Robert Rauschenberg’s 1959 combine featuring a stuffed bald eagle is Canyon.
Canyon belongs to Rauschenberg’s Combines, a body of work that merged painting with sculpture and found materials. The piece brings together a painted and collaged canvas, a taxidermied golden eagle, a suspended pillow, fabric, photographs, cardboard, a mirror and other everyday elements.
The title and imagery have encouraged art historians to connect the work with the myth of Ganymede, in which Zeus takes the form of an eagle. One interpretation sees the eagle and hanging pillow as a playful reference to that story, although other scholars caution against treating Rauschenberg’s combinations as having one fixed symbolic meaning.
The eagle also created a legal and practical problem decades later. Because golden eagles are protected under U.S. law, the artwork could not simply be sold like an ordinary painting. After collector Ileana Sonnabend’s death, her heirs donated Canyon to the Museum of Modern Art following a major tax dispute.