Site of slumber, sex, and sickness, the bed occupies a significant corner of our lives. As a household object it is uniquely loaded — a divided destination of dreaming, devotion, death and despair, so much of existence takes place there. It is no wonder then that this humble piece of furniture has been a popular subject for artists, ranging from traditional depictions of the bed as a place of sleep and restfulness to more experimental and conceptual representations of it as an arena of political intent, or as a charged object of desire.
When we think of beds in art, Tracey Emin’s seminal My Bed from the late ‘90s is the most obvious specimen. In this controversial work, Emin reconstructed her own bed in the gallery space, strewn with detritus — including Absolut bottles, discarded knickers and used condoms — and a slew of stained sheets. Based on the artist’s bedbound drinking spree, the work can be considered to be a frank self-portrait. The “bed” as the visceral venue of desire and degradation is the ideal canvas for Emin to meditate on her personal experience; at the same time, it’s a not-so-subtle nod to the role the bed has played throughout art history.
If Emin’s bed isn’t the first bed that comes to mind, then maybe it’s Manet’s Olympia. In 1863, Edouard Manet painted a nude woman propped upright against plush pillows on a creased bed, boldy confronting the viewer with her gaze. Much like Emin’s bed, the painting was described as “shocking” when in was first unveiled to the public. To the contemporary viewer, it might not be so clear why this was (after all art history is basically just a massive archive of female nudes) but Manet’s was different. For starters, she wore that tiny choker, which was a sure sign for the people of the day that this wasn’t a virgin, or a noble woman who just wanted to get naked, but rather — a prostitute. Second of all, viewers were aghast at the way she looked directly back at them, disregarding the genteel, coy sideways glance of historical portraiture — she’s knowing. And, it goes without saying: Manet’s rumpled bed reeks of sex and debauchery.
Manet’s painting subverts a long artistic tradition of women arranged lengthways on beds for heterosexual male viewing pleasure. In the most famous example —Titian’s delectable Venus of Urbino (1534) — the “reclining nude” is a sweet, cherub-faced woman lounging across an unmade bed in a docile, inviting pose. In contrast, Manet’s brazen bedfellow claims the bed as her own.
But, the bed is not just a passive symbol of sex and erotic power play, it is also an active site of discussion. Between 2014 and 2015, Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz lugged a 50-pound dorm mattress across campus as an endurance performance piece.The purpose of Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)— her senior visual arts thesis — was to challenge how the college handled rape cases, including her own. While the performance was derided for its exposure of the accused while legal proceedings were ongoing, the piece was also praised for what art critic Jerry Saltz called its “pure radical vulnerability”. As with Emin’s installation, Sulkowicz’ mattress enters the public domain as an emotionally charged and politically fraught object.
If we are talking of beds as a place of political demonstration, then who can forget John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s Bed-ins for Peace? In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, Lennon and Ono held two week-long peaceful protests from the comfort of their hotel beds in Amsterdam and Montreal. Derived from the “sit-in” as a form of peaceful protest, they invited the world press to witness their quiet demonstration. While not necessarily an art performance, the Bed-Ins instigate vital questions associated with the medium — what’s public and what’s private, and what constitutes a protest — hinged on a piece of furniture steeped in multifaceted meaning.
Both Anselm Kiefer and Rachel Whiteread have immortalised the bed as sombre sculptures evocative of death and memory. Kiefer’s devastating installation Die Frauen der Revolution (“The Women of the Revolution”) (1992/2013) situates several single beds cast in lead in a space resembling a stark hospital ward, or a sepulchral chamber. Meanwhile, Whiteread has built an entire career out of defamiliarising everyday objects, including the bed. In Untitled (Airbed II) (1992), Whiteread fashions a mattress out of fleshy beige rubber, recalling the poignant absence of the body. Another work, Shallow Breath (1988) — a monumental cast of the underside of a mattress — was made in memory of her father; its concrete, blocky form implies a tomb or a mortuary slab.
Louise Bourgeois reconfigures the bed as a potent stage of psychoanalytic inquiry. Her stirring installation Red Room (Parents) (1994) recreates her parent’s bedroom in deep scarlet and mahogany, placing the double bed at its beating heart. Here, the bedroom — or bed specifically — is established as the arena of both passion and violence, hinged on Freud’s conception of the “primal scene”. Bourgeois’ symbolic piece is loaded with cryptic significance: “Je t’aime” is stitched on a pillow in curling red cursive; an uncanny rubber finger pierced with a pin sprouts from the covers. For Frida Kahlo, on the other hand, beds feature in her work out of necessity — due to various injuries Kahlo spent a significant portion of her life in bed. For example, in Henry Ford Hospital (The Flying Bed) (1932) Kahlo presents herself lying in a pool of blood on a cast iron bed, cords spooling out of her and rising upwards — a baby at the end of one alludes to her struggle with infertility.
As much as beds are hives of activity or laden with individual meaning and memories, they are also places of quietness, reflection and sleep. Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s mixed media paintings frequently feature lovers entwined on sofas and beds. In one intimate work, Nwantinti (2012) a man rests his head on a woman’s lap, looking up at her with quiet devotion. In contrast, Edward Hopper’s Summer in the City (1949) presents a woman sitting upright in bed as her lover sleeps face down. Flooded in amber light and dark shadow, the bed is a battlefield of marital discontent. Elsewhere, in Sophie Calle’s conceptual project The Sleepers (1979), the French artist invited friends and strangers to share her bed over several days. She then interviewed and photographed her bed companions, resulting in a surprisingly moving series of images. The Sleepers reveals the bed as a pivotal spot of daily ritual: the subjects eat and drink, rest and unwind, talk and sleep within the confines of the bed. In this work, the bed shifts between public and private, sleep and wakefulness, presence and absence.
If Emin’s and Manet’s beds are the two most famous beds in modern art history, Vincent Van Gogh’s bed in Bedroom at Arles (1888) might just pip them to the post. In a letter to his brother Theo about the painting, Van Gogh wrote that the pieces of furniture in the room must “express unswerving rest”; in another letter to Paul Gauguin he wrote that the painting had emerged from a period of bedridden sickness. Stripped of any deep psychological meaning or political purpose, Van Gogh’s bed is just as remarkable for its expressive rendering of the bed as a tranquil place of peace and quiet. And at the end of the day, that should suffice.