SAND CASTLES: Rauschenberg takes two of his dogs for a walk on the beach on Captiva in 1984. The artist moved to the island in 1970 and began buying up properties, eventually becoming the island’s largest landowner.
TERRY VAN BRUNT/ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG FOUNDATION
I AM SITTING on a white beach as the sun sets over the Gulf of Mexico, watching a pod of dolphins play. Groups of wild birds stalk the tide line, eyeing the sand for small invertebrates. The beach stretches away for a mile and a half either side of me; behind me are a few private houses set among strangler figs and mango trees. This is Captiva Island, home to Robert Rauschenberg, one of the most successful American artists of the 20th century. Anyone can visit the island, yet staying at Rauschenberg’s residence is an opportunity few get to experience. I’m here because the Rauschenberg Foundation has invited me in the run-up to a major retrospective of the artist that begins at Tate Modern in London next month, before moving to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then to San Francisco.
Robert Rauschenberg, or Bob, as he liked to be called, arrived on Captiva, a flat, sandy island 20 miles south of Fort Myers on the western coast of Florida, in 1968. New York was on the verge of financial collapse, and his contemporaries in modern American art were all moving to off-center locations: Jasper Johns to the Caribbean, Sigmar Polke to Afghanistan, Donald Judd to Marfa, Texas. “Something in the 1960s was coming to an end,” Akim Borchardt-Hume, the director of exhibitions at Tate Modern, tells me. “Race riots, the death of Bobby Kennedy, the death of Martin Luther King, the death of Janis Joplin…. It was the end of an era of postwar Utopian optimism.” Captiva, beautiful and remote, felt to Rauschenberg like an idyllic alternative. It had “a magic that was unexplainable in its power,” the artist noted. He would live on the island for another 28 years, and it remained a profound influence on his art until his death in 2008.