Combine painting

The artwork «Buksa mi» (my pants) by the Norwegian artist Bjørn Krogstad, from 1968, an example of combine painting

A combine painting is an artwork that incorporates various objects into a painted canvas surface, creating a sort of hybrid between painting and sculpture.^[1][2][3] Items attached to paintings might include photographic images, clothing, newspaper clippings, ephemera or any number of three-dimensional objects. The term is most closely associated with the artwork of American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) who coined the phrase^[4] to describe his own creations. Rauschenberg’s Combines explored the blurry boundaries between art and the everyday world. In addition, his cross-medium creations challenged the doctrine of medium specificity mentioned by modernist art critic Clement Greenberg. Frank Stella created a large body of paintings that recall the combine paintings of Robert Rauschenberg by juxtaposing a wide variety of surface and material in each work ultimately leading to Stella's sculpture and architecture of the 21st century.^[5]

Rauschenberg

Rauschenberg and his artist friend/flat mate Jasper Johns used to design window displays together for upscale retailers such as Tiffany's and Bonwit Teller in Manhattan before they became better established as artists.^[6] They shared ideas about art as well as career strategies.^[6] Paul Schimmel of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art described Rauschenberg's Combine paintings as "some of the most influential, poetic and revolutionary works in the history of American art."^[6] But they've also been called "ramshackle hybrids between painting and sculpture, stage prop and three-dimensional scrap-book assemblage" according to Guardian critic Adrian Searle.^[6] Searle believed the "different elements of the Combines have been described as having no more relation than the different stories that vie for attention on a newspaper page."^[6] Jasper Johns, as well, used similar techniques; in at least one painting, Johns attached a paintbrush right inside his painting.

Examples of Rauschenberg's Combine paintings include Bed (1955), Canyon (1959), and the free-standing Monogram (1955–1959).^[2] Rauschenberg's works mostly incorporated two-dimensional materials held together with "splashes and drips of paint" with occasional 3-D objects.^[2] Critic John Perreault wrote "The Combines are both painting and sculpture–or, some purists would say, neither."^[2] Perreault liked them since they were memorable, photogenic, and could "stick in the mind" as well as "surprise and keep on surprising."^[2] Rauschenberg added stuffed birds on his 1955 work Satellite, which featured a stuffed pheasant "patrolling its top edge."^[7] In another work, he added a ladder. His Combine Broadcast, featuring three radios blaring at once,^[3] was a "melange of paint, grids, newspaper clips and fabric snippets."^[8] According to one source, his Broadcast had three radios playing simultaneously, which produced a sort of irritating static, so that one of the work's owners, at one point, replaced the "noise" with tapes of actual programs when guests visited.^[8] Rauschenberg's The Bed had a pillow attached to a patchwork quilt with paint splashed over it.^[3] The idea was to promote immediacy.^[3]

The prevailing theme of Rauschenberg's "combine" paintings is "nonmeaning, the absurd, or antiart." In this regard the combine paintings relate to Pop art and their much earlier predecessor Dada.^[9]

Exponential increase in value

In the early 1960s, Rauschenberg's Combines sold from $400 to $7,500.^[3] But their value shot upwards. In 1999, the Museum of Modern Art, which had balked at buying Rauschenberg's work decades earlier, spent $12 million to buy his Factum II which the artist made in 1957.^[10] Rauschenberg's Rebus was valued in 1991 at $7.3 million.^[11] A three-panel work created in 1955 that takes its name from the Latin for a "puzzle of images and words",^[12] it "builds a narrative from seemingly nonsensical sequences of found images and abstract elements," according to The New York Times.^[7] MOMA bought Rebus in 2005.^[12] Rauschenberg reportedly said that the images in Rebus jostle with each other "like pedestrians on a street."^[12] Rauschenberg's Photograph, a Combine painting from 1959, was valued at $10.7 million by Sotheby's in 2008.^[11] His work Bantam sold for $2.6 million in 2009.^[13] In 2008, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, who described Combines as "multimedia hybrids", wrote MOMA was "Rauschenberg Central" because it owned over 300 of his works.^[7] The Whitney owned 60 Rauschenbergs.^[7] In 2012, Canyon was donated to MoMA by the children of Ileana Sonnabend as part of an IRS settlement that valued the work at $65 million.^[14]

See also

• Paul Kelpe

References