American Art Collaborative

“I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world,” Robert Rauschenberg once said, daring to carry the medium’s pursuit of realism through to its fullest expression. In the mid-1950s, true to this sentiment, he devised a genre of works he called “combines”—wall-mounted and freestanding hybrids of painting and assemblage. In Untitled, Rauschenberg incorporated characteristically mundane materials while obscuring their autobiographical significance. Affixed to the canvas is metal ductwork, the wired corner of a 1961 New York license plate, cloth, and printed paper. These materials are acknowledged in various ways: the distressed paint on the duct is echoed in the brushwork across the canvas, for example, and Rauschenberg created a thick red frame for the offset piece of license plate.