The Painting Ate the City — Combine Quarterly

How a cluttered studio on Pearl Street turned garbage, quilts, and a stuffed goat into the most radical American art of the century.

There is a tire bolted to the canvas. Above it, a photograph of the Manhattan Bridge clipped from Tuesday's edition of the Herald Tribune. Below, a smear of housepaint the color of dried blood. Behind all of it, a field of cadmium red that could only belong to someone who once studied with de Kooning. This is not a painting you look at. This is a painting you walk around.

The Street Is the Studio

I first walked into the Pearl Street space on an afternoon in February 1955. The door was propped open with a brick. Inside, the floor was layered three deep with newspaper, fabric scraps, and empty tubes of oil paint. Rauschenberg stood on a stepladder, pressing a transfer onto wet canvas with a spoon. He did not look down. "You have to commit to the image," he said. I stopped writing and watched.