A lecture by Graham Coulter-Smith

Coulter-Smith says that:

Rauschenberg and Johns challenged abstraction by using representational elements in their work. But in so doing they did not herald a return to the tradition of narrative painting that modern art had broken with. Instead they introduced a different way of dealing with imagery, one that is in many ways abstract. Instead of being concerned with visual abstraction, however, these artists were concerned with linguistic abstraction.