On December 31, 2026, one of Moderna Museet’s longest-running collection displays in recent years will come to an end. Until then, Monogram is on view in Stockholm: a stuffed angora goat with a tire around its belly, placed on a painting lying flat like a field beneath the animal. The work is Sweden’s most debated art purchase of all time, and at the same time it offers a surprisingly good entry point into why collage, layers and found images feel so natural today, even on a poster. Robert Rauschenberg made the picture plane a place where reality could be pasted on - and that legacy is still visible in the wall art we choose.
Quick facts: The exhibition “Monogram - Robert Rauschenberg and the Moderna Museet Collection” is on view at Moderna Museet in Stockholm from November 23, 2024 to December 31, 2026. The work Monogram was made from 1955 to 1959 and has been part of the museum’s collection since 1964, after the purchase was pushed through by then-director Pontus Hultén with support from the fundraising campaign The Museum We Want. Rauschenberg was born on October 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas, and died on May 12, 2008.
The goat found in a used office furniture store
The origins of Monogram are prosaic in a way that says everything about Rauschenberg’s method. He found the stuffed angora goat in a store selling used office furniture in Manhattan, bought it cheaply and carried it home to his studio. The animal stood there for several years while the work was reworked again and again: the goat was first placed against a vertical painting, then on a shelf, before Rauschenberg finally laid the canvas flat on the floor and let the goat stand in the middle of it, with the tire around its body.
The name came from its form. The horns and the tire wind around each other roughly like two initials woven together into a monogram - two entirely different things that nevertheless form a symbol. Work on it continued from 1955 to 1959, and it belongs to the series known as Combines, works Rauschenberg made from roughly 1954 to 1962 in which the distinction between painting and sculpture deliberately ceases to apply.
That idea is what makes him relevant far beyond the museum gallery. A Combine is essentially a collage that refuses to stay flat: newspaper clippings, fabric, photographs, paint and street debris in the same frame. When we hang a graphic work today in which typography, photography and fields of color meet on the same surface, we are part of a tradition Rauschenberg established when it was still considered provocative.
Why the goat ended up in Stockholm and not in New York
The work was first shown at art dealer Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York in 1959. Collector Robert Scull then offered to buy it and donate it to the Museum of Modern Art — and was turned down. MoMA’s then director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., declined the gift. Five years later, in 1964, the work went instead to Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Behind the purchase was Pontus Hultén, who took over as director in 1960, two years after the museum opened on Skeppsholmen. Hultén had become acquainted with Rauschenberg’s art in Paris and was one of Europe’s earliest and most energetic advocates of the new American art. The purchase was funded through a fundraising campaign known as The Museum of Our Desire, in which private individuals and the museum’s friends helped fill gaps in a young collection.
“One museum turned down the goat, another made it its most famous resident — and the difference between those decisions is the whole distance between preserving art history and daring to write it.”
The story has become one of the most frequently cited in the Swedish museum world, and it acquired a particular aftertaste that same year: in 1964, Rauschenberg was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale, the first time an American had won the biennale’s top prize for painting. Sweden had therefore bought a work by an artist who was then moving from being questioned to becoming an international force. If you’d like to see what that postwar rupture looked like from a Swedish perspective, you can find the background in our overview of Moderna Museet’s presentation of Swedish art, 1945–1979.
Five New York Evenings in 1964 – When Stockholm Became a Stage
The purchase was not an isolated transaction. That same year, Moderna Museet, together with the music association Fylkingen, organized five so-called New York evenings featuring ballet, concerts, and happenings. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company came to Stockholm with John Cage, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris — and Rauschenberg himself, who during those years worked as a set and lighting designer for Cunningham’s company.
It says something important about who he was. Rauschenberg was not a studio artist who produced finished canvases; he was a collaborator who moved between dance, music, technology, and printmaking. A few years later, together with engineer Billy Klüver, he founded Experiments in Art and Technology, an initiative that brought artists together with engineers from Bell Labs. Klüver was Swedish, making the connection between Stockholm and the American avant-garde scene unusually strong for a small country.
