Marcel Duchamp, one of the formative figures in the development of abstract art was behind the wave of artists in the mid-1950s who redefined the terms of painterly abstraction. Other precedents can be found in Joseph Cornell’s ready-mades in the 1940s which were more ‘object’ than ‘painting’. Younger artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Claes Oldenburg forged new links between painting and social environment. Rauschenberg’s paintings showed a shift away from pure abstraction of the early 1950s towards creating 3-D assemblages were odd juxtapositions, distinctly modernist, but Rauschenberg moved beyond Dadaist jokes and surrealist dreams into an absurd world shot through with the consumerist impulses of the mid-decade. Rauschenberg’s