For Rauschenberg, there was a natural progression from the Red Paintings—a series he executed at the beginning of this period—to the Combines (1954–64), as, initially, two-dimensional collage and, later, three-dimensional objects came to the fore. By summer 1954, Rauschenberg had made the first fully realized Combine, eliminating all distinctions between painting and sculpture. Expanding on Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade, Rauschenberg imbued such ordinary objects as a patchwork quilt and an automobile tire with new significance by combining unrelated items and incorporating them into the context of art. When the artist first exhibited Red Paintings and Combines at the Egan Gallery, New York, in December 1954, critics were baffled by the works, which challenged existing definitions of art.

Less than a decade later, however, Rauschenberg’s reputation as the leading artist of his generation was established following his first retrospective, held in 1963 at the Jewish Museum, New York, and his acceptance the following year of the grand prize for painting at the 32nd Venice Biennale. Among the works by Rauschenberg shown in the U.S. Pavilion in Venice were many of his now-celebrated Combines, including Bed (1955), as well as several paintings from a group of works the artist began in fall 1962, in which he used commercially produced silkscreens based on mass-media sources as well as his own photographs. 

Rauschenberg’s adoption of a commercial means of reproduction and his focus on mass-media subjects in this series led art critics to identify him with the Pop art movement that had recently emerged on the New York art scene. In comparison with the often coolly executed paintings of the Pop artists, however, Rauschenberg’s works are emphatically gestural and handmade. The silkscreen paintings have an expressive quality resulting from their hand-painted areas, the collage-like overlays of photographic images, and the intentional slippage and irregularities the artist allowed to remain uncorrected during the screening process.