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[[Top of page]] The material of Pop Art should be accessible to everyone, and it should say the same thing to everyone. But the significant this is that the best Pop works reveal more layers of meaning as they get older. [[Top of page]]
of abstract painting and its potential, together with the suggestion that art could be taken out of the studio. The whole city could be read as one big picture: art was everywhere and everything. 
People were angered by "Bed" because they thought that Rauschenberg wanted to kill off "fine art" or, at the very least, to bring it into disrepute. But, in point of fact, he had exactly the contrary intention. He wanted to make it possible for "fine art" to continue into contexts which had previously been unthought of. He was a mediator, not a saboteur; and it is thanks to him, and to Jasper Johns, that the art of thinking with the brush, and of maintaining an entirely personal system of marks throughout the construction of a large painting, did not fall back upon formula during the late nineteen-fifties but entered upon a new phase of its existence.
Meditation of this kind is not normally associated with Pop Art, and neither Johns nor Rauschenberg is, or ever was, a Pop artist in the strict sense: an artist, that is to say, who uses the idiom of mass communications with a minimum of alteration. Johns with his paintings of the American flag, Rauschenberg with his stuffed angora goat with a tire wrapped round its middle, were not trying to cause a scandal. They were using subject matter that would distract the observer from their inner intention, which was to see what was still left for painting to do.
The essence of Pop Art, as it is generally understood, is direct and unambiguous statement: "EAT/DIE." Jasper Johns appeared to be making that kind of statement with his flags and his targets but, after just 20 years, it is clear to us that few artists have kept so much of their privacy intact. If complete and instantaneous appreciation is one of the charms of Pop Art, then no one could be less of a Pop artist than Jasper Johns. Johns's methods are oblique, devious, well-hidden. They are part of a thought structure to which no one but he himself has access. Even when he uses familiar material, as with the flags and the targets (and, later, the map of the U.S.A.), he does it more to put us off the track than to make us feel at home.
The material of Pop should be accessible to everyone, and it should say the same thing to everyone, without exception (Warhol's Brillo boxes and Campbell's soup cans are examples of this). What are known as Rauschenberg's "combine-paintings" of 1955 are wayward autobiographical epics which, once again, have nothing to do with Pop Art. They derive, rather, from a lifelong marinade of memory and observation, and they result in an aromatic stew in which all ingredients are equal and a reproduction of a beautiful woman painted by Rubens has no more intrinsic status than a worm-eaten theater stub or .the spokes of a long-derelict umbrella.
"Combine-painting," it should be noted, means something quite different from "collage." Collage, a term now well over half-a-century old, means fundamentally a collection of pasted images which sit politely on a flat surface in a frame and wait to be looked at. A combine-painting, put on the other hand, can incorporate any kind of object, whether two- or three-dimensional, and can spread across the wall, down onto the floor, or up toward the ceiling in ways peculiar to itself. There are literally no limits to what can be included in a combine-painting and its amounts, in essence, to a personal selection of whatever happens to drift by in the everyday life of a great city. In a combine-painting, lights may flash on and off, a pocket radio may play till the battery gives out, or a stuffed bird may strut on the top edge of the canvas. An absolute equality