May 13 (Bloomberg) -- Robert Rauschenberg did not need canvas to make a painting --not as long as he had a stuffed goat or an old quilt on hand. He did not even need a studio for his art. Not when a tennis court or a roller skate would do.

This was the man who said he preferred to work ``in the gap between art and life.''

Without doubt, Rauschenberg, who died on Monday at age 82, was the most inventive artist in America. He seems to have been the artist for whom the term ``mixed-media'' was created.

Rauschenberg was one of the first to incorporate commercial silk-silkscreen printing into painting; experiment with interactive electronics; design sets, costumes and lighting for dance companies; and to incorporate all manner of ``junk'' --old tires, chairs, shirts, light bulbs, fans, ladders, shoes, newspapers, postcards, snapshots -- into messy, brusquely brushed, visually tantalizing sculpture and painting hybrids that he called ``Combines.''

It was a combine that made him famous. That was ``Monogram'' (1959), a taxidermied Angora goat wearing a tire around its middle and a daub of paint on its nose.

The 1955 ``Bed,'' consisting of the artist's own pillow and quilt slathered with house paint and wrapped around a wood support, was partly the result of his being too poor to buy proper materials.

Fabric Scraps

Such works wreaked havoc with existing definitions of art by suggesting, like Marcel Duchamp's ``readymades,'' that it could come out of anything -- and intrigue everyone.

Born October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, where his mother made him shirts out of fabric scraps, Rauschenberg discovered a native talent for drawing while serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

He went to art school in Kansas City and in Paris (where he met his future wife, the artist Susan Weil) on the G.I. Bill. (Their son, Christopher, was born in 1951, the year of Rauschenberg's first one-man show in New York.)

Together, the couple studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Rauschenberg would also meet composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. He joined them in the first ``Happening'' -- an early form of performance art -- and the three became frequent collaborators as well as lifelong friends.

All-White Paintings

A garrulous, unstoppably cheerful sort who liked his whiskey almost as much as his work, Rauschenberg moved to New York in 1949. He also lived on Captiva, an island off Florida's Gulf coast.

Success was not waiting to meet him, at least not right away. That may have been because, unlike his close friend and sometime intimate, Jasper Johns, few people had a clue about his art.

First he made a series of all-white paintings, on which a viewer's shadow was the only image. Then he made all-black ones. Red ones followed, and these began to incorporate newspapers, torn shirts and light bulbs.

Collage and experimentation were always the touchstones of Rauschenberg's creative life. So was his daring.

One of his earliest acts was to persuade abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning to give him a drawing that he would painstakingly erase, thereby creating a new artwork (``Erased De Kooning,'' 1953) that he could call his own.

Enfant Terrible

In doing so, Rauschenberg repudiated abstract expressionism while helping to usher in an age of conceptualism to which contemporary art is still in thrall.

By the time of his first retrospective, at the Jewish Museum in 1963, he had earned a reputation as the enfant terrible of contemporary art. Only a year later, he became the first American to win top prize for painting at the Venice Biennale.

Instead of resting on his laurels, he formed Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) with Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver and began to work with sound transmissions and light sculptures that a viewer's step could set into motion.

Rauschenberg was also a master printmaker who constantly sought new ways to transfer photographic, painted or digital images to surfaces that included not just paper and canvas but aluminum, cheesecloth and silk. (This exploration continued, with the help of assistants, throughout his last years, even after a stroke left him palsied and wheelchair-bound.)

All of this activity was put on grand display in 1997, when the Guggenheim Museum mounted a comprehensive traveling retrospective with over 300 pieces. It included one collaged painting that was a quarter-mile long.

As an energetic advocate for the arts and one of the most charitable artists of his generation, he set up philanthropic organizations like Change, Inc., to aid artists in need.

Art, Rauschenberg once said, was a ``means to function thoroughly and passionately in a world that has a lot more to it than paint.''

His engagement with that world was complete.

(Linda Yablonsky is an art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer on this story: Linda Yablonsky at fabyab@earthlink.net.

Last Updated: May 13, 2008 12:17 EDT