Robert Rauschenberg’s Combine Paintings
By: Polina Rosewood
Tags: Painting, History, Art, Culture, Artist

Robert Rauschenberg’s Combine Paintings

Analyzing ‘Canyon,’ one of the artist’s most famous works.

Robert Rauschenberg, “Canyon,” 1959. Oil, pencil, paper, metal, photograph, fabric, wood, canvas, buttons,

mirror, taxidermied eagle, cardboard, pillow, paint tube and other materials. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Upon seeing Rauschenberg’s Canyon for the first time, I recall feeling both confused and revolted. As my fifteen-year-old eyes analyzed the piece, I couldn’t help but question the sanity of the artist. Why would a sound man taxidermy an eagle, fasten the stuffed bird to a pedestal and call it art? Why would he slap black and white paint across a canvas with no apparent intention? And how could he reproduce photographs that weren’t his own without committing copyright violations?

Temporarily loaned to the National Gallery of Art several years ago, Canyon was displayed alongside pieces by Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein and other prominent Pop artists in an exhibit dedicated to the movement. The show also included one of Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup silk screens, an artist and an image so well known to my generation for its obvious commercial reference and clean, graphic appearance; I could not fathom how Rauschenberg’s work could have achieved a similar level of prestige.

Amidst economic collapse and catastrophic devastation that wreaked havoc on Europe at the end of World War II, the United States miraculously emerged as a political and financially viable superpower. Industry boomed, resulting in the mass-production of in-demand commercial products, and pop culture entered American living rooms on new television sets. Society was setting the stage for the emergence of a new art movement.

According to Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, the Pop art movement “sought to harness the communicative power of art” through the reincorporation of symbols, metaphors and figurative imagery into an art form “grounded in consumer culture and the mass media.”

Pop artists emphasized and frequently incorporated iconographic images of commercial products, celebrities and prominent news events into their artwork to capture the visual experience of everyday life in post-World War II America. In congruence with the Pop Art agenda, Rauschenberg viewed himself as a journalist-artist whose duty was to communicate his reactions to current events through his artwork.

“I think of my activity more in relation to reporting than I do as something for an isolated elite,” he said.

Rauschenberg communicated his fascination with mass media in Canyon by incorporating printed images clipped from newspapers. These images were most likely recognizable to the contemporary viewer.

To create Canyon, Rauschenberg treated a box-like canvas (approx. 6’ 9” X 5’ 10” X 2’), using oil paint, printed paper, wood, metal, newspaper clippings and a mirror, and applied these materials in an expressive manor that reads as both arbitrary and intentional. A sheet of metal is fastened to the upper right corner of the canvas and various newspaper images are printed around its upper half. Naturally, Rauschenberg also added a few three-dimensional ready-made objects to the work: a pillow and a stuffed eagle.

Hiroko Ikegami recognized the recurring motif of stuffed birds in Rauschenberg’s work. Migration, Ikegami claimed, “forms a central theme and structure in Rauschenberg’s artistic production.”

Rauschenberg traveled frequently throughout his career, completing a world tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as a costume and set designer. He began working for the company in 1954 and was instructed by Cunningham to construct sets from “the existing circumstances and environment at the time of the performance.”

Rauschenberg translated his assemblage set design techniques into his independent artworks, developing the method of material collection known as arbitrary accumulation, which he used to create Canyon in 1954. The term refers to the process of gathering objects at random near one’s present location and using them to create a new work of art.

Fundamentally based on the idea of chance, the concept of arbitrary accumulation parallels in principle to the Dada movement. Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, father of the ready-made, became infamous for his piece Fountain, a repurposed porcelain urinal. Objects collected as a result of arbitrary accumulation are essentially ready-made. Because Rauschenberg’s innovations and overall aesthetic could be so closely tied to Dada, many contemporary art critics created a new category for him: Neo-Dada.

Rauschenberg earned this title because, like the artists responsible for the original Dada movement, he valued the randomness of the artistic process and the concept of the ready-made. Many of Rauschenberg’s works, specifically his Combines, were created using a compilation of random objects the artist collected.

A Combine can be defined as a work of art that is comprised of both two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements, and does not seek to exist as just painting or just sculpture. Branden W. Joseph explores the concept of the combine in Random Order.

“A Combine is not a fixed univocal arrangement or enchaining of signs…rather, a Combine is a multiplicity and each ‘reading’ is an actualization, a unique, contingent, and changeable act of reception.”

Rauschenberg’s signature aesthetic set him apart from his American contemporaries, especially on the global market.

“Rauschenberg’s update of the collage method in his combine technique, his free- use of ready-made objects, and the cross boundary nature of his art and performance…appealed to his overseas audience sometimes even more than his domestic audience.”

Rauschenberg’s combines, as stated by the artist himself, are supposed to be read as visual journalistic pieces; in other words, they are meant to capture and preserve the impression of a specific time and place. It cannot be discounted, however, that scholars have recognized Rauschenberg’s tendency to collect the same types of “arbitrary” objects repeatedly. Both stuffed birds and pillows are motifs that he has replicated in other works. Because of these persistent motifs, the validity of Rauschenberg’s reliance on pure chance is called into question.

Rembrandt Harmens Van Rhine, “The Abduction of Ganymede (Ganymede in the Claws of an Eagle)”. Oil on canvas. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Germany.

Kenneth Bendiner interprets Canyon as “a witty though faithful recreation of Rembrandt’s painting The [Abduction] of Ganymede.”

The painting depicts Zeus in the form of a black eagle holding the naked, screaming boy Ganymede in his beak by the arm. The imagery in Rauschenberg’s work, whether intentional or unintentional, clearly mimics the Rembrandt.

“Canyon takes its inspiration in part from a Rembrandt Ganymede that depicts an eagle pulling a heavy, bawling boy into the air, one who looks rather like the child in the snapshot in the Combine; the hanging bag evokes the boy’s buttocks.”

The snapshot to which Stevens refers is a photograph pasted on the left side of the canvas that depicts Rauschenberg’s son. The boy appears curious and extends one of his arms upward, mimicking the image of the Statue of Liberty placed next to him. The Liberty image could be a reference to the American dream or possibly the freedom of youth, but Brandon Joseph finds scrutinizing the meaning of Rauschenberg’s images to be futile.

“Searching for iconography is useless not because it cannot exist there but, because it can be made to exist anywhere.” Rauschenberg’s ambiguity and mastery of the printed image comes as no surprise; after all, he is a Pop artist.