Rauschenberg's "Estate" 1963 oil and silk screened ink on canvas

Robert Rauschenberg, 82, the American painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer and performance artist who was one of the most influential artists in the second half of the 20th Century, died recently at his home in Captiva Island, Fla. Mr. Rauschenberg died of heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the Manhattan gallery that represented the artist.

A prolific worker in many media that he combined according to his own rules, Mr. Rauschenberg was as much a catalyst for others as a creator who sought to operate in an aesthetic no-man's land, which he famously called "the gap between art and life."

Like his friends and collaborators composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, Mr. Rauschenberg brought together chance procedures and everyday experiences, and found materials to create pieces that testified to new possibilities in art. Such openness, along with his habitual blurring of boundaries among media, gave a model for generations of artists.

"His ferocious, almost omnivorous creativity as a young artist in the [late] '40s, '50s and even into the '60s was so liberating for his generation and the generation that followed," said James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago.

"He brought a freedom and openness not burdened by the weight of the immediate past. Everything he touched in the '40s and '50s seemed to be new and challenging."

Mr. Rauschenberg was born Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design before a disappointing stay in Paris at the Academie Julian. After reading about the work of artist Josef Albers, Mr. Rauschenberg returned to the United States to study with him at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Mr. Rauschenberg soon found Albers intimidating and moved to New York City to work at the Art Students League. He continued to visit Black Mountain College, where he met Cage and Cunningham, with whom he was to collaborate for many years. Working with others--especially avant-garde dancers and musicians--became a favorite way of creating.

In the early 1950s, when Abstract Expressionist painters were being recognized as the strongest artists to have emerged in the United States, Mr. Rauschenberg found himself "revolted" by their rhetoric and began to paint very different abstractions. These were all in one color, and the first of them were made in conjunction with dance performances. He conceived them as screens that would reflect collaboration.

The spareness of Mr. Rauschenberg's monochromes would one day make them seem anticipatory of Minimal Art. His works of the mid-1950s, on the contrary, found ways to bring more, rather than less, into modern art.A radical effort of the 1950s was a group of monoprints Mr. Rauschenberg made with his wife, Susan Weil. These works introduced new, mixed techniques to what would become a major area of his art production: printmaking.

"In thinking about the most impressive large bodies of prints in the 20th Century, Picasso is the main event and [Jasper] Johns and Rauschenberg are considered competitively," said Mark Pascale, associate curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago.

"But every time Rauschenberg approached printmaking, he did it freshly. He was always looking for a new facet to explore."

In the mid-50s, Mr. Rauschenberg began to use the collage technique, incorporating found objects and other materials from everyday life into paintings he called "combines." These were some of the most arresting works of the postwar period. On some of them rests the artist's reputation as a significant linking figure between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

An aid to Mr. Rauschenberg's practice of combining images was a transfer-drawing technique he developed in the 1950s.

This method he later adapted to canvas by use of the photomechanical process of screenprinting. The early pieces he produced using screenprinting were among the most important works of the 1960s.

In 1963, Mr. Rauschenberg became one of the first artists younger than 40 to receive an important museum retrospective.

Thereafter, Mr. Rauschenberg's interest in painting waned, and he was more occupied with performances, sculptures and installations. Mr. Rauschenberg often said that New York was essential to an artist's development. But in 1969, on the advice of his astrologer, he sought a more peaceful existence and found it on Captiva, an island in the Gulf of Mexico near Ft. Myers, Fla. In 1976, Mr. Rauschenberg became the Smithsonian Institution's "Bicentennial Artist," honored with a traveling retrospective that came to Chicago.

During the run of that show, a survey published in West Germany named him as the most prominent contemporary artist in the world, with more work represented in museums, private collections and art publications than any other living artist from the previous two decades. Mr. Rauschenberg said his retrospective had set him thinking about earlier works. The large, openly autobiographical paintings he subsequently produced thus had recourse to older images and ways of working. "He took from different sources, combined images and used popular materials, prefiguring much that came later [in art]. I see him as a precursor of post-modernism," said Elizabeth Smith, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

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