Robert Rauschenberg was fascinating. His work was always intriguing and interesting. Often unsettling, with it's ability to provoke with the common place.

My father was also born in Port Arthur in 1925 and was only a few months older than him. Although I don't they they knew each other very well, oddly enough, my father used to work with his father at Gulf Oil Refinery many years ago.

The cranky reviews filter in.

Destructive enfant terrible or creative genius? Does erasing de Kooning cement your position?

"I wasn't working against anything," he said of his early career. "People tried to insist that Jasper Johns and I did the kind of work we did because we were against abstract expressionism. But I used Vermeer, Leonardo, Ben Shahn, anything in history. If you need it, it's what you do. I've never accepted the aesthetic limitation of doing something to the exclusion of something else. That's negative, there's no energy there. I just backed off from abstract expressionism because they had their space and I didn't feel at home in it."

Last January, a friend of mine went to pick up an old pump organ that someone was giving away. My friend's wife wanted the pump organ, and he needed both help and a pickup truck, so I went with him to Evansville (45 miles) to bring it back.

I forgot to bring tie-down straps or bungee cords, but it seemed to ride okay, so we headed off, drove slow, and thought, if it doesn't ride well, we'll stop and get some straps. It did fine, most of the morning, for we stopped at a health food store and a used bookstore, but as we readied to leave town, I made a quick left hand turn, at a very busy intersection, and the organ rolled off the side of the truck and smashed in the street. I shattered. It was very awkward, and he and I were laughing as we scrambled to picked up all the pieces as cars waited.

He was very pleased, because he thought it was not in favor of having it in the house. We could not figure out what to do with it in Evansville, so we drove home with it. A friend of mine who is a potter and painter said she wanted it so she could use it to enter in a contest for recycled art. It is a wonderful piece of art which won first place in the competition. She used the keyboard, and various broken parts of the organ, along with discarded, yellowed sheet music written in German, and made the whole thing look like a large door, which she called "The Door".

The chief judge called it an homage to Rauschenberg, which it wasn't, but after examining some of his work, I can see how he saw it.

Saw this a few days ago and have been meaning to tell my wife Mel. He has been a huge influence on her work - perhaps the biggest (and knowingly).

Matt