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There was seldom enough money to buy proper materials, so Rauschenberg used improper ones. Blueprint paper in wide sheets cost $1.75 a roll; he and Susan Weil (they were married in 1950, and their son Christopher was born the following year) spread the stuff out on the floor of their apartment, strewed it with pattern-objects like fishnets and doilies, and one lay down naked on it while the other went over the paper with a portable sun lamp, making giant prints. Only one of the works survives: the blue roentgen ghost of a nude, eerily transparent. Later, Rauschenberg put a similar motif—a sectional X ray of his own body—in the largest and most spectacular of his lithographs, Booster, 1967.
In these blueprints, two themes of his mature art appeared. The first was collaboration: he worked with his wife on them, as he would work with others in theater, dance and printing. "Ideas aren't real estate; they grow collectively, and that knocks out the egotistical loneliness that generally infects art."
The second, equally important, was the idea that a painting's surface was an impartial collector of images. Anything could be dropped on the blueprints and leave its mark. Soon afterward, Rauschenberg made grass paintings—bundles of soil and plant matter held together with chicken wire, from which seedlings sprouted. (The last of these modest forerunners of earth art perished of cold and thirst in his loft down by the Fulton Street docks in 1954.) The results of this clownish exercise, as it looked then, would be of capital importance to modern art.
By now Rauschenberg was living in the middle of a junk-crammed environment—Manhattan—a place that every week threw away more artifacts than were made in a year in 18th century Paris. An afternoon's stroll could furnish him with a complete "palette" of things to make art with: cardboard cartons, striped police barriers, sea tar, a stuffed bird, a broken umbrella, a shaving mirror, grimy postcards. These relics were sorted out in his studio, glued to surfaces, punctuated with slathers of paint. They emerged as large-scale collages, to which Rauschenberg gave the name combines. At first they were relatively flat. Collection was almost an orthodox collage: layers of souvenir-like junk half-effaced by swaths and spatters of bright red paint. (Rauschenberg liked color to have the same "given" quality as a found object; discovering some unlabeled cans of house paint on sale for 50 each, he opened them and painted with whatever color he found inside.)
Of course, the roots of Rauschenberg's combines are fixed in the history of collage and particularly in the work of the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. Rauschenberg remembers being "amazed" by the Schwitters collages he saw at the Museum of Modern Art, and he was particularly influenced by the way they were composed on a horizontal-vertical grid. "He wasn't using diagonals. I hate diagonals!" The effect shows in works like Rebus. 1955—a curiously fugitive image despite its size, full of airy space and images of flight: the winds from Botticelli's Birth of Venus, photographs of a bee, a dragonfly, a mosquito and a fly's eye. Gradually the objects became more dominant.