Memories of Rauschenberg: 'A giant among artists'

"My first thought was, the world won't be the same without him, but then I thought: We still have him," said Rosamund Felsen, owner of the Rosamund Felsen Gallery at Santa Monica's Bergamot Station, who heard of Rauschenberg's death Tuesday morning in a call from her daughter.

Colleagues credited the influential, Texas-born artist with breaking the boundaries traditionally separating painting, sculpture and other forms of artistic expression.

Rauschenberg's son Christopher, 56, a photographer in Portland, Ore., said his father's work -- considered a bridge between the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s and 1960s Pop art -- tended to confound academics steeped in traditional art history. "Everybody was always trying to deconstruct his work the way they were trained to with medieval painting: 'If there's a dog here, it means this,' " he said. "That was always a complete misreading. It was always very frustrating to have people create these elaborate decodings, completely missing the point. They're not puzzles; they're more like oracular foretellings."

Added the younger Rauschenberg of his father's work, which often incorporated items others might see as trash: "It's about a sort of richness. He didn't get a new item at a store, he found one that someone had used for 20 years and had all those little dents and dings. That was him."

Felsen Rosamund Felsen Gallerysaid she had known Rauschenberg -- who died Monday at 82 of heart failure at his home and studio in Captiva, Fla. -- since 1967, when he came to Gemini G.E.L. "I couldn't believe how handsome he was," she says now.

Felsen is a founding partner of L.A.’s Gemini G.E.L., one of the country's foremost publishers of art lithography, now run by Stanley Grinstein and Felsen's ex-husband, Sidney Felsen. One of the Gemini's first prints was by Rauschenberg, who was instrumental in bringing other contemporary artists, such as Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein, to Gemini.

"Probably -- no, not probably, he was the most influential person in my life," Rosamund Felsen said. "Not only in terms of thinking about art, looking at art, but thinking about life."