Robert Rauschenberg

Canyon is one of Rauschenberg’s Combines, the hybrid works incorporating painting, collage, and found objects that he began making in 1954. Rauschenberg often kept an eye out for curious items while walking the streets in downtown Manhattan, later taking “whatever the day would lay out” and using it toward artistic ends.

In 1959 he received a phone call from a friend, the artist Sari Dienes, who offered him a taxidermy eagle she had found among objects destined for the trash. Back in his studio, Rauschenberg set to work incorporating the bird into a canvas along with other nontraditional materials—the cuff of a men’s shirtsleeve, an industrial metal canister, a photograph of his young son, a pillow—all collaged among fabric and printed matter and covered with various kinds of paint.

“A pair of socks,” Rauschenberg declared of his Combines, “is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric.” By incorporating the stuff of the everyday world into painting, Rauschenberg challenged the heroic gestural painting of the Abstract Expressionist artists who had preceded him and asserted an openness to ordinary objects that would be widespread among later generations of artists.