CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/21/2025

Celebrating Robert Rauschenberg on his centenary

Robert Rauschenberg's "Bed" is among the most seminal of all seminal artworks of the twentieth century. Comprised of oil, pencil, toothpaste and red fingernail polish on pillow, quilt (previously owned by Dorothea Rockburne), and bedsheet mounted on wood supports, it is arguably the artist's first Combine. Produced in 1955, this hybrid artwork was completed seven years after Rauschenberg first encountered Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, four years after he met John Cage, three years after his travels through Europe and North Africa with painter and partner Cy Twombly, two years after he erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning and called it art, and one year from the time he met and became romantically involved with Jasper Johns, whose own masterpiece, "Flag," was also produced in 1955. One year later, Rauschenberg would write, "I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of a photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint. In the end, what one sees as my work is what I choose to make with no guarantee of enlightenment, humor, beauty or art."