New York - Robert Rauschenberg, a pioneer of pop art who made his wildly creative pieces from almost anything that came to hand, has died in Florida aged 82, it was announced Tuesday. No cause was given for his death, which deprived the US art world of one of its preeminent post war innovators.
Adept at painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography and performance art, Rauschenberg rose to fame in the mid-1950s with a piece called Bed, which he created after waking up with a desire to paint but no canvas to paint on. Instead he painted on his quilt, and in his signature style of mixing painting with 3D objects, he wrapped the quilt round a wooden post.
Rauschenberg called such works "combines". Another famous work was Monogram (1959), a stuffed Angora goat wearing a tyre around its middle and a daub of paint on its nose.
Born in Texas in 1922, Rauschenberg went to art school after serving in the US Navy in World War II and exhibited his quixotic artistic sense when he moved to New York in 1949 with a series of mono-colour paintings on which the only image was the viewer's shadow.
He became the first American to win the top prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964, and also was one of the first artists to experiment with interactive electronics. His elaborate sculptural installations, such as Oracle and Soundings transformed junk contraptions into pieces of refined sculptural beauty.
"His ferocious, almost omnivorous creativity as a young artist in the [late] '40s, '50s and even into the '60s was so liberating for his generation and the generation that followed," James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, told the Chicago Tribune. "He brought a freedom and openness not burdened by the weight of the immediate past."
