I have come to think of beds as some of the most revealing portraits we have. A face can compose itself; a mattress cannot. We spend roughly half our lives there – drowsy, carnal, insomniac hours, while the mind drifts and the body rests. Sheets crease, pillows dip, objects drift to the side in little tides: books, bottles, pens, pills. The place of sleep keeps the evidence. Over time, it accrues into a kind of biography.
Tracey Emin understood this when she transferred her own unmade pit into the gallery and refused to tidy anything away. My Bed (1998), newly installed at Tate Modern, records several days of bed‑rotting, drinking and depression. The rumpled mattress sags with inertia, as if the body has only just rolled out of shot. On the floor around it, the debris of a private breakdown has been carefully preserved – used tissues, empty vodka bottles, cigarettes, blister packs, a belt – like evidence at a crime scene.
If Emin gives us one ravaged example, Nan Goldin offers a whole atlas of them in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). Currently on show at Gagosian in London, this is a sequence of intimate snapshots where bodies drift and sprawl across bare mattresses, the twisted sheets mapping fragile, provisional states of love. In Goldin’s photographs, they are insistently inhabited; we find ourselves at their edges, close enough to sense how easily tenderness can fray into risk.
Others have let the place of sleep become an address – a location to live, work and remain in view. For the French writer Colette, the lit became a peculiar refuge in 1940s Paris. Arthritic and bedridden during the Occupation, she spent years on a divan – a gift from her friend the Princesse de Polignac – which she christened her ‘raft’. Propped on cushions, marooned but intellectually alive, she wrote her memoirs and scandalous bestseller Gigi (1944), even while filing columns for collaborationist newspapers. Devoted neighbours, Jean Cocteau among them, would drop by. In photographs, she reclines in lipstick and furs, her pens and papers scattered across a bridge table, as the light from a lamp shaded with her beloved blue writing paper bathes the room in a soft, spectral glow.
In the late 1950s, Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace on Sunset Boulevard takes the glamour of the bed into the realm of a Hollywood fever dream. The mansion, with crushed‑quartz walls glittering in the Californian sun, had at its centre the rose-coloured principal suite where Mansfield posed for some of her most provocative Playboy shoots. Framed by scalloped mirrors, the emerald-satin coverlet, floating in a fluffy pink carpet so deep her miniature chihuahuas could barely wade through it. The room suggests that a woman might live permanently inside a centre‑fold, reclining in an endless afternoon, yet it also hints at the work involved in keeping up the act: a fantasy of seduction that glosses over the labour of being Jayne Mansfield.
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In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), the bed becomes unabashedly theatrical. Petra, a brilliant, embittered fashion designer, prowls her lavish apartment in West Germany like a restless cat. The action unfolds on an ornate bedstead, serving as a boudoir/office where she makes calls on a large Bakelite telephone, seduces a young model, and slugs champagne from fragile coupes, flanked by mannequins, sketches and her submissive assistant. Here the bed becomes a lush feminine portrait – an erotic working space where privacy blurs into performance and softness is turned to power.
The idea of the bed as a spectacle, something to be watched as much as slept in, has been with us for centuries. In Louis XIV’s court, the state bed at Versailles made sleep a matter of public ceremony. In the Grand Appartement du Roi – a suite of mirrored salons and gilt panels glowing with candlelight – the royal bedchamber functioned as a small, gilded theatre. Courtiers crowded in for the daily levée and couchée, watching the Sun King woken, washed and dressed upon a crimson velvet dais. The place he slept was elsewhere; this was a pure symbol, a stage prop in the grand ritual of absolutism.
‘Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ runs at Gagosian Davies Street until 21 March. For more information, visit gagosian.com. ‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’ runs at Tate Modern until 31 August. For more information, visit tate.org
Izabella Scott is the author of ‘The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial’, published by Atlantic Books in the UK, and by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US in September