For a visitor in 2026, this means that Monogram is not just a curiosity featuring a goat. It is a remnant of a moment when, for a few years, Skeppsholmen was at the heart of the international art debate. Make the most of it: after the turn of the year, the work returns to the museum’s regular rotation.
From the erased drawing to silkscreen: three techniques that shape the visual language
Three works are enough to understand Rauschenberg’s entire toolkit. The first is Erased de Kooning Drawing from 1953, now in SFMOMA’s collection. Rauschenberg asked the established painter Willem de Kooning for a drawing with the explicit intention of erasing it, got one, and then spent weeks erasing it. What remained was an almost empty sheet of paper — and the idea that removal can be a creative act just as much as addition.
The second is the Combines, in which objects are brought into the image instead of being depicted. A tire is a tire, not a painted illusion of a tire. The third is silkscreen painting, which he began in 1962 after a visit to Andy Warhol’s studio. Screen printing allowed press images, sports photos, space images, and details from older paintings to be layered over one another on the same canvas, often in offset halftone patterns and translucent fields of color.
This is also where the direct bridge to today’s wall art lies. Silkscreen logic — repetition, displacement, transparency, image on top of image — has become a basic visual language in what is now sold as graphic posters. The parallel with Warhol’s more restrained handling of images deserves its own comparison, which you’ll find in our article on Warhol and the line behind the image.
How to bring home the Rauschenberg feel without a stuffed goat
Decorating in the spirit of Rauschenberg isn’t about buying a reproduction of a Combine — they don’t work well in two-dimensional form and lose their whole point without volume. It’s about three principles you can put into practice right away.
The first is layering. Look for works in which two image systems lie on top of each other: a photograph beneath a field of color, a printed halftone over a painted surface, text cutting through a shape. These works can hang close to a seating area, because they reward anyone who looks for a long time. You’ll find them especially among the abstract posters and in the selection of pop art.
The second is collision. Rauschenberg never put together things that already went together. The equivalent on a wall is to hang a stark geometric print next to a soft photograph, or to mix a classic museum image with something contemporary and graphic. A wall with only matching motifs is calm but lifeless; a wall with a single deliberate clash has movement.
The third is scale. Monogram measures just over a meter across and occupies the floor, not the wall. At home, you can achieve the same effect with one really large format instead of several small ones: one 70x100 piece does more for a room than four 30x40 pieces, especially above a sofa or in a stairwell. If you’re unsure how many centimeters you need, see the discussion in our guide to gallery walls.
Tip: Want to try the collage principle on a budget? Hang three motifs in the same frame, each with a different visual logic — a photograph, a text-based print, and a solid field of color. Keep the frame width and mat the same, so the composition holds together even though the contents clash. It’s precisely this balance between order and disorder that makes Combines easy to read.
Rauschenberg’s place among the famous names
In a collection where Impressionists and Modernists often take center stage, Rauschenberg stands slightly apart, and that’s precisely the point. He belongs not to a style but to an attitude: that everyday materials are suitable as art materials, that an image can always become another image, that an artist can just as well work with a dance company or an engineer as with a paintbrush.
For anyone creating a wall of artworks by famous artists, he works best as a point of contrast. Place a layered, graphic motif next to a classic landscape or a restrained portrait, and the classic image suddenly gains a tension it didn’t have on its own. The same applies in reverse: a restrained motif calms down a wall that would otherwise have too much going on.
And if you make it to Skeppsholmen before New Year’s, get close and notice how much color there actually is in the canvas beneath the goat. That’s usually the first thing visitors miss.
Frequently asked questions about Rauschenberg and Monogram
If you’re looking for art with the same desire to challenge expectations, you’ll find the full selection among our graphic, abstract, and pop art-inspired designs — start where the room needs a clash, not where it’s already calm.
Sources and further reading: Moderna Museet on Monogram and SFMOMA on Erased de Kooning Drawing.