So does John F. Kennedy's raised finger, pointing unforgettably out from another. The black paintings of the 1950s rip collage to shreds. His famous Erased de Kooning preserves everything from de Kooning but the result. The older man supplied a drawing, but Rauschenberg makes it a collaboration. Where de Kooning's hand sweeps, so does Rauschenberg's, but with the blunt end of the pencil.
Broad gesture remains, but it annihilates itself.
Another early work looks like a Joseph Cornell box, but with nothing inside. Silkscreens amount to rebuses that spell nothing, like a broken allegory . One painting, Rebus , makes the riddle explicit, as if art and language are themselves exhausted. Already his combine paintings had displayed the brutal traces of its death. In Bed he overlaid collage with blood red .