"Much critical commentary on Rauschenberg has focused on the so–called combine paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. These were the works––most notably, the horizontally disposed painting Monogram, sporting a stuffed Angora goat, and the vertically disposed painting Bed, incorporating a real quilt and pillow––that briefly earned Rauschenberg a reputation as something of an enfant terrible and as one of the leading exponents of a new post–Duchampian avant–garde. He was singled out in this way, along with Cage and Marcel Duchamp and the unlikely Jean Tinguely, in a widely read book by Calvin Tomkins published in 1968 under the title Ahead of the Game: Four Versions of the Avant–Garde. (6) Rauschenberg's more materially encumbered combine paintings came to be seen as effecting a radical restructuring of painting, with the work no longer functioning as formalized entity set in the viewer's line of sight to evoke a fictional pictorial space but rather as something much more literal and insistently materialized, a flat support to which objects, images, and paint were attached."
(Alex Potts)
Alex Potts, Reviewed work(s): Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo–Avant–Garde by Branden Joseph, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 167–170 (review consists of 4 pages), Published by: College Art Association.