According to Alex Potts in Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde in the Art Bulletin critical commentary on Rauschenberg, since John Cage's classic 1961 essay "On Robert Rauschenberg," has emphasized the distinctive combinatorial logic or illogic of his so-called combine paintings. Rauschenberg himself designated these as combines rather than assemblages or collages, doing so possibly to fend off associations with modernist ideas of compositional structure or calculated disjuncture.

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, Combine painting, 1955.

It dispenses with the traditional compositional effects and realizes a bringing together of parts that preserved their separate identity. Rauschenberg's approach did not conceive of the overall format of a work as a relatively empty framing that simply made the constituent elements simultaneously present. He considered the combining of parts as itself a significant phenomenon, producing new results and effects not present in the elements that were being brought together. He was also attentive to the image quality of the entities with which he was working; for him they were not just constructs or prosaically factual entities.