during the first winter after he got out of the army, Johns met someone who would give him a crucial jolt out of this frustrating situation: Robert Rauschenberg, who would become the most important person in his life for the next seven years. Also a Southerner, the Texas-born Rauschenberg was almost five years older than Johns and had already had one-man exhibitions in two of New York’s most important galleries. At the time they met, Rauschenberg was regarded by many in the art world as a sort of enfant terrible for the experimental and provocative works he was making.
Rauschenberg had first gained notoriety with a series of all-white paintings that registered passing shadows and changes in light. He had also made all-black paintings of collaged newspaper covered with dark pigment that many viewers associated with nihilism and destructiveness, although Rauschenberg insisted he had intended no such thing. He had made paintings out of dirt in which grass sprouted and grew (he regularly visited the gallery where one was displayed to water it), but most infamously, he had obtained a drawing from de Kooning – perhaps the most important painter at that moment among younger artists – with the sole purpose of erasing it, simply because he wanted to “know whether a drawing can be made out of erasing.”[14] At the time he and Johns met, Rauschenberg had just begun making a series of all-red paintings that incorporated an array of collage materials, including pieces of fabric and newspaper clippings – objects from everyday life that were in his view just as important in the creation of art as the intensely private feelings favoured by the Abstract Expressionists.
Flag above White with Collage, 1955. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 57 × 49 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel. Gift of the artist in memory of Christian Geelhaar. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Despite his reputation for controversy, Rauschenberg was, as far as Johns was concerned, a seasoned professional. He knew where to get inexpensive studio space, and he was adept at finding ways to work only when he needed money so that he could give more time to his art. Most importantly, Rauschenberg had somehow managed to effect the transformation for which Johns yearned: he was the first “real artist” Johns had ever known, and “everything was arranged to accommodate that fact.”[15] Soon after they met, Rauschenberg talked Johns into leaving his job at a bookstore to join him in freelance work designing window displays for such upscale shops as Bonwit Teller and Tiffany’s. With the help of a mutual friend, Johns soon found a loft around the corner from Rauschenberg’s studio on Fulton Street in lower Manhattan, which at that time was home to a number of rundown buildings that had formerly housed manufacturing firms and warehouses.
Living in such spaces was technically illegal – Johns’s building had actually been condemned by the city – but it was cheap and provided ample space for living and working, far more than had been possible in the tiny apartment in the East Village that Johns had previously occupied. Moreover, at this time few artists were living as far downtown as Rauschenberg and Johns, and the distance provided a sense of privacy from the ongoing networking and gossip of the art world. This was important professionally as well as personally, as both Johns and Rauschenberg had determined to find their own way as artists, without simply following what their elders had done.
Very few works by Johns survive from the period before he became acquainted with Rauschenberg. A handful of drawings from the early 1950s are known; Johns prefers that they not be reproduced, although their titles are suggestive: Tattooed Torso, Idiot, Spanked Child. In contrast to these drawings, the modestly scaled and intimate works that Johns made during the first months of his acquaintance with Rauschenberg were poised between abstraction and representation, mingling painting, drawing, sculpture and collage.
Two Flags, 1962. Oil on canvas (two panels), 248.9 × 182.8 cm. Collection of Norman and Irma Braman. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Book, 1957. Encaustic on book and wood, 25.4 × 33 cm. The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Target with Plaster Casts, 1955. Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects, 129.5 × 111.8 × 8.8 cm. Collection of David Geffen, Los Angeles. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
White Flag, 1955. Encaustic, oil, newsprint, and charcoal on canvas, 198.9 × 306.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Figure 5, 1955. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 44.5 × 35.6 cm. Collection the artist. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Among these, Rauschenberg especially admired Johns’s richly worked pencil drawings of dried oranges (Illustration), their murky forms barely emerging from the darkness of the page. Collage was the dominant process in a small work that Johns had made while still working at the bookstore, one night folding and tearing an order form and painting over the resulting grid pattern in flickering shades of green (Illustration). Other pieces suggested the impact of the time he spent at Rauschenberg’s studio. Just as Rauschenberg was constructing from scavenged crates paintings that verged on the sculptural in their inclusion of ledges, shelves, partitions and niches, so too did Johns make several constructed works, including Star and a shallow box containing the plaster cast of a friend’s face (Illustration). Painted white, they evoked the quiet poetry of Joseph Cornell, an artist whose assembled boxes he and Rauschenberg greatly admired. In the work with the plaster cast, Johns covered the upper panel with collaged papers ranging from receipts to images of an ear, a man’s torso, and a house. Similarly, in Construction with Toy Piano, Johns used a miniature musical instrument as a surface for pasted papers heavily worked with graphite; the composition was topped by the numbered keys of the toy piano, which sounded notes when struck.
A closer look at Construction with Toy Piano reveals the complexities of Johns’s growingrelationship with Rauschenberg. Its connections between making art and making music echo Music Box, a 1953 sculpture by Rauschenberg. Music Box was owned by Rachel Rosenthal, a mutual friend of Rauschenberg and Johns who had helped Johns find his loft; a small, roughly hewn wooden box, it was studded with nails and contained a few pebbles.[16] When the box was picked up and shaken, the pebbles would strike the nails and inner walls of the box, giving off sounds – like Johns’s toy piano, Rauschenberg’s work encouraged viewers to “play” it.
Furthermore, at the right side of Construction with Toy Piano is a small sticker reading “Hotel Bilbao.” Rauschenberg had incorporated such stickers in one of several collages he made while travelling in Europe and North Africa between 1952 and 1953. Johns could have easily picked up the Bilbao sticker from the materials commonly strewn about Rauschenberg’s loft, but other circumstances suggest that his appropriation was a more intimate act. Very few people in New York even knew of the existence of the works Rauschenberg brought back with him from this trip, and showing them to Johns – who became the owner of several of them – was a great gesture of trust. Construction with Toy Piano seems to be a response to Rauschenberg’s collages, most of which were meant to be handled: the entire composition of his collage with the Bilbao stickers, for example, is visible only when the collage is opened up like a greeting card. Johns’s work similarly solicited the viewer’s participation in its invitation to press the toy piano’s keys.
Johns’s use of collage in these early works also forms a tentative response to what was beginning to happen in Rauschenberg’s own practice. With Johns looking on, Rauschenberg was intensifying the physicality of his paintings by incorporating a growing range of materials and objects into his art; verging on
Calvin Tomkins,
Johns owns another version of
