Found on the Spit

When Robert Rauschenberg bought his first home on Captiva Island in 1970, he was already an international artistic star, famous for his radical combines that challenged the limits of painting. Yet, his move to this remote Florida barrier island was not a retirement, but a profound shift in his creative practice. Far from the dirty streets of Manhattan, Rauschenberg began incorporating the flotsam of the Gulf Coast into his work: discarded cardboard cartons, old rubber tires barnacled by the sea, and bleached mangrove roots. The island was a giant collage, where the sea was constantly depositing and reclaiming material, and he became its chief curator.

A new retrospective exhibition at the Fort Myers Art Center examines this fertile Florida period, showcasing seventy-five works produced in his Captiva studio. The exhibition highlights his use of light and transparent fabrics, which seem directly influenced by the humid air and shifting tides of Pine Island Sound. Rauschenberg’s works from this era have a light, breezy spaciousness that is very different from his claustrophobic New York collages. He seemed fascinated by the way the salt air corroded metal and dissolved paper, accepting this natural decay as an active participant in his artistic process.

The Captiva studio was also a sanctuary for a revolving community of artists, printmakers, and writers who came to work on his massive lithography press. Rauschenberg protected the island’s wild character, buying up adjacent parcels of land to save them from the condominium developers who were beginning to cover the coastline. To view his Florida works today is to see a landscape preserved in its most chaotic, natural state, before it was tamed by asphalt and sprinkler systems. His art is a document of a Captiva that was still a wild spit of sand, where everything was temporary and everything was art.