He led the way to Pop Art

Robert Rauschenberg, the protean artist from small-town Texas whose imaginative commitment to hybrid forms of painting and sculpture changed the course of American and European art, died Monday night after a brief illness at his home on Captiva Island, Fla., according to New York's PaceWildenstein Gallery, which represents his work. He was 82 and had been in poor health for several years.

Rauschenberg was widely regarded as a principal bridge between Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and Pop Art in the 1960s, but he did not subscribe to any narrow doctrine. His work also influenced the emergence of Neo-Dada, Minimal, Conceptual, Post-minimal, Process and performance art. His deep and abiding interest in printmaking facilitated a major revival in the medium, and his achievements in lithography were instrumental in the creation of a contemporary market for prints. In Europe, the humble, everyday objects of the Arte Povera ("poor art") movement expanded on his use of cast-off materials retrieved from the trash bin and the attic.

Rauschenberg's art was instrumental in reintroducing representational imagery into common usage. Until then, avant-garde art on both sides of the Atlantic was most closely identified with pure abstraction, which the public regarded with skepticism. Rauschenberg mixed traditional forms of modern painting and sculpture with photographs, found objects, studio printmaking techniques and mass-produced pictures gathered in postcards, postage stamps and newspapers. In one of the most repeated, yet frequently misquoted, statements in postwar American art, he asserted: "Painting relates to both art and life. . . . (I try to act in that gap between the two)."

Together with painter Jasper Johns, with whom he was romantically linked, Rauschenberg was the most important American artist to emerge into prominence in the 1950s. When he was awarded the grand prize for painting at the 1964 Venice Biennale in Italy -- only the third American to receive the distinguished honor, after James Whistler and Mark Tobey -- the surprise selection ignited a firestorm of controversy in Europe but secured his international reputation. Rauschenberg had been using commercially made silk screens to reproduce photographic images on his canvases, a technique that he picked up from Andy Warhol, and the imagery mingled with energetic brushwork in brilliant colors. The day after the Venice Biennale announcement he had all the silk screens in his New York studio destroyed, to forestall any temptation to repeat himself.