Winter Pool, the first painting by Rauschenberg to enter the Museum's collection, is a prime example of a very important period in this highly inventive and influential artist's work—the mid-1950s to the early 1960s—when he created bold objects that were a hybrid of painting and sculpture and a reinvention of collage. He called them Combines. In Cubist collage, pasted papers add up to a readable image, such as a still life. With Combines, there is no narrative and the interpretation is left to the viewer.

The work, in exceptionally fresh condition, consists of two separate canvases, each about the height of a man. A wooden ladder bridges the gap between them, and its legs extend to the floor, inviting the viewer to climb into the picture. The compositions of both canvases consist of syncopated grids formed by rectangles of paint and found objects: shirt cuffs, a handkerchief, poster letters, and photographic reproductions. Rauschenberg's virtuoso handling of paint both exploits and confronts the dominant painterly style of the early 1950s—Abstract Expressionism—and undermines the Renaissance notion that a painting shows an ideal world behind the canvas surface.