A Pioneer of Pop
Many art historians consider Rauschenberg a predecessor of Pop, who laid the groundwork for a fully-fledged Pop art movement in the 1960s. Like many of his combines, Bed (1955) contains elements of both postwar abstract painting and everyday found materials.
The Element of Surprise
For Rauschenberg, the combines were about discovery and chance: “I wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn’t a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing.”1