Over the years, she has given the Guggenheim four important paintings, including a purple Rothko from 1949 and a 1963 untitled silk-screen painting by Robert Rauschenberg.

It made me think of Andy Warhol's silk-screen paintings of an electric chair.

As with Warhol's silk-screen paintings, the precision and repetition of the appropriated imagery enlivens the lackadaisical color washes.

His own signature icons - silhouettes of unicorns, tree roots, variations on highway signs, genitalia - proliferate and overlap on his 14 silk-screen paintings.

They owe a large debt to the silk-screen paintings of both Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.

"Every time you spend $100," he told anyone who passed him, "you get a leftover original of one of my silk-screen paintings free ."

When Mr. Rauschenberg started the silk-screen paintings, he was already well known as a master manipulator of the flotsam and jetsam of the everyday.

In essence, the silk-screen paintings condensed the combines into a single surface of fluttering, tissue-thin images and abstract brushstrokes.

One, a selection of the vigorous silk-screen paintings done between 1962 and 1964, opened last week at the Whitney Museum.

To make the silk-screen paintings, Mr. Rauschenberg more or less translated the three-dimensional found imagery of the combines into flat photographic fields.