Combine painting

American artist Frank Stella created a large body of paintings in the late 1950s that recall the Combines of Robert Rauschenberg.

"[6] They have also been called "ramshackle hybrids between painting and sculpture, stage prop and three-dimensional scrap-book assemblage" by The Guardian's critic Adrian Searle.

In The Art Newspaper, Simmons wrote, “To mention the overarching theme of this iteration of the Whitney Biennial as linked to Robert Rauschenberg’s legacy, for example, without breaking down his connection as a Texan and his probable viewing of the assemblages he must have seen by Black American artists—descendants of slavery—in the rural South is actually preposterous.

Early on, to support their artistic careers, they collaborated on commercial projects, such as window displays for upscale retailers including Tiffany's and Bonwit Teller in Manhattan.

In this regard the Combine paintings relate to the succeeding Pop art and the much earlier predecessor: the Dada Movement of the early 1900s.

"[12] Moira Roth links the Combines to Marcel Duchamp's attitude in art, saying that the perceived density of the content, and the integration of mass media elements is a facade born out of the alienation and indifference experienced by the artist during the McCarthy Period.

Jonathan Katz says that underneath the impersonal and inexpressive appearance of Rauschenberg’s art is a hidden homosexual code that can unlock some of the significance of the work.

[9] 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.

The historian Kenneth Bendiner famously proposed Canyon as a playful recreation of a 1635 Rembrandt painting depicting a scene from Greek mythology, The Rape of Ganymede.

[12] Other art historians, such as Branden Joseph, have argued that searching for iconography in Rauschenberg's Combines is useless because it can be made to exist anywhere.