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Before he became known for his inventive and innovative works, Robert Rauschenberg was a pharmacology student at the University of Texas at Austin. It was while he was serving as a hospital technician in San Diego during World War II that Rauschenberg became interested in art. After the war, he enrolled in the Kansas City Art Institute and traveled to Paris to study art in 1948. Later that year, Rauschenberg returned to the States to study under artist Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. It was there he met his lifelong friends and collaborators composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. He also studied at the Art Students League in New York, moving to that city permanently in 1949.

Rauschenberg's early projects critiqued art making in the context of new ideas of the 1950s. With his friend Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg served as a key link in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. Throughout his life, he created work that was unfailingly experimental, exploring art as a means of communication and an interchange of ideas.

In the AMAM's Combine Drawing, Rauschenberg used traditional media- charcoal, crayon, and watercolor-to create an original work of art. But he also appropriated images from mass media- photographs of Sophia Loren, John F. Kennedy, and others-collaging them onto the white sheet of paper, then drawing and painting over them to create "combine," or hybrid drawing, that mixes media, genres, and objects.

Rauschenberg questioned the ideas of "the original" and "the masterpiece" throughout his oeuvre. In the Automobile Tire Print (1951) that he made with Cage, Rauschenberg laid out strips of white paper while Cage drove over them with his Model A Ford, creating prints from the tires Rauschenberg had inked. In 1953, in another notorious gesture, Rauschenberg boldly asked Willem de Kooning for one of his drawings so that he could erase it. De Kooning generously agreed, and Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) stands as an icon of his respect for Abstract Expressionism and his notion that process is central to art making.

Combine Drawing makes a fascinating comparison with Johns'sTarget , another drawing from 1960. Like Rauschenberg, Johns represented a familiar object, a barroom dartboard, in a new context. In Combine Drawing, boundaries between the original object and the artwork are further blurred by incorporating actual images cut from newspapers or magazines. By encouraging the viewer's active participation, the AMAM drawing recalls Rauschenberg's oft-quoted statement, "Painting relates to both art and life .!.!. I try to act in the gap between the two."