Robert Rauschenberg, whose show has just ended at the Whitechapel Gallery, is a traditional artist, binding into one vision all the major streams of experiment and achievement of twentieth-century art which interest him. The paintings, combine paintings, and objects on view are a digest of influences which in fact we all know; if we do not, then there is no excuse, because books on the art leading up to Rauschenberg are a commonplace in bookshops, let alone the pictures themselves which are on view at the Tate and other galleries. Rauschenberg’s is probably the best example of a kind of art in the mid twentieth century which starts off by making you think it is art autre, and then it becomes art engagè, only, on final analysis to turn into a kind of art pour I’art. At first glance nothing could be more art autre than the first combine paintings with their wilful inclusion of everything that is not art. The point of art autre as I see it, is to cut to the root any kind of making or appreciating that involves the aesthetic faculty; it is done expressly to destroy the academic and conventional idea of what constitutes Art and substitute a gratuitous gesture in its place, a gesture that is in the end only made valid by the vision of the maker, the true artist. It is a simultaneous alienation of the art-object from the spectator and from arty, or aesthetic, art; but this situation is never a complete success unless the art-object is thumpingly bad—then of course you do get a complete alienation. Rauschenberg’s art is very good however and so the feeling of alienation is quickly replaced by a feeling of magnetism.