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![Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting [seven panel], 1951. Oil on
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After abstract expressionism dominated American art in the late 1950s, minimalism emerged featuring artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg is known for works like his White Paintings from 1951 and Erased de Kooning Drawing from 1953, where he erased a Willem de Kooning drawing. He sought to bridge the gap between art and life. Johns is known for iconic works like Flag from 1955 that incorporated common objects and images. Both artists collaborated and helped establish the Neo-Dada movement that rejected abstract expressionism in favor of incorporating objects and images from everyday life.
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03 after ab ex
- 2. After AbEx American artin the late 1950s, Minimalism
- 3. • Robert Rauschenberg(1925-2008) “"Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)" • Jasper Johns (1930-) • John Cage (1912-1992) • “Neo-Dada”
- 4. Robert Rauschenberg, WhitePainting [seven panel], 1951. Oil on canvas, 72 x 125 x 1 1/2 inches
- 5. “I think thatI'm never sure of what the impulse is psychologically. I don't mess around with my subconscious. I mean I try to keep wide awake. And if I see in the superficial subconscious relationships that I'm familiar with, cliches of association, I change the picture. I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested. “ Rauschenberg in 1963. ‘There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain. And I never could I don't know whether it was from my Albers training or my own personal hangup, but I never could see those qualities in paint.’”
- 6. Robert Rauschenberg Erased deKooning Drawing 1953
- 7. Rauschenberg on ErasedDe Kooning
- 8.
- 9. Robert Rauschenberg, Portraitof Iris Clert, 1961
- 10. Robert Rauschenberg -'Canyon', 1959
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- 16. Jasper Johns • May15, 1930- • (83 years old) • Collaborations/cohabitations with Rauschenberg
- 17. • Jasper Johns,Flag, 1955
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- 20.
- 22. • Jasper Johns, DoIt Yourself (Target), 1960
- 24. • Painting with TwoBalls, 1960
- 25. Jasper Johns Flagat auction in 2010
- 27. • Jasper Johns,set for Walkaround Time, 1968 (Merce Cunningham dance tribute to Marcel Duchamp)
- 30. John Cage &Merce Cunningham, Variations V (excerpts)
- 31. John Cage, waterwalk
Editor's Notes
- #4 Robert Rauschenberg: “I think that I'm never sure of what the impulse is psychologically. I don't mess around with my subconscious. I mean I try to keep wide awake. And if I see in the superficial subconscious relationships that I'm familiar with, cliches of association, I change the picture. I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested. Rauschenberg in 1963. ‘There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain. And I never could I don't know whether it was from my Albers training or my own personal hangup, but I never could see those qualities in paint.’” a young artist Rauschenberg married the painter Susan Weil. The two met while attending the Academie Julian in Paris, and in 1948 both decided to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina to study under Josef Albers. The White Paintings of RR at BMC are said to have directly influenced Cage in the composition of his completely "silent" piece titled 4'33" the following year.
- #5 the summer of 1951 Robert Rauschenberg created his revolutionary White Paintings at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. At a time when Abstract Expressionism was ascendant in New York, Rauschenberg's uninflected all-white surfaces eliminated gesture and denied all possibility of narrative or external reference. In his radical reduction of content as well as in his conception of the works as a series of modular shaped geometric canvases, Rauschenberg can be seen as presaging Minimalism by a decade.The White Paintings shocked the artistic community at Black Mountain, and word of the "scandal" spread to the New York art world long before they were first exhibited at the Stable Gallery in October 1953. While generally misunderstood at the time, the works were highly influential for Rauschenberg's frequent collaborator, the composer John Cage. Under the sway of the Buddhist aesthetics of Zen, Cage interpreted the blank surfaces as "landing strips" or receptors for light and shadow, and was inspired to pursue the corresponding notion of silence and ambient sound in music. His response, 4'33" (1952), consisted of the pianist sitting quietly at the piano without touching the keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds so that incidental sounds in the surrounding environment—such as the wind in the trees outside or the whispering of audience members—determined the content of the piece. Rauschenberg's moves in white are part of the grand gesture that his early work strove for and often achieved. His colleague John Cage recognised this when he wrote: "The white paintings were airports for the lights, shadows and particles." Rauschenberg was able to make nothing the subject of a painting in a way that Cage would, after him, make nothing the subject of a piece of music. Then everything could enter in. "Having made the empty canvases (a canvas is never empty), Rauschenberg became the giver of gifts." When the White Paintings were exhibited at the Stable Gallery in New York in the autumn of 1953, Cage wrote a statement for them: "... No subject/ No Image/No taste/No object/No beauty/No message/ No talent/No technique.../No idea..
- #7 It apparently took Rauschenberg one month to get the sheet relatively clear of marks. No photograph exists of the work he erased; It also helps to know that another significant Rauschenberg cohort, Jasper Johns, did the lettering, which states: "Erased de Kooning Drawing, Robert Rauschenberg, 1953." It was a collaborative act; later, Rauschenberg's collaborative theatre work with Cunningham, Cage, Trisha Brown and others formed an essential part of his activity.
- #9 Combine painting: oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 6' 3 1/4" x 31 1/2" x 8" Bed is one of Robert Rauschenberg's first Combines, the artist's term for his technique of attaching cast–off items, such as tires or old furniture, to a traditional support. In this case he framed a well–worn pillow, sheet, and quilt, scribbled on them with pencil, and splashed them with paint, in a style reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. Legend has it that the bedclothes in Bed are Rauschenberg's own, pressed into use when he lacked the money to buy a canvas. Since the artist himself probably slept under this very sheet and quilt, Bed is as personal as a self-portrait, or more so—a quality consistent with Rauschenberg's statement, "Painting relates to both art and life. . . . (I try to act in that gap between the two)." Although the materials here come from a bed, and are arranged like one, Rauschenberg has hung them on the wall, like a work of art. So the bed loses its function, but not its associations with sleep, dreams, illness, sex—the most intimate moments in life. Critics have also projected onto the fluid-drenched fabric connotations of violence and morbidity.
- #10 Robert Rauschenberg, Portrait of Iris Clert Rauschenberg's approach was sometimes called "Neo-Dada," a label he shared with the painter and close friend, Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg's oft-repeated quote that he wanted to work "in the gap between art and life" Rauschenberg's submission consisted of a telegram sent to the gallery declaring "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so." Born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925, Robert Rauschenberg began his artistic career in the late 1940s. Following a series of trips to Europe and attendance at several art schools, Rauschenberg moved to New York and set up a studio in the same building as Jasper Johns with whom he formed a profound friendship. During this time, Rauschenberg began to produce his influential Combines, a term he invented to describe this new art form that broke down barriers between painting and sculpture. After his first exhibition, in 1958 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, Rauschenberg met Marcel Duchamp, whose "ready-mades" and work with found objects had a significant influence on the young artist In 1964, Rauschenberg won the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale 1961, Rauschenberg took a step in what could be considered the opposite direction by championing the role of creator in creating art's meaning. Rauschenberg was invited to participate in an exhibition at the Galerie Iris Clert, where artists were to create and display a portrait of the owner, Iris Clert. Rauschenberg's submission consisted of a telegram sent to the gallery declaring "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so." These so-called "Combine Paintings" ultimately came to include such heretofore un-painterly objects as a stuffed goat and the artist's own bed quilt, breaking down traditional boundaries between painting and sculpture, reportedly prompting one Abstract Expressionist painter to remark, "If this is Modern Art, then I quit!" Rauschenberg's Combines provided inspiration for a generation of artists seeking alternatives to traditional artistic media.
- #11 Robert Rauschenberg - 'Canyon', 1959, oil, housepaint, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, buttons, nails, cardboard, printed paper, photographs, wood, paint tubes, mirror string, pillow & bald eagle on canvas National Gallery of Art (Washington, D. C.) A Combine Painting transgressed the traditional boundaries of a painting by placing elements outside of the pictorial rectangle “I don't really trust ideas, especially good ones. Rather I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown. “ B . In Canyon (1959, Sonnabend Collection), an American bald eagle perches on a cardboard box nest, "feathered" by a pillow hanging below. The bird appears to fly out of the canvas into the space of the viewer. 1954 Rauschenberg began to break down the rigidly held barriers between the mediums of painting and sculpture by combining both mediums into one work of art. He started by collaging photographs, newsprint, and other forms of photographic reproductions into his paintings. Soon after he was incorporating all kinds of materials from the realm of everyday life into his canvases: clothing, urban detritus, cast-off commodities, even taxidermied animals. He coined the term "Combine" to differentiate these works of art from traditional painting; they were neither painting nor sculpture, but rather an indelible mixture of the two. While the term Combine technically refers to works made between 1954 and 1962, Rauschenberg continued throughout his career to produce series of Combine-style works that deployed this strategy of radical collage and combination. This breakdown of traditional genres permitted another important aspect of Rauschenberg's work to flourish -- the slippage between the arenas of high and low culture -- for the works marry the painterly gestures of fine art to everyday objects.
- #12 Monogram (1955–59, Moderna Museet, Stockholm), which displays a paint-daubed angora goat, girded by an automobile tire and mounted on a kind of pasture seeded with urban debris
- #14 Rauschenberg's combines, like the work of his friend and mentor Marcel Duchamp, are seeded with such puns, parallels and quirks of meaning. Like Duchamp, he was given to embedding a kind of ironic lechery in his images—the supreme example being Monogram, 1959. Monogram remains the most notorious of Rauschenberg's combines: a stuffed Angora goat, girdled with a tire. The title is self-fulfilling—it is Rauschenberg's monogram, the sign by which he is best known—but why did it become so famous? Partly because of its unacknowledged life as a powerful sexual fetish. The lust of the goat, as William Blake remarked in a somewhat different context, is the bounty of God, and Monogram is an image of copulation Says Rauschenberg: "We were relieved of the responsibility the abstract expressionists had. They had fought the battle of showing there was such a thing as American art; we didn't have that problem. We were undistracted by things we couldn't imagine, like art collectors and taxes. There was a very strong sense of just getting up and doing something." Nothing could be farther from the truth than the often-raised notion that Rauschenberg was engaged in some Oedipal battle against abstract expressionism. This idea was fostered by one of his best-known gestures, that of erasing a de Kooning pencil drawing. Actually, de Kooning gave Rauschenberg the drawing for that purpose; as far as the younger artist was concerned, it was an act of homage to de Kooning. Indeed, the painted areas of Rauschenberg's combines, with their spattering bravado of touch, are a meditation on the abstract expressionist legacy: they extend rather than reject it.
- #18 Jasper Johns He is best known for his painting Flag (1954-55), which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often described as a 'Neo-Dadaist', as opposed to pop art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture. Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography. In New York, Johns met a number of other artists including the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg. While working together creating window displays for Tiffany's, Johns and Raushenberg explored the New York art scene. After a visit to Philadelphia to see Marcel Duchamp's painting, The Large Glass (1915-23), Johns became very interested in his work. Duchamp had revolutionized the art world with his "readymades" — a series of found objects presented as finished works of art. This irreverence for the fixed attitudes toward what could be considered art was a substantial influence on Johns. Some time later, with Merce Cunningham, he created a performance based on the piece, entitled "Walkaround Time.“ Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media as Encaustic (wax-based paint), and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs. Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject. Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, in the end it could be said that they simply changed subjects. Johns neutralized the subject, so that something like pure paint--painted surface--could declare itself. In contrast to the concept of macho 'artist hero' as ascribed to Abstract Expressionist figures such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose paintings are fully indexical (that is, standing effectively as an all-over canvas signature), "Neo-Dadaists" like Johns and Robert Rauschenberg seem preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols, painted indexically in mockery of the hallowed individuality of the Abstract Expressionists. There is also the issue of symbols existing outside of any referential context; Johns' flag, for instance, is primarily a visual object, divorced from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in-itself.
- #19 Detail of Flag, 1954-55 The story is 'I dreamt one night that I painted the flag of America. The next day I did it don't think I'm gifted; I just think I'm receptive ... I think I have this peculiar kind of sensibility as a painter where things are handed to me and I just use them . . . I suppose I'm lucky in that images just drop in as if they were handed down to me.' By the time Johns and Rauschenberg met in 1954, becoming friends and lovers, Rauschenberg had been to art school in Paris and at Black Mountain College, was a frequent visitor to the Club and the Cedar Tavern, and had been exhibiting in New York for several years. Johns, five years Hauschenberg's junior and with little formal art training, absorbed his friend's esthetic before moving on to develop his own. Leo Steinberg wrote in 1972, "I once heard Johns say that Rauschenberg was the man who in this century had invented the most since Picasso. What he invented above all was ... a pictorial surface that let the world in again."(6) Of primary importance for Johns, along with certain techniques of picture making, was Rauschenberg's conception of the canvas as a literally flat surface (what Steinberg called the flatbed picture plane") which served as a repository for familiar, man-made objects and images appropriated from the culture (what Johns referred to as "things the mind already knows"). Also essential to Johns was Rauschenberg's refusal to depict the human figure except through photographs, tracings and body imprints; Johns extended the latter practice into three-dimensions with his body casts. I said: 'I take it that when you're making art you're often saying to yourself 'It would be interesting to see that."' Johns answered: 'Or "it would be interesting to do that", which is not the same The modern art community was searching for new ideas to succeed the pure emotionality of the Abstract Expressionists. Johns' paintings of targets, maps, invited both the wrath and praise of critics. Johns' early work combined a serious concern for the craft of painting with an everyday, almost absurd, subject matter. The meaning of the painting could be found in the painting process itself. It was a new experience for gallery goers to find paintings solely of