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Farewell to Art Icon Robert Rauschenberg

Texas born painter, photographer, printmaker, sculptor, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Robert Rauschenberg died Monday, May 12, at his home in Captiva, Florida, of heart failure at the age of 82.

Rauschenberg worked in an amazing variety of media. He even won a 1984 Grammy Award for best album package for the Talking Heads album "Speaking in Tongues."

I remember being blown away when I first saw his paintings, but I was even more thrilled when I learned about what he was doing in the theatre. 

Rauschenberg produced some of his “boldest and freshest conceptions” when he worked onstage. From the early 1950s until 2007 he designed for dance. Rauschenberg said he regarded the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as his biggest canvas. According to writer and critic Alastair Macaulay the most marvelous Rauschenberg stage designs he had ever seen, and most supremely theatrical, were what he made for Cunningham's "Interscape"  (2000).

Rauschenberg blurred the lines between painting, sculpture, technology, printmaking, dancing and photography. The world provided his canvas. “I work in the gap between art and life,” he once said. To him nothing was ugly. All was art. All things were beautiful. 

---Penne J. Laubenthal

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