Robert Rauschenberg, Dead at 82

A matter of hours after we stood at Sotheby’s enraptured by Robert Rauschenberg‘s “Embark [Anagrams],” the extraordinary 1995 vegetable dye transfer on paper that goes on the block Thursday morning, comes news that the 82-year-old artist has died of heart failure at his Florida home. We’ll remember the puckish Rauschenberg as a sparkly-eyed master who once told an interviewer that he had long stopped offering visitors to his home and studio gifts of his work, because he found it terribly depressing when they would inevitably depart having forgotten to take the pieces with them.