Rauschenberg, though, was always more maximalist than minimalist, and in 1954 he embarked on the combines that would occupy him for the next decade. These pieces were as loud as the White Paintings were mute—as action-packed as any action painting by Jackson Pollock and just as assaultive on the eye.
Indeed, barraging the viewer with imagery was the point. “I was bombarded with TV sets and magazines, by the refuse, by the excess of the world,” Rauschenberg said. “I thought that if I could paint or make an honest work, it should incorporate all of these objects, which were and are a reality.” The combines included wall-hung compositions as well as freestanding assemblages, with Bed (1955) and Monogram (1955–59) being the most indelible.
Bed started out as the solution to a problem: Rauschenberg didn’t have a canvas he could use. So he tucked together sheets, a pillow, and a quilt donated by the artist Dorothea Rockburne, presenting the ensemble vertically to afford an overhead view of the object. Rauschenberg covered Bed’s upper half with penciled scribbles and splashes of paint and later joked that someone might try to crawl into it. Bed was interpreted as another jape at Abstract Expressionism but was actually, through referencing the artist’s personal life, a self-portrait of sorts. Moreover, its association with sleep evoked AbEx’s debt to Surrealism’s probing of the subconscious.
Monogram, meanwhile, is perhaps Rauschenberg’s signature work. Its centerpiece, a stuffed angora goat with a tire around its midsection, stands on a large, prone canvas set on casters, allowing it to be hauled around like a child’s pull-toy on steroids. Rauschenberg had spotted the goat in the window of a secondhand furniture store and purchased it with all the money he had at the time—$15. Monogram went through two iterations—the first with the animal placed sideways on a shelf mounted to a painting; the second with it placed on a small platform, a vertical panel attached to its behind—before taking its final form at the suggestion of Johns.
The goat’s face was splashed with multicolored splotches, while the tire’s tread was painted white, reversing, as it were, the black used in Tire Print. While Rauschenberg said he’d been focused on the way the tire and goat were yoked together like letters in a monogram, some observers linked the piece to his homosexuality, claiming it referenced The Scapegoat (1854–1856), a meditation by the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Hunt (1827–1910) on the Hebrew tradition of expiating guilt by symbolically laying it on the titular creature. In this reading, Monogram signified the pariah status of gay men in midcentury America with its depiction of a goat (synonymous with randiness) penetrating an anus-like tire.
On the other hand, the combines sparked debates over the efficacy of trying to decipher Rauschenberg’s meaning at all, with one such argument involving a piece titled Canyon (1959). Like Monogram, it incorporated taxidermy in the form of a golden eagle perched with its wings outstretched on an empty carton under a mix of paint, cardboard, newspapers, and a snapshot of Rauschenberg’s son as a baby. This led one critic to opine that Canyon was a send-up of Rembrandt’s The Rape of Ganymede (1635), a mythological scene of the Greek deity Zeus in raptor guise abducting the eponymous infant to serve as cupbearer to the gods. Other critics pooh-poohed this notion, ascribing purely formal intentions on Rauschenberg’s part. (Clearer were federal laws against stuffing a protected species, which prohibited the heirs of its original owner, the gallerist Ileana Sonnabend, from selling Canyon; ultimately it was donated to the Museum of Modern Art with a zero valuation.)
