Inlet, 1959

In the mid-1950s, Robert Rauschenberg began making Combines: artworks that merge elements of painting and sculpture yet defy the conventions of both mediums. For Inlet, he used paint to adhere found objects to the work’s
surface, turning the brushstroke from an expressive gesture associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s into a method of cohering parts into a whole. He also affixed paint can lids and a paint tube to the work, cleverly treating the tools of painting as sculptural objects, much as he invoked the still-life painting tradition—which often pictured hunting trophies—by including an actual taxidermied bird. By combining these references to painting and art history with everyday items he found on the streets of New York, Rauschenberg emphasized the inseparability not only of painting and sculpture, and of action and object, but also of modern art and modern life.