His work was controversial and difficult to describe: music played on sculptures rather than instruments; photography collaged with paint and scribbled words; performance art pieces that blended postmodern dance with innovations in lighting and audio. He was a pioneer of 20th-century art, neither aligning himself with the era’s dominant abstract expressionism, nor fully in tune with the pop art movement he helped birth.
Robert “Bob” Rauschenberg would have turned 100 this month. Though he’s been gone for nearly two decades, his legacy threads through Southwest Florida, in a generation of artists influenced by his work, and friends, like Lawrence Voytek, who remember him as “an off-the-charts wild and crazy guy.”
Born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg on October 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg’s journey from refinery town boy to art-world iconoclast was marked by an affinity for bucking the rules. In 1953, he bought a sketch from looming abstract expressionism legend Willem de Kooning, then erased it and displayed the blank page in a gilded frame, titling the work Erased de Kooning Drawing. Some critics lambasted it as a mockery; others lauded it as the peak of 20th-century conceptual art. In 1966, he choreographed a performance art piece—on rollerskates—with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. The work was considered a revolution for the world of postmodern dance. His ‘Combines’—a word he invented to describe his assemblages of disparate items like stuffed chickens, shredded tires and newspaper clippings—defied traditional categories. Were they sculptures? Or paintings? Neither—and both.
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New York City (1981), courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
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Rauschenberg would have turned 100 on October 22. To mark the centennial, the foundation is breathing fresh energy into his legacy, with global tributes and a long-awaited revival of his artist residency campus on Captiva Island, closed since Hurricane Ian.
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Untitled [Mona Lisa] (1952), courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
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Religious Fluke (1962), courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
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Lilac Role [Anagram (A Pun)] (1997), courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
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When you speak with local artists, Rauschenberg’s influence emerges time and again. Cape Coral artist Martha De la Cruz blends media—video, sculpture, everyday objects—and says Rauschenberg inspired her to embrace playfulness over formality. Lawrence, a metal artist, felt artistically adrift. Then he met Rauschenberg, who channeled Lawrence’s energy into collaborative works like Stop Side Early Winter Glut, made from a stop sign and crumpled oil cans the pair found at a scrap yard. Through his work, collaborations and mere presence, Rauschenberg gave artists permission to follow an idea wherever it led, whether toward coherence or chaos.
Fort Myers sculptor Jud Nelson recalls the day in 1962 when he visited the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and stood before a 40-foot expanse of screen-printing. Using techniques borrowed from then-emerging artist Andy Warhol and completed in 24 hours, Rauschenberg’s Barge combined images of cars and trains with sporadic insects, caged animals, celebrities and nods to the Old Masters in a scramble of juxtaposition.
Jud, then an 18-year-old student artist, looked at Barge and felt vindicated. ‘This artist knows how to see the world as it is,’ he thought. In stark contrast to the interpretive, emotional styles of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Rauschenberg saw art as a presentation or extension of life, captured through found objects. Jud also subverted his era’s sculpture conventions, abandoning marble and metal human forms and chiseling Styrofoam into everyday objects—chairs, sunglasses, teabags—with mindbending realism. Their styles couldn’t be more different, but Rauschenberg’s influence on Jud remained indelible. When they met at Jud’s 2006 retrospective at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Florida SouthWestern State College, both had built careers teaching viewers to see as they did.
Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
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After two decades in New York, Rauschenberg purchased his Captiva Island home in 1968 and quickly established a reputation as a philanthropist, mentor and coveted dinner guest. He’d gather friends at his Captiva studio and hold court late into the night, talking about the environment, local charities and how getting the right piece of art in front of the right person just might lead to world peace. He was a gay man in a time and place of limited acceptance, yet he was universally loved by art-world elites and the neighborhood postman. His friendships with celebrities and wealthy collectors drew attention to the region’s burgeoning art market, bolstering local artists who would draw from his outlook.
Such was the case for Marcus Jansen, the region’s most famous resident artist since Rauschenberg, who recently relocated out of the area. As a teenager in the 1960s, Marcus stumbled across Rauschenberg’s work in a German train station. The grittiness reminded him of New York City street art. “I had never seen anything like that before,” he says. Marcus studied Rauschenberg’s work and developed his own style, with vibrant commentaries on culture and capitalism and assemblage works that blend everything from toy soldiers to post-hurricane debris.
To Marcus, Rauschenberg was “this huge 21st-century Picasso.” He never dreamed they would meet. Then, in 2004, the Gallery of Fine Art was rechristened as the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, and Marcus was invited to join the opening show.
Coin (Jammer) (1976), courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
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A forerunner of pop art, Rauschenberg lived on Captiva from 1970 until his passing in 2008. He pushed art beyond canvas and category, pioneering hybrid forms. His Combines—audacious layerings of stuffed animals, tires and scrap metal—were the original assemblage art. Monogram (below) remains the most recognized.
Rauschenberg—by then wheelchair bound—rolled through the gallery with a posse and waved for the group to stop in front of Marcus’ painting, Diary of a New Jack. “Oh!” Rauschenberg told the star-struck emerging artist. “You’re just in time.” It was a simple quip, but typical of Rauschenberg, who had a way of turning ordinary encounters into moments that felt fated.
Flautist Kat Epple remembers that day and how Rauschenberg embraced the artists of Southwest Florida. He’d done the same for her at a dinner party 15 years earlier. As the drinks flowed, Kat picked up her bottle of beer and started playing it like a flute. Her husband, Bob Stohl, grabbed a nearly empty bottle of wine as his instrument. Rauschenberg joined the improv, tapping chopsticks on bottles like a xylophone. A crowd gathered. “Our song ended with Bob exuberantly playing a dramatic final note [and] knocking over a bottle of red wine that spilled and splattered onto the bar and floor,” Kat says. “The audience applauded loudly.”
Rauschenberg loved the way Kat played a room like an instrument, and invited her and her husband to his Captiva studio. In their first visit, the couple tapped out a concert on a series of musical metal sculptures called Strategic Structures, designed with Lawrence Voytek (listen to the piece on katepple.com). Soon after, Kat, Lawrence and friend Laurence Getford joined forces as Sonic Combine, Rauschenberg’s studio ‘house band.’ This was peak Rauschenberg: nonconformist, collectivist, revolutionary.
Monogram (1955-1959)/Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
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This year, in honor of Rauschenberg’s 100th birthday, museums, galleries and artists worldwide are honoring his legacy. Bob Rauschenberg Gallery curator Jade Dellinger commissioned Steve Keene—a prolific, Brooklyn-based painter—to produce 100 original works inspired by Rauschenberg. The show is on display through December 6 at the Fort Myers gallery. And the foundation’s Captiva artist residency campus, closed since Hurricane Ian, is gearing up to reopen its programming within the year.
Jade never had the chance to meet the artist, but he does have an original Rauschenberg—with a classic Rauschenberg story. As a teenager in 1960s Land O’ Lakes, Florida, the curator read an article following Rauschenberg through a day on Captiva, describing his midday wake-up, walk to a beach bar and late nights in the studio. He decided to write a fan letter. “Instead of writing through his gatekeepers, I sent a letter to the Mucky Duck Neighborhood Pub,” he says. Jade enclosed a $10 bill and a postscript: ‘Let me buy you a drink.’
Weeks later, Jade’s parents called him to the door to sign for a special delivery: a long, thin metal tube. He popped it open and a lithographic poster slid into his hands. The piece, now worth thousands, had just returned from a show in China. It was inscribed with a handwritten note: ‘I’ll have that drink and wish you luck just before I go to work tonight. I’ve put a gift in your pocket.’
For Jade, the exchange was transformative, a stamp of approval that there was room for another small-town boy in the wider world of art. For years, his email signature included a favorite quote from Rauschenberg: “Fort Myers is as small as your mind is; it can be just as large as the world is.”
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Courtesy Kat Epple
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In Fort Myers, Rauschenberg found kindred spirits like flautist Kat Epple (pictured). He showed that boundary-pushing art could thrive far from New York—an ethos carried forward at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW, where programming channels his experimental spirit.
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Wet Flirt (Urban Bourbon) (1994), courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
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