Canyon (1959)

Robert Rauschenberg, American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement.
Rauschenberg experimented with the use of newspaper and magazine photographs in his paintings, devising a process using solvent to transfer images directly onto the canvas. About 1962 he borrowed from Andy Warhol the silk-screen stencil technique for applying photographic images to large expanses of canvas, reinforcing the images and unifying them compositionally with broad strokes of paint reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist brushwork. These works draw on themes from modern American history and popular culture and are notable for their sophisticated compositions and the spatial relations of the objects depicted in them. During this period his painting became more purely graphic (e.g., Bicycle [1963]) than the earlier combines. By the 1970s, however, he had turned to prints on silk, cotton, and cheesecloth, as well as to three-dimensional constructions of cloth, paper, and bamboo in an Oriental manner.

Critics originally viewed the Combines in terms of the formal aspects of art, shape, color, texture, and the composition and arrangement of these. This 1960's view has changed over time so that more recently critics and art historians see the Combines as carrying codified messages difficult to decipher because there is no apparent order to the presentation of the objects.