Combine Painting - Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg and his artist friend/flat mate Jasper Johns used to design window displays together for upscale retailers such as Tiffany's and Bonwit Teller in Manhattan before they became better established as artists. They shared ideas about art as well as career strategies. Paul Schimmel of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art described Rauschenberg's Combine paintings as "some of the most influential, poetic and revolutionary works in the history of American art." But they've also been called "ramshackle hybrids between painting and sculpture, stage prop and three-dimensional scrap-book assemblage" according to Guardian critic Adrian Searle. Searle believed the "different elements of the Combines have been described as having no more relation than the different stories that vie for attention on a newspaper page." Jasper Johns, as well, used similar techniques; in at least one painting, Johns attached a paintbrush right inside his painting.

Examples of Rauschenberg's Combine paintings include Bed (1955), Canyon (1959), and the free-standing Monogram (1955–1959). Rauschenberg's works mostly incorporated two-dimensional materials held together with "splashes and drips of paint" with occasional 3-D objects. Critic John Perreault wrote "The Combines are both painting and sculpture–or, some purists would say, neither." Perreault liked them since they were memorable, photogenic, and "stick in the mind" as well as "surprise and keep on surprising." Rauschenberg added stuffed birds on his 1955 work Satellite, which featured a stuffed pheasant "patrolling its top edge." In another work, he added a ladder. His Combine Broadcast, three radios blaring at once which was a "melange of paint, grids, newspaper clips and fabric snippets." According to one source, his Broadcast had three radios playing simultaneously, which produced a sort of irritating static, so that one of the work's owners, at one point, replaced the "noise" with tapes of actual programs when guests visited. Rauschenberg's The Bed had a pillow attached to a patchwork quilt with paint splashed over it. The idea was to promote immediacy.

The prevailing theme of Rauschenberg's "combine" paintings is "nonmeaning, the absurd, or antiart." In this regard the combine paintings relate to Pop art and their much earlier predecessor Dada.