Combine painting

Robert Rauschenberg, Rhyme, 1956

Rauschenberg and his artist friend/flatmate 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.[6] They shared ideas about art as well as career strategies.[6] 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."[6] But they've also been called "ramshackle hybrids between painting and sculpture, stage prop and three-dimensional scrap-book assemblage" according to The Guardian's critic Adrian Searle.[6] 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."[6] 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).[2] Rauschenberg's works mostly incorporated two-dimensional materials held together with "splashes and drips of paint" with occasional 3-D objects.[2] Critic John Perreault wrote "The Combines are both painting and sculpture–or, some purists would say, neither."[2] Perreault liked them since they were memorable, photogenic, and could "stick in the mind" as well as "surprise and keep on surprising."[2] Rauschenberg added stuffed birds on his 1955 work Satellite, which featured a stuffed pheasant "patrolling its top edge."[7] In another work, he added a ladder. His Combine Broadcast, featuring three radios blaring at once,[3] was a "melange of paint, grids, newspaper clips and fabric snippets."[8] 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.[8] Rauschenberg's Bed had a pillow attached to a patchwork quilt with paint splashed over it.[3] The idea was to promote immediacy.[3]

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.[9]

In the early 1960s, Rauschenberg's Combines sold from $400 to $7,500.[3] But their value shot upwards. In 1999, the Museum of Modern Art, which had balked at buying Rauschenberg's work decades earlier, spent $12 million to buy his Factum II which the artist made in 1957.[10] Rauschenberg's Rebus was valued in 1991 at $7.3 million.[11] A three-panel work created in 1955 that takes its name from the Latin for a "puzzle of images and words",[12] it "builds a narrative from seemingly nonsensical sequences of found images and abstract elements," according to The New York Times.[7] MOMA bought Rebus in 2005.[12] Rauschenberg reportedly said that the images in Rebus jostle with each other "like pedestrians on a street."[12] Rauschenberg's Photograph, a Combine painting from 1959, was valued at $10.7 million by Sotheby's in 2008.[11] His work Bantam sold for $2.6 million in 2009.[13] In 2008, The New York Times' art critic Roberta Smith, who described Combines as "multimedia hybrids", wrote MOMA was "Rauschenberg Central" because it owned over 300 of his works.[7] The Whitney owned 60 Rauschenbergs.[7] In 2012, Canyon was donated to MoMA by the children of Ileana Sonnabend as part of an IRS settlement that valued the work at $65 million.[14]

Canyon, 1959 Combine: oil, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, cardboard box, printed paper, printed reproductions, photograph, wood, paint tube, and mirror on canvas with oil on bald eagle, string, and pillow Robert Rauschenberg 207.6 × 177.8 × 61 cm

Canyon, one of Rauschenberg's most recognizable Combines, has been the subject of art historical debate revolving around the validity of reading Rauschenberg's work iconographically. Historian Kenneth Bendiner famously proposed Canyon as a playful recreation of a 1635 Rembrandt painting depicting the abduction of Ganymede, interpreting the suspended pillow as Ganymede's buttocks and the stuffed bald eagle as the form assumed by the Greek god Zeus.[15] Other historians and critics, such as Joseph Branden have argued that searching for iconography in Rauschenberg's Combines is useless because it can be made to exist anywhere.[15] Bendiner's interpretation is discredited for failing to account for compositional movement and for disregarding a number of elements within the work, for example the blue and red text in the center, in order to mould the interpretation to it.

Interpretations of Rauschenberg's Combines vary from a deeply personal and subjective collage of expression (often homoerotic), to a surface of indecipherable, or rather infinitely cipher-able, materials which challenge notions of painting, sculpture, reception, and chance, to a multivalent iconographic landscape that seems to resist fixed decoding in favor of a more open-ended play of meaning. Rauschenberg himself states "I don't want a painting to be just an expression of my personality. I feel it ought to be much better than that … I’ve always felt as though, whatever I’ve used and whatever I’ve done, the method was always closer to a collaboration with materials than to any kind of conscious manipulation and control."[16]

Moira Roth links the Combines to Duchamp's indifferent attitude in art, arguing that the perceived density of the content, and the integration of mass media elements is a facade born out of the alienation and indifference experienced by the artist during the McCarthy Period. Jonathan Katz argues that underneath the impersonal and inexpressive appearance of his work is a secret homosexual code that can unlock some of the significance of Rauschenberg's work,[17] but Ed Krčma points out the weakness of steering the analysis towards preconceived conclusions, especially since Rauschenberg's work is described as a poetry of infinite possibilities.

More recent interpretations of Canyon reconsider the work in postmodern terms, claiming that the Combine works more like a human mind than a human eye; Fragmented scraps of images, news cutouts, found objects and paint interact in esoteric ways and more closely resemble a cerebral process than a 'traditional' image. Yve-Alain Bois calls the search for iconographic meaning in Rauschenberg's work misguided because it is too limiting. His art's "lack of center" is a statement in itself, and the infinite permutations of meaning that can result highlight the subjectivity of art reception that postmodernism explores.[18]

• Paul Kelpe