Artist Robert Rauschenberg Dies at 82

Artist Robert Rauschenberg has died at the age of 82. He was an abstract artist in which he painted and sculpted. The artist born in Texas in 1925 also worked with photography, print and papermaking.

He's well known for creating paintings using material outside the traditional artist. He made his way into art history when he devised the "combines." Combines are the art of finding and creating combinations in a three-dimensional piece. Often times he would take pieces the general person would classify as trash and turn them into works. In 1958, he began to move from paintings to drawings, where he created one of his famous pieces called the "Erased de Kooning."

Perhaps Rauschenberg is known for his 1959 piece, "Monogram." It consisted of a tennis ball, a goat, a heel of a shoe, police tape and paint.

His most famous piece is a simple bed quilt he painted on with paint, fingernail polish, and oddly enough toothpaste. Rauschenberg woke up one morning and wanted to create. However, he didn't have the money to buy a canvas to work on. So he took the quilt off his bed and created a piece of history.

Remarkably, as the pop art era evolved throughout the 60s, he took two dimension art to the next step. He would take popular images and put them onto a canvas. Then he would place brushstrokes over top of the images. While at a distance they look simple abstract pieces. However, once you get up closer you can see the image and almost see as if the strokes flow and converse with one another. This very popular form of his art was a combination of his love for the "combines" he once created and his love for painting.

This form of art Robert Rauschenberg did was what he liked to call "the gap between life and art." The quote became just one of his many famous quotes.

Through the next decade he continued the form of art and placed them onto other objects and different surfaces.

His work over the years has been recognized in several ways. In 1966, he and another started the organization Experiments in Art and Technology that was to promote artists and engineers working together.