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The New York Times
May 14, 2008
Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time
and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was
82.
He died of heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the artist's gallery in Manhattan.
Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,”
for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas.
“Monogram” was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted
panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint,
as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of
postwar modernism.
A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage
performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr.
Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one
medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the
mediums in which he worked.
Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph
Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between
painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and
printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture
and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between
art and life.
Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art
onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he
emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between
artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came
next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process
Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.
No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr.
Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr.
Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view,
collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American
culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now
underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.”
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