Gallery 103

Working with a wide range of subjects, styles, materials, and techniques, Robert Rauschenberg has been called a forerunner of virtually every postwar movement since Abstract Expressionism. At the time that he began making art in the late 1940s, his belief that painting relates to both art and life presented a direct challenge to the prevalent modernist aesthetic. The celebrated Combines begun in the mid-1950s brought real-world images and objects into the realm of abstract painting and countered sanctioned divisions between painting and sculpture.

These works established the artist's ongoing dialogue between mediums, between the handmade and the readymade, and between the gestural brush stroke and the mechanically reproduced image. Jointly acquired by Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Barge (1963), a monumental work in black, white, and gray, incorporates many of the motifs that Rauschenberg used again and again in his 79 silkscreen paintings: the urban environment, athletes, space exploration and flight, modes of transportation, and examples from art history.