Bed

Where the quilt came from

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation's chronology is specific about it. The quilt was taken at Black Mountain College, near Asheville in North Carolina, from the artist Dorothea Rockburne. Robert Rauschenberg stretched it over a board and painted it because at the time he did not have enough money to buy canvas.

That order of events matters. The quilt was not chosen as a subject and then painted; it was used because it was there and canvas was not. The support came first and the image followed.

The pillow and the sheet went on with it. Because the bedding was his own, the work has usually been read as a self-portrait, and the reading is hard to avoid when the object is the size and shape of the place he slept.

What he painted with

The museum's materials line names oil and pencil. The Foundation's chronology adds two more, and they are not art materials at all: red fingernail polish and striped toothpaste.

Both leave a distinct mark. Nail varnish dries glossy and sits high on cloth; striped toothpaste comes out of the tube in ribbons of two colours at once. The pale ropes of colour running down over the pillow and the quilt are that kind of extrusion rather than brushwork.

Nothing is disguised. The quilt's pattern reads clearly under the paint, the pillow keeps its ticking stripes, and the sheet keeps its creases. Robert Rauschenberg worked on the bedding without covering it.

Spoleto put it in a storage room

Bed went to Italy in the summer of 1958, in an exhibition of young American and Italian artists selected by the Artnews editors Alfred Frankfurter, Thomas B. Hess and Irving Sandler for the Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto. It ran from 8 to 29 June.

The festival's officials refused to hang it in the main gallery. The Foundation's chronology records that they put the painting in a storage room instead.

The objection is not recorded in the chronology, and the work itself suggests what it might have been. A stained bed hung on a wall invites a reading as a crime scene, and that reading attached to the work early.

The only thing that sold

Robert Rauschenberg's first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York ran from 4 to 29 March 1958 and held about twenty Combines. The chronology records the commercial result in one clause: Leo Castelli buys Bed, the only artwork sold.

The dealer kept it for thirty-one years. In 1989 he gave it to the Museum of Modern Art in honour of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the museum's founding director, and the museum accessioned it on 8 May that year as number 79.1989.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr. had form with Robert Rauschenberg's Combines. When the collector Robert Scull offered to buy Monogram in 1959 and give it to the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. declined the offer, and the goat went to Stockholm instead.

Where it was shown

Bed travelled steadily once the Spoleto refusal was behind it. It hung at Documenta II in Kassel from 11 July to 11 October 1959, with Thaw and Kickback.

That December it went to Paris. André Breton and Marcel Duchamp included it in the Exposition internationale du surréalisme at the Galerie Daniel Cordier, which opened on 15 December 1959, alongside Odalisk. Jasper Johns showed Target with Plaster Casts in the same exhibition.

It returned to Surrealist company in New York a year later, at the International Surrealist Exhibition at the D'Arcy Galleries, and went to Stockholm in 1962 for 4 Amerikanare, organised by Pontus Hultén at the Moderna Museet.

In 1964 it was in the United States Pavilion at the 32nd Venice Biennale, in the exhibition Four Germinal Painters, the year Robert Rauschenberg won the International Grand Prize in Painting. Canyon hung there too.

By January 1977 the work was the picture used to stand for him. Artnews put him on its cover photographed with Bed by Gianfranco Gorgoni, while his retrospective was at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington.

How critics read it

Leo Steinberg used Bed as one of his main examples in arguing against a purely formal account of the Combines. His lecture Encounters with Rauschenberg, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2000, discusses Erased de Kooning Drawing, Bed and Monogram together, and sets his reading against those of Clement Greenberg and Hilton Kramer.

Steinberg's term for what the Combines do is the flatbed picture plane. A painting on that model is not a window onto a scene but a horizontal surface that collects things, tipped up to face the viewer.

Bed is the plainest demonstration of the idea in his catalogue, because the surface it tips up is one a body actually lies on.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Bed is photographed square on against a pale wall, hanging upright in its thin reddish frame. The plate therefore shows the front face and nothing else: the work stands eight inches proud of the wall, and none of that depth is visible here.