Port Arthur native Robert Rauschenberg spent the last hours of his life in the very place he had wished.
"When I die, I don't want to go anywhere. I just want to work in my studio," said the internationally known pop artist at a news conference in 2005 in Lafayette, La., where he had an exhibition dedicated to his late mother, Dora.
With his only sister, Janet Begneaud, by his side, the artist known to many as the Pope of Pop, for his kindness and optimism, died of heart failure at 10:53 p.m. Monday in his studio on Captiva Island at the age of 82. At the artist's behest, his ashes will be spread on the beach in front of that studio Sunday with only his family and loyal staff members present, said Byron Begneaud, Rauschenberg's brother-in-law of 52 years. Memorial services are being planned for New York and Florida at a later date, as yet undecided, Begneaud, Janet's husband, said.
"He and Janet had a special bond," said Begneaud, speaking with soft R's and a slight drawl by phone from Lafayette. "Janet's been holding his hand for about six weeks. He had been in intensive care, but they moved him to his studio and cleared a path for him to see the bay."
Rauschenberg spent most of his life near the ocean, including many years in New York. But it started in Port Arthur, where he was born in 1925, at Gates Hospital. Rauschenberg often talked about his humble beginnings in Southeast Texas. His family, like many other American families, fell on hard times during the Depression, but using their wits, his family scraped by. In the Rauschenberg household, nothing went to waste. His mother used to sew remnants of fabric together to make clothes for the family. In an interview with the New York Times, Rauschenberg admitted his mother went so far as to make a skirt out of the back of the suit that her brother was buried in because she didn't want the fabric to go to waste. It was that culture of transforming trash into treasure that ultimately made Rauschenberg a star. He preferred to create his pieces out of second-hand store finds, items he found in the street and in trash bins and objects he had on hand, versus canvases or anything store-bought.
Raised in a fundamentalist Christian home by parents Dora and Ernest, he left Port Arthur and the idea that he might become a minister, to attend college in Austin in 1943. But he was expelled within a semester because he had trouble reading.
"Milton was not a scholar," remembered Dovie Horton, a member of Thomas Jefferson High School's Class of '43. "I later found out he was dyslexic."
Rauschenberg said he was "spared the shame" of returning home from college when he received a letter from the draft board. The U.S. Navy trained him to be a neuropsychiatric technician. He was to bathe and wrap corpses.
"No, I was not forced to fight. What I saw was much worse," Rauschenberg said in the Lafayette press conference. "I got to see, every day, what war did to the young men who barely survived it. I was in the repair business."
After the war, the young man, still known as Milton, hitchhiked home to Port Arthur only to find his family had moved to Lafayette.
"Janet wasn't there in Lafayette very long before she was named Sweet Potato Queen. She was a beauty and Milton was always sweet and gentle," Horton said.
And Milton wasn't there long before he left for art school and renamed himself "Bob."
"When people got to know me better and just assumed that I had some dignity, it became Robert then. So now I'm known as either Robert or Bob," he said.
Reinvention was the hallmark of his career. He worked in every medium---in theater, dance and even engineering, he created set designs, lighting designs and costumes while reinventing what the entire world thought of as art. Rauschenberg attributed much of what he learned about creating and reinventing to his time spent at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He collaborated with art world giants Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline and Josef Albers; dancer Merce Cunningham; and musician John Cage.
In 1953, he moved to New York City, where he met aspiring artist Jasper Johns and designed window displays for Tiffany's to make ends meet while exploring the New York art scene. Their work in the 1950s would become the link between abstract expressionism, which dominated the art world in the '50s, and pop art of the 1960s, and is still influencing artists today.
Rauschenberg became the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964, a prestigious contemporary art exhibition. (Mark Tobey and James Whistler previously had won the Painting Prize.)
Amid fame, he did not forget his hometown, visiting several times in the '80s and '90s for benefits for Lamar State College-Port Arthur and the Museum of the Gulf Coast.
"He was a very generous person," said Sam Monroe, president of both LSC-Port Arthur and the Port Arthur Historical Society. "He liked people. He met people. He showed interest in everybody."
In a previous interview, celebrated photographer and Beaumont native Keith Carter of Lamar University agreed. "His approach influenced everybody in my generation," Carter said.
Donna Meeks, chair of the Lamar University art department, puts Rauschenberg in the same league as Picasso and Duchamp. "He is one of the three most significant artists in the 20th century," she said. "I don't think artists today work without knowledge of Rauschenberg."
Rauschenberg is survived by a son, Christopher, 56, a Portland, Ore.-based artist and photographer.
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