Combine painting

A combine painting or Combine is an artwork that incorporates elements of both painting and sculpture. Items attached to paintings might include three-dimensional everyday objects such as clothing or furniture, as well as printed matter including photographs or newspaper clippings. The term is most closely associated with the artwork of American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) who coined the phrase Combine to describe his own artworks that explore the boundary between art and the everyday world. By placing them in the context of art, he endowed a new significance to ordinary objects. These cross-medium creations challenged the doctrine of medium specificity mentioned by modernist art critic Clement Greenberg. American artist Frank Stella created a large body of paintings in the late 1950s that recall the Combines of Robert Rauschenberg. In these works, Stella juxtaposed a wide variety of surfaces and materials, a process which led to Stella's later sculpture of the 21st century. The reception of Rauschenberg’s Combines has been varied throughout their history. Paul Schimmel of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art described Rauschenberg's Combine paintings as "some of the most influential, poetic and revolutionary works in the history of American art." They have also been called "ramshackle hybrids between painting and sculpture, stage prop and three-dimensional scrap-book assemblage" by The Guardians critic Adrian Searle. In reviews of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, critics highlighted Robert Rauschenberg as precedent for many of the contemporary artworks included. Artist Xaviera Simmons, however, pointed out that these critics did not go far enough to look into Rauschenberg's own precedents; she pointed to African American artists working with found objects in the Southern United States — a likely example for Rauschenberg who was raised in Port Arthur, Texas.