"Rauschenberg's references to other media aren’t just tricks. They're an integral part of the way he connects the language of his images to that of a wider world. Collagists [collage makers] had always done this, ever since the invention of collage. Braque and Picasso brought newspaper clippings and headlines into their images, though these had to be scaled to the actual size of the printed page - you couldn't effectively do a cubist collage six feet high, it would need too many elements. The same was true of Kurt Schwitters, with his bus tickets and cigarette wrappers and bits of wood or rusty iron. But around 1962, Rauschenberg began to use not things but the images of things. He gathered photos and enlarged them into silk screens, so that they could be printed directly on the canvas. This had two main effects. First, it enormously increased his image bank, because just about everything in the world.. ..has been photographed. And second, by reusing silk - screened images from one painting to the next, it let him use repetition and counterpoint across a series of works in a way that wasn't possible.. ..if he had been using things themselves. In doing this, he was adapting to the great central fact of American communication, its takeover by the imagery of television."