Less Than the Sum of His Parts
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Robert Rauschenberg has made a career out of undermining, dodging, and challenging the notions of meaning and aesthetics in art. His anti-art oeuvre is among the most influential of the last 50 years, as responsible as that of Warhol or Duchamp for the contemporary Dadaist antics, Pop-art banalities, and sprawling, anything goes messes that can be seen in many galleries and museums.
He is also to blame, in part, for art that is solely about reaction, confusion, nihilism, or reduction – art that couldn’t give a damn. His prolific and experimental oeuvre, full of posturing and clever fakery, is one of the great cons of the 20th century.
“Robert Rauschenberg: Combines,” an exhibition of 67 three-dimensional constructions and bas-relief collages, or “Combines,” made between 1954 and 1964, currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, brings together the artist’s signature works that early on established his reputation. The show also puts a lot of the contemporary anti-art junk out there in historical context. For these reasons and these reasons alone it is of significance as an exhibition. In terms of aesthetic merit – well, Mr. Rauschenberg appears to be disinterested in aesthetic merit, so the exhibition is fairly useless.
Mr. Rauschenberg’s style is one of appropriation – splicing and collaging random imagery, color, and objects. Yet nothing in his bag of tricks is particularly original or even personal. His mark is borrowed from the Abstract Expressionists; his approach to making things is borrowed from Cubist collage and the masterful constructions of Joseph Cornell; his materials are borrowed from the junkyard, the taxidermist, the comic strip, and the street; and his structure (most often based on the grid) is borrowed from any number of art-historical sources. In Mr. Rauschenberg’s hands, all of these borrowings are made colorless and muddled; mute and lifeless.
Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Combines” are well known for their strange juxtapositions: in “Bed” (1955), a quilt, pillow, and paint; in “The Tower” (1957), an umbrella, broom, sawhorse, and electric lights; in “Canyon” (1959), metal, paint, printed reproductions, a mirror, a pillow, and a stuffed bald eagle; in “Monogram” (1955-59), paint, printed reproductions, a tennis ball, a rubber tire, and a stuffed Angora goat; in “Pantomime” (1961), a painting and two electric fans. All these are included in the Met’s exhibition.
The problem with Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Combines” is not with their materials (art can be made of anything) but with his approach. Mr. Rauschenberg’s art is a faithless art that relies not on drawing or color or metaphor or rhythm to give the works punch, power, and life. Rather, his approach is glib, distant, and accidental. He relies on the chance power of the meaningless juxtapositions of disparate objects and images.
Occasionally, you can sense that Mr. Rauschenberg, almost against his better judgment, is seduced by color or texture or metaphoric possibility; that he, like Picasso, Braque, and Cornell, takes pleasure in the discovery of his materials. But in the end – either because of his own lack of talent or his own disdain for composition – his in souciance always wins out.
Because there is no real order to discern in the “Combines,” the artist is free both of the obligation of intent and the pitfalls of failure. The dated, pseudo-Abstract Expressionist packages, in which the works are wrapped, could just as well be Social Realist or Impressionist, for they merely mock the art of their time rather than embrace, extend, or believe in it.
Too often, the experience of a Rauschenberg “combine” is one of numerous banal forces working against one another, canceling one another out. In “Pilgrim” (1960), a lifeless abstract painting (a parody of Abstract Expressionism) is combined with a mundane wood chair, which sits on the floor, and is pushed up against and attached to the canvas. The painted forms on the canvas continue onto the back and seat of the chair. The combined banal elements together become not exponentially but just plain more banal.
The best experiences in Rauschenberg’s “Combines” happen in spite of the artist not because of him; when objects can be seen and appreciated as existing separate from the work. In “Trophy III (for Jean Tinguely)” (1961), an old, eight-foot-tall, carved wood frame on which are hung a cloth, bed springs, a metal ladder, and a fuse box, among other things, the frame’s carving and the circular rhythm of bed springs, seen relatively unaltered, can be valued by themselves.
This show also marks the Met’s recent acquisition – jointly with the collector Steven A. Cohen – of the combine “Winter Pool” (1959), the first Rauschenberg painting to enter the museum’s collection. “Winter Pool” consists of two vertical canvases – separated and held together by a wooden ladder – on which the artist has painted mostly rectangles and to which he has attached metal, cloth, sandpaper, printed reproductions, a found painting, and handheld bellows, among other things.
“Winter Pool,” like so many of Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Combines,” is at first arresting, even startling, for its unusual combination of elements. But the spark fizzles out very, very quickly. “Winter Pool” becomes, if anything, a one-note gag on the triptych or on the fact that you may need a ladder to hang works of art.
Looking at “Winter Pool,” I was reminded of the works of the masterful Uruguayan Constructivist Joaquin Torres-Garcia, who also uses images of ladders in his compositions. But, whereas Torres-Garcia’s ladders are rich, full metaphors exploring the relationship of part to part – of constructing, ascending, and extending life, art, and culture – the ladder in “Winter Pool” is nothing more than an old ladder. It, like the other forms in the work, goes nowhere. It closes the painting down.
The purchase of “Winter Pool,” for which the Metropolitan paid an estimated $15 million,is only half as ridiculous as the Museum of Modern Art’s recent acquisition of “Rebus” (1955), for which they paid an estimated $30 million. Together, they equal the cost of last year’s Duccio, but I have yet to see any art-world eyebrows raised in anything but approval.
The Met’s exhibition (indeed Mr. Rauschenberg’s entire oeuvre) is backed by lengthy catalog essays that interpret, canonize, and extol nearly every aspect of the artist’s work. The truth is, though, as this large exhibition demonstrates, it does not matter whether or not Mr. Rauschenberg’s “combines” are coded or ambivalent; innovative or derivative; influential, transgressive, or subversive. It does not matter how much they challenge, mock, or blur the boundaries between traditional painting and sculpture, art and life, popular and high culture. The works do not hold up as paintings, sculptures, or a combination of the two.
As they say, the proof is in the pudding; and when all is said and done, the “Combines” are merely boring, academic, and cumbersome, often ugly, works of art.
Until April 2 (1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).