EVERYTHING IN SIGHT.(artist Robert Rauschenberg)(Interview)

Captiva and Sanibel, two small barrier islands off Florida's southwest coast near Fort Myers, caught the full force of last summer's Hurricane Charley. The Category 4 storm caused an estimated fourteen billion dollars in property damage on the islands, snapping coconut palms in half, flinging boats around like clamshells, and turning uprooted Australian pines into airborne missiles. Robert Rauschenberg, a full-time resident of Captiva since 1970 and the largest private landholder on the island, resisted leaving until Charley had roared through; he was then evacuated by helicopter, because conditions on the island had become unsafe, and he couldn't get back to his studio for three weeks.

All his properties--he owns ten houses there, in addition to a stretch of carefully preserved palmetto jungle--took a beating. The house that came through with the least damage, luckily, was the studio, which he and his companion, Darryl Pottorf, designed and built in 1993. The studio, a white bunkerlike building that overlooks the Gulf of Mexico--Rauschenberg once described it as "a cross between the Taj Mahal and the Pentagon"--has storage and workshop space for his assistants on the ground level and, on the second floor, a forty-by-eighty-foot room with six huge worktables, where Rauschenberg lays out the images that will become his paintings. Bob (nobody calls him anything else) was sitting beside one of the tables when I visited him last December. He was in a high office chair on wheels, chatting with Pottorf and one of his studio assistants while he watched a cooking show on TV. He'd had a run of medical misfortunes--a broken hip with internal complications in 2001, and a year later a head injury and a stroke that paralyzed his right side--but, as long as he stayed in the chair, Rauschenberg, who is seventy-nine, seemed improbably youthful.

Eight paintings from his new "Scenarios" series were hanging on the studio walls--large pictures, seven feet high by ten feet wide, with colorful images of exceptional clarity and crispness, and with more white space than you usually find in Rauschenberg's work. For several months after his stroke, he had been depressed and unable to work, but gradually the habits of a lifetime reasserted themselves, and a little more than a year ago he started the new series. I had seen a few of them the week before, at his studio in New York; they struck me as the strongest, most lyrical pictures he had produced in a long time.

The biggest change in the new paintings was that he had not taken the photographs reproduced in them. "I can't do that now, because of my arm," he said. His paralyzed right hand lay in his lap, cocked at a right angle to his wrist, the long, tapering fingers bent backward. "I get other people to take them for me." His tone was matter-of-fact.

I asked whether he directs the photographers. "Now and then," he replied. "I tell them, 'Don't do any selecting. And if you think something would be a bad shot, take it.' " (Wide smile and a short, high-pitched burst of laughter, from a man who appreciates his own humor.) Rauschenberg has been using photographic images as art material since the nineteen-fifties, and the current flood of photo-based art throughout the world is traceable in some part to his influence. Being unable to take his own photographs hurts, but not to the point of self-pity: "I can't stand myself or anyone else if they start whining. I just have to figure out ways to continue without getting so distraught I can't function."

The day nurse who looks after him came from the kitchen to see if he needed anything, and he indicated that he'd like his glass refilled--white wine and soda, which he likes in a big glass, "with too much ice." Czar, a docile white Samoyed, ambled over and flopped down by Rauschenberg's chair. I was thinking of a time twenty years ago, sitting with the artist, with three big dogs at our feet and a soap opera playing soundlessly on a TV. I'd always assumed that TV was something he watched without really watching, a flow of images that might feed into the endlessly replenished visual storehouse he draws upon for his work. That morning, though, looking at a man and a tearful young woman on the screen, he nodded sagely and said, "He's married to her, but he doesn't know it yet, because he has amnesia." It reminded me of something he'd told the critic Dore Ashton several years earlier: "I have a peculiar kind of focus. I tend to see everything in sight."

While he went to the bathroom, using a wheeled walker and attended by the nurse, I took a closer look at the paintings. Many of the images had the Rauschenbergian look of something ordinary seen in a new way--a multicolored umbrella, a bicycle, urban detritus, street signs or crudely lettered advertisements ("Pappy's Parking"), discarded tires, run-down houses, trucks and cars and people walking--but instead of brushing against each other or overlapping, most of the images existed in a separate, clearly defined space. In one painting, a photograph filled the upper right quadrant; it showed a group of young men and women in bathing suits, lying or standing on large rocks near water, in front of a concrete wall on which someone had painted the word "remove" in big orange letters. The bathers coexisted with other images--a rusted manhole cover, an industrial pipe with gauges and dials attached, the rainbow-hued beach umbrella--working ...