No one’s work has embodied what is fascinating about art as much as Robert Rauschenberg’s works of the ’60s did. His placement of real objects both in and in front of the image, his witty combinations of materials and media, represented a break with academic traditions of artmaking and produced an independent order of the image that seemed to affect a seamless union between art and life, the polar opposites the avant-garde strove so hard to unite.

In this survey of work, it was easy to place the early assemblages, like Quote, 1964, in relation to his later works from 1987–92, which were shown