Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Poetic and lush, Robert Rauschenberg's Combines present layers of complex and sometimes conflicting information. This approach, first explored by Rauschenberg in the early 1950s, proved prescient and has become increasingly relevant in the current age of cascading information, when even the most ground-breaking artists are referencing and sampling disparate elements to create new forms. The Combines suggest the fragility of definitions, the fluidity of materials and the complexity of forms that are characteristic of Rauschenberg's works. The artist's handling of materials provides a precise physical evolutionary link between the painterly qualities of Abstract Expressionism and iconographical, subject-driven early Pop art. This book focuses on the works created roughly between 1954 and 1964, the most important decade in the artist's 50-year career, and constitutes the most complete survey of the Combines ever presented, as well as the most rigorous analysis of their political, social, autobiographical and aesthetic significance. An introductory essay by exhibition curator Paul Schimmel titled "Reading Rauschenberg" offers an iconographic analysis of the earlier Combines , based on in-depth conversations with the artist. Other texts help to contextualize the Combines , such as Thomas Crow's essay that calls them the major artistic statement of their time, and the one body of art that could simultaneously hold its own from de Kooning to Pop art.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) is a key figure in the ascendance of American art during the decades following World War II. Rauschenberg's early combinations of paint and found objects (labeled combines by the artist) would help propel him into the ranks of the most important international artists of the 1950s and 1960s. This catalog accompanies an exhibition traveling internationally through 2007. While the exhibition includes 67 works, the catalog assembles 174, and represents the first complete survey of Rauschenberg's combines. The four accompanying essays focus on the combines and contextualize them across the decade of their creation (1953-64). The full inventory and exhibition histories of the combines are invaluable, as is the selected bibliography, but it is the beautiful full-color, full-page reproductions that rightly take center stage. This is the most substantial and important exhibition catalog devoted to Rauschenberg since his Guggenheim retrospective of 1999. Recommended for all libraries that collect American and contemporary art.-- Kraig Binkowski, Yale Ctr. for British Art Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

Published as an exhibition catalog for Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art, this is much more: it is a major scholarly work contributing substantial insight into artwork critical to the development of postmodernism. Rauschenberg's importance to contemporary art is well documented by many significant publications, most recently Mary Lynn Kotz's Rauschenberg: Art and Life (new ed., CH, Jun'05, 42-5666). Schimmel offers the first exploration of Rauschenberg's work in key years 1953-64. He not only presents the 70 combines in the exhibition but illustrates an additional 100 pieces, all extant works identified as combines by the Rauschenberg Studio. Four major essays by longtime Rauschenberg scholars explore specific aspects of the combines in depth and with punctilious research. Knitting these diverse scholarly essays together is the keen sense readers get of the artistic context in which Rauschenberg worked. One cannot escape the conclusion that this was a momentous time in American art. This large-format, beautifully designed book with 170 outstanding color plates and numerous other figures is made more useful by its inventory and the exhibition histories of the combines. This is an important contribution on a major artist; the essays, highly specialized, are dense and demanding reading. A significant addition to Rauschenberg literature. Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students through professionals. Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty; Professionals/Practitioners. Reviewed by J. A. Day.