Visual Arts

Robert Rauschenberg, the puckish, pioneering artist from Port Arthur, Texas, whose impact can be traced through both painting and sculpture over the last half-century, died Monday at 82.

TONY CENICOLA/The New York Times

Artist Robert Rauschenberg, who was born in Port Arthur, Texas, was considered a mixed-media pioneer. He died Monday in Florida at 82.

He died at his home on Florida's Captiva Island, according to press reports. The cause of death was heart failure, according to a statement from PaceWildenstein, the New York gallery that represents him.

Over a career that spanned decades and genres, Mr. Rauschenberg was best known for his "combines," three-dimensional pieces that merged found objects with abstract painting. Alternatively whimsical and poignant, he skewered art-historical preciousness while tracking American pop culture as it evolved after World War II.

For one of his most celebrated mixed-media works, Monogram, Mr. Rauschenberg wrapped a stuffed angora goat with a rubber tire and stood the piece on a collaged canvas. Taking a shot at his abstract expressionist forebears, the artist dabbled the goat's muzzle with paint in an abstract pattern.

Dallas Museum of Art

Skyway, a collage showing images of John F. Kennedy, is among more than 50 Rauschenberg pieces owned by the Dallas Museum of Art.

"Bob Rauschenberg is certainly the greatest Texas-born artist of the 20th century and, in the post-World War II era, one of the giants of contemporary art on the international scene," John R. "Jack" Lane, Eugene McDermott director of the Dallas Museum of Art, said Tuesday.

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur in 1925. (He renamed himself Robert in adulthood.) His presence in the state is deep. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth owns five lithographs, one print and one combine painting, dating from the late 1960s to the late '70s.

The Dallas Museum of Art staged two exhibitions, "Work From Four Series: A Sesquicentennial Exhibition" in 1986-87 and "Dialogues: Duchamp, Cornell, Johns, Rauschenberg" in 2005-06. The latter show placed Mr. Rauschenberg in a continuity with innovators Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell and also related his work to that of his proto-pop peer Jasper Johns.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mr. Rauschenberg wrapped a stuffed angora goat with a rubber tire and stood the piece on a collaged canvas in Monogram .

The DMA owns more than 50 pieces by Mr. Rauschenberg, the most important being Skyway, a signature piece on view in the Hamon Atrium. The monumental collage painting features repeated images of John F. Kennedy and diagrams from early space exploration missions as well as references to abstract and historical painting. It was done in 1964, the same year he won the prestigious Venice Biennale Grand Prize.

In 1984, Mr. Rauschenberg was on hand to celebrate the opening of the DMA's current location in the Arts District. In 1989, he presented a limited-edition serigraph to a Dallas Cares AIDS benefit. That same year, he received the Algur H. Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts at Southern Methodist University.

Mr. Rauschenberg also attended Dallas' first Two by Two for AIDS and Art gala in 1999, hosted by collector Howard Rachofsky; in 2000 he served as the event's honorary chairman.

"He was one of the seminal figures of postwar art," Mr. Rachofsky said Tuesday. "You could name them on one hand and he would always be on that list. Pollock, de Kooning, then Rauschenberg. Jasper Johns after that and that's postwar art."

His prolific production and continued exhibitions have ensured his relevancy. Last year, the Menil Collection in Houston showed "Robert Rauschenberg: Cardboards and Related Pieces," a 1971­72 series in which he worked exclusively with cardboard boxes and explored the possibilities of composition under rigid self-constraints.

In one famous episode, poor finances inspired wild innovation: Getting up to paint one day in 1955 and realizing he was too broke to buy a canvas, Mr. Rauschenberg used paint and household pigments, such as toothpaste, to transform his quilt, bedsheets and pillow into Bed , one of his best and best-known works. That piece is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

"The divisions between media – collages, painting, photography, sculpture – he was involved in all of them," said Dorothy Kosinski, director of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and former senior curator at the DMA.

Mr. Rauschenberg himself was sanguine about the notion of objects – made or found, inert or organic. "I always felt there was little difference between objects and live stuff, a ball in relation to a frog, for example," he said at the Modern of Fort Worth during a 1995 opening. "I thought there was life in everything, and what always went with that was a sense that everything around us carries its history."

Kriston Capps is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C. Staff writer Alan Peppard and Bloomberg News Service contributed to this story.