Combine painting
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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] It's a three-panel work created in 1955 which 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
References
- ↑ Artspeak, Robert Atkins, 1990
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- ↑ New York Times October 24 2013 "“We are fortunate to have six Combines from the mid-’50s through 1961,” Ms. Temkin said, referring to the term Rauschenberg coined to describe works that incorporate castoff objects like tires, flatware or furniture."
- ↑ Unhappy Medium, Frank Stella and Kurt Schwitters by John Haber. Retrieved January 10, 2010.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Varieties of Visual Experience, Edmund Burke Feldman, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.; 3rd edition (March 1987), ISBN 978-0-8109-1735-4
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- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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