(source)

From 365Gay.com:

Robert Rauschenberg, whose use of odd and everyday articles earned him a reputation as a pioneer in pop art but whose talents spanned the worlds of painting, sculpture and dance, has died, his gallery representative said Tuesday. He was 82.

Rauschenberg, who first gained fame in the 1950s, didn’t copy popular culture wholesale as Andy Warhol did with Campbell’s soup cans and Roy Lichtenstein did with comic books. Instead, 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.

Among Rauschenberg’s most famous works was “Bed,” created after 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. Not to be limited by paint, Rauschenberg was a sculptor and choreographer and even won a 1984 Grammy Award for best album package for the Talking Heads album “Speaking in Tongues.”

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.”

He met Jasper Johns in 1954. He and the younger artist, both destined to become world famous, became lovers and influenced each other’s work. According to the book “Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists,” Rauschenberg told biographer Calvin Tomkins that “Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, `I’ve got a terrific idea for you,’ and then I’d have to find one for him.”

Click on the image below to see full gallery