Untitled

No body of work did more to redraw the boundaries of postwar art than Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines. Begun in 1954, the series gathered paint and found material, including fabric, printed paper, metal and the discarded things of the street, onto a single surface that was neither quite painting nor quite sculpture. In Untitled, Rauschenberg’s layering of used mailing envelopes extends the logic of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades and draws on the Dadaists’ appreciation of the beauty hidden in rejected materials. Stained with oil and speckled with debris, Rauschenberg does nothing to transform the envelopes themselves into fine art, opting instead the artfulness in his manipulation of the material to speak for itself: each envelope is laid down such that every torn edge and crease creates a sense of line and adds dimension to the work. Large swaths of white paint create a border of gestural brushstrokes around the canvas, a visual element reminiscent of the prevailing Abstract Expressionist style of the time.

In a statement for which he is now famous, the artist said, “painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two” (quoted in M. L. Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life, New York, 1990, p. 89). That gap was filled, increasingly, with the imagery of everyday American life. In 1958, Rauschenberg began lifting newspaper and magazine images onto paper with solvent, repeating, distorting and sometimes inverting them in his transfer drawings. Traces of this practice can be found in the present work’s stamp of Abraham Lincoln tucked in the lower right corner. By letting the iconic American figure enters the work subtly yet directly, Rauschenberg anticipated the fervor of Pop Art that would overtake the 1960s. Created in this fertile period for the artist, Untitled carries the series’ central proposition: art need not stand apart from life.