Yoicks
1954

Robert Rauschenberg’s embrace of everyday life—what critic Brian O’Doherty described as the artist’s “vernacular glance”—began with paintings such as Yoicks, which included fabrics, newspaper, and found objects. The “combine paintings,” as Rasuchenberg called these hybrid painting-sculptures, fused the improvisatory brushwork of Abstract Expressionism with a proliferation of collaged elements. Yoicks, one of Rauschenberg’s first paintings to incorporate fabric, contains alternating strips of the readymade polka-dotted material and bands of red and yellow dripped paint. With its inclusion of cartoons and a title derived from a comic strip exclamation, this work is whimsical and exuberant, a departure from the series of monochromatic paintings that had occupied the artist during the early 1950s.