Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg dies in Fla. at 82

The artist used odd and everyday items in his creations.

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg’s media knew few bounds.

One of his most famous works or “combines” was “Bed,” created when he woke up in the mood to paint but had no money for a canvas. His solution was to take the quilt off his bed and use paint, toothpaste and fingernail polish for his creation. He was also a sculptor and a choreographer.

Rauschenberg died of heart failure Monday at 82, it was announced Tuesday by Jennifer Joy, his representative at PaceWildenstein gallery in New York. His use of odd and everyday articles earned him regard as a pioneer in pop art, first gaining fame in the 1950s.

“The most famous thing he said was that he worked in the gap between art and life,” said John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “I think what he meant by this is life was his materials as much as art was his materials.”

Rauschenberg didn’t mine popular culture wholesale as Andy Warhol (Campbell’s Soup cans) and Roy Lichtenstein (comic books) did, but his combines — incongruous combinations of three-dimensional objects and paint — shared pop’s blurring of art and objects from modern life.

He also responded to his pop colleagues and began incorporating up-to-the-minute photographed images in his works in the 1960s, including, memorably, pictures of John F. Kennedy. He even won a 1984 Grammy Award for best album package for the Talking Heads album “Speaking in Tongues.”

“I’m curious,” he said in 1997 in one of the few interviews he granted in later years. “It’s very rewarding. I’m still discovering things every day.”

Nan Rosenthal, who curated “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines,” a joint exhibition by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, called Rauschenberg a “tremendously imaginative artist.”

Rosenthal said she believed Rauschenberg would be best remembered for his series of all-white, all-black and all-red paintings, as well as the combines. The Met owns about 25 Rauschenberg paintings and about 75 drawings and prints.

Rauschenberg’s more than 50 years in art produced such a varied and prolific collection that it consumed both uptown and downtown locations during a 1998 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, in his book “American Visions,” called Rauschenberg “a protean genius who showed America that all of life could be open to art. ... Rauschenberg didn’t give a fig for consistency, or curating his reputation; his taste was always facile, omnivorous, and hit-or-miss, yet he had a bigness of soul and a richness of temperament that recalled Walt Whitman.”

Rauschenberg split his time between New York and Captiva Island in Florida.

“I like things that are almost souvenirs of a creation, as opposed to being an artwork,” he said in a 1997 Harper’s Bazaar interview, “because the process is more interesting than completing the stuff.”

He studied painting at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1947. He later took his studies to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he studied under master Josef Albers (who supposedly hated his work), and alongside contemporary artists such as choreographer Merce Cunningham and musician John Cage. He also studied at the Art Students League in New York City.

Rauschenberg’s first paintings in the early 1950s comprised a series of all-white and all-black surfaces underlaid with wrinkled newspaper. In later works he began making art from what others would consider junk — old soda bottles, traffic barricades, and stuffed birds and calling them “combine” paintings.