The 25 Sculptures That Define the Modern Age Robert Rauschenberg, "Bed", 1955

Coming up during the mid-1950s, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg was an aesthetic heir to Abstract Expressionism who also delighted in puncturing its solemn, often grandiose aura. After “Erased de Kooning Drawing” (1953), for which he spent weeks rubbing away a drawing he’d commissioned from Willem de Kooning, he created a similarly ambivalent and much-debated homage in the form of “Bed.” One of his earliest Combines — improvisatory assemblages that merged painting, sculpture and collage with mundane and eerie everyday objects — the work recast his own well-worn sheets and a folksy quilt from the artist Dorothea Rockburne as a pointedly intimate canvas. Rauschenberg defaced the bedding and pillow with feverish pencil scribblings and then stained them several times over with unruly, drippy blotches of oil paint in the style of Jackson Pollock. The gestures appeared so violent to some critics that one likened the work to “a police photo of the murder bed after the corpse has been removed.” Rauschenberg, however, didn’t find the work disturbing: Years after its creation, he told an interviewer, “My fear has always been that someone would want to crawl into it.” Either way, “Bed,” now in MoMA’s collection, demonstrated that the boundaries between mediums — and between art and life — had become irrelevant amid the conceptual freedom offered by the postwar art world. — Zoey Poll