Review

“I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint.”, said Robert Rauschenberg. He is describing his ‘Combine Paintings’, of which Untitled is amongst the very earliest, that marked a major shift not just in the Abstract Expressionist that was the dominant movement of the day, but in the course of American Art. They bridged a gap between Abstract Expressionism and the soon emergent Pop Art, combining found imagery and pop culture objects with a saturation of thick, impasto paintwork and an openness to chance operations and randomness that allows for perceptual shifts in the work. As Rauschenberg developed this style of art-marking further, the images became more refined, clearer in their messages and ideologies. Yet here we see the beginnings of change, the first step towards a flattening of mediums where painting and sculpture became not separate practices but something combined.