Robert RauschenbergThe American artist Robert Rauschenberg, a man of few words, made one famous statement. He said that his ambition was to fill the gap between art and life. Even these few words were not original.
His friend John Cage had already said that this should be the aim of the modern artist. Similarly, Rauschenberg's art was not especially original; it could scarcely have existed without cubist collage and the work of Kurt Schwitters. And yet he created a body of unmistakably American work that threw down a challenge to the abstract expressionism of Pollock and de Kooning; work of a similar scale and ease, metropolitan art that evoked the spirit of the old frontier so dear to the late 20th-century American public.
Rauschenberg, who has died aged 82, was born of mixed German and Cherokee descent in Port Arthur, Texas. He had a good war, "that is, practically no war at all", as a neuropsychiatric technician in naval hospitals in California. Like many Americans, he had never seen a real painting, and when he did, in a California exhibition, he was none too impressed: Reynolds's Portrait of Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse was, he remarked, "an enormous brown thing". But it was his first inkling that being an artist might constitute a career, and as he was not much good at anything else, when he was demobbed, he signed up at the Kansas City Art Institute.
From there he saved up to go to Paris, but learned very little from the Académie Julian ("the criticism was once a week in French, and I didn't understand any French"), painted a few desultory cityscapes, fell in love with Sue Weil, a New York art student - whom he was to marry, have a son with but later divorce - and joined her at Black Mountain College in North Carolina to study under Joseph Albers. On the face of it, Albers's Bauhaus aesthetics were not ideal for the scruffy and undirected work that Rauschenberg was producing, but he needed and wanted the discipline, and it is possible to see in the delicate discrimination with which he placed the elements of his collages the influence of Albers's elegant control.
But it was Rauschenberg's fellow student, Cage, who had the major influence on him. Cage's 4 min 33 sec, the work which starts when the pianist raises the lid of the piano and finishes, without him or her having played a note, four minutes and 33 seconds later, has its parallel in Rauschenberg's white paintings. Not White On White like Malevich earlier in the century, but white, so that its only surface interest would be the shadows of passers-by falling upon it, just as Cage's work was a collage of sounds from outside and inside the concert hall.
From Black Mountain Rauschenberg went to New York, where he had his first show in 1951, at the Betty Parsons Gallery, the prime mover and shaker in Manhattan. It attracted withering reviews - "stylish doodles", said the New York Times - and no sales. About now, too, he used an eraser to bring a drawing by De Kooning back to the faint indentations that pencil had made on paper. This was construed as a radical attack by a younger painter on the values of the abstract expressionists, who were by now regarded as world leaders of the avant garde.
Undaunted by unpopularity, though he was never to make much money until he and Jasper Johns began to decorate the windows of Bonwit Teller and Tiffany under a joint pseudonym in the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg pressed on with theatre designs for another Black Mountain friend, Merce Cunningham. Meanwhile, he developed his collages, reaching some kind of summation in 1955 when, apparently short of a surface to work on, he decided to paint the quilt on his own bed, hanging it vertically to do so.
The quilt's pattern of orange squares was too dominating, so he added the pillow on top, splashed on some more paint and, with some logic, called the resulting work Bed. Simultaneously, he was developing his so-called combines, which were paintings with objects mounted on the surface, and his constructions, which were paintings with bigger objects mounted on the surface. Part of the New York legend is that these caused great consternation. It is hard, after Dada, to see how.
When Monogram, his painted construction with an amiable stuffed angora goat encircled by a tyre, was exhibited in the Tate Gallery exhibition, Painting and Sculpture of a Decade 1954-64 (he had a one-man Whitechapel show the same year), it looked absolutely right, the subject of nice judgment, and totally unshocking. As well it might: it had taken Rauschenberg months to hit on the right arrangement. And by now he was regarded as one of the leading lights of New York art.
In the 1990s he embarked on a series of collaged images called Anagrams (collages after all amount to visual anagrams). They included political processions, buildings, sculpture, vegetables, table lamps, jetties, beach scenes, flags, posters from all parts of the world, the images recurring in different works and in different combinations.
As Rauschenberg found acclaim and financial security, he never forgot the earlier struggles and in 1970 he helped to found Change, an organisation devoted to providing emergency funds for artists.
He is survived by his son Christopher and his companion Darryl Pottorf.
Robert Rauschenberg, artist, born October 22nd, 1925; died May 12th, 2008