauschenberg went to the avant-garde Black Mountain College, where he studied with artist Josef Albers, and met composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, with whom he had a long association.

Rauschenberg soon moved to New York, determined to find his artistic niche. He was so poor that he went to parties and used the bathroom to take a quick shower. For several years, he lived with artist Johns, and each influenced the other's work. Together they earned money designing window displays for Tiffany and Bonwit Teller.

By the late 1960s, as Rauschenberg's combines, collages and photographic assemblages found favor with the public, he expanded his vision to artistic forms that he discovered in his worldwide travels. In the early 1980s, he set up workshops in China and Japan and came back with 500 new collages and a multi-frame photograph 100 feet long.

Major exhibitions were held at the old National Collection of Fine Arts (1977), the Pompidou Center in Paris (1981), the National Gallery of Art (1991 and 2007) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2005).

"I had a hard time for most of my early life -- people thought I was out to shock or, before that, that I was just a joke," he said in 1997. "But finally I hung around long enough that they said, 'Maybe there IS something to it -- he's still here.' "

Despite a lifelong drinking problem -- he consumed more than a bottle of whiskey a day for many years -- Rauschenberg made more than 6,000 works of art in his lifetime. Always restless, he never sought to create a perfect masterpiece, only to find new ideas that struck his fancy.

In recent years, Rauschenberg suffered a broken hip and a stroke that paralyzed his right hand, but he kept working at his Florida compound until shortly before his death.

"I do what I do because . . . painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself," he said in a 2005 New Yorker profile. "And it's always the moment of doing it that counts. When a painting is finished it's already something I've done, no longer something I'm doing."

In addition to his son, survivors include his companion, artist Darryl Pottorf; and a sister.