One of the first objects encountered upon entering Robert Rauschenberg: Combines at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was Satellite (1955). This modestly scaled Combine is composed of a sundry collection of materials including a pair of dirty cream-colored socks, two dainty discolored doilies, a strip of worn paisley sheet, sections of cardboard, paint-soaked comic strip broadsheets, and dripping, sensual passages of red, yellow, white, and blue oil paint. This mess of elements is topped off by a swaggering, taxidermied chicken caked in thick oil, who struts defiantly across the paint-encrusted upper ledge of the picture, his downward gaze defiant, comedic, endearing, and paradoxically alive. While Satellite, one of Rauschenberg’s earliest Combines, displays many of the visual traits common to the works that occupied the artist from 1954 to 1964, when compared with later efforts such as Canyon (1959), or Monogram from the same year, it is a reserved, diffident work, but no less determined in its explosion of contemporary pictorial conventions. Orthodox modernism’s investment in the arrangement of flat abstract forms on a two-dimensional plane that prevailed in the 1950s is here subjected to merciless derision. Not only does Rauschenberg demonstrate his irresistible formal sensibilities in the...