Monogram (artwork)

Rauschenberg created a series of combines between 1954 and 1964, where he merged different aspects of painting and sculpture to create a new artistic category. The artist first saw the stuffed Angora goat in the window of a secondhand furniture store at Seventh Avenue in New York. He took interest in the object and bought it for 15 dollars. Rauschenberg brought it to his studio and would work on this work during the next five years, during which it evolved into three different forms, documented by several studies and photographs, before the final result. The title came from the result of the union of the goat and the tire, which reminded the artist of the letters in a monogram.[5]

The work is often taken as what Kenneth Bendiner described as a ‘a specific re-working’ of the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat.[4]

Art critic Catherine Craft said on the work: “Not surprisingly, Monogram shocked contemporary viewers. Still, there is also a strangely poignant beauty to its acquiescent, eternally patient goat. Some observers have associated it with an animal awaiting sacrifice. Nevertheless, with its horns and long, shimmering coat it also recalls the [series of hanging “fetish” assemblages of animal fur, rope, wood and various small objects] Feticci Personali Rauschenberg made in Italy."[6]