Robert Rauschenberg, champion of junk art, dies aged 82

Robert Rauschenberg, the most versatile, inventive and iconoclastic American artist of the past 50 years, who would use anything from canvas to a stuffed goat or household junk for his creations, has died in Florida after a long illness, his gallery representative said. He was 82.

Rauschenberg first embraced painting when he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute in the late 1940s and later in Paris. But to call him a painter was an understatement. In his own words, he sought to operate "in the gap between art and life".

He painted, true – but he was also a sculptor, set designer and choreographer, working in whatever medium and on almost whatever object that came to hand.

Born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, and brought up as a Christian fundamentalist, Rauschenberg originally wanted to become a minister – but gave it up because his church banned dancing. "I was considered slow," he once said. "While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins."

But he soon discovered a talent for drawing and composition. By the mid-1950s he had created the "Combines" style that became the template for his career. It blended painting, sculpture and almost anything else that captured Rauschenberg's imagination. He would use car tyres, shirts, light bulbs – whatever came to hand – in the process, blurring the line between everyday life and art as few other artists of his era did.

Among his best-known works are Bed in 1955, that used his own pillow and bedspread wrapped around a wooden support, and Monogram in 1959, consisting of a stuffed Angora goat with a tyre around its mid-section and paint blobbed on its nose.

Early on, he made little public headway – mainly because few had the slightest idea what he was up to. But over the years, he became one of the country's best known and most influential artists, who never shrank from a challenge to art's established order.

In the 1960s, he began silk-screen paintings and then embarked on a period of more collaborative projects. In terms of art history, Rauschenberg was a leader of the reaction to abstract expressionism, according to an official biography at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

In 1997, the museum put on a retrospective of his work (including a collage painting a quarter-of-a-mile long).

Recognition extended further afield in 1964, when he became the first American artist to win top prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. Two decades later, Rauschenberg underlined his versatility by winning a Grammy Award for best album package, for Speaking in Tongues by Talking Heads.

In his book American Visions, the art critic Robert Hughes said Rauschenberg was a "protean genius" with a "richness of temperament" who showed Americans that every aspect of life was open to art. He "didn't give a fig for consistency", nor was he concerned about his reputation. "His taste was always facile, omnivorous, and hit-or-miss," wrote Mr Hughes.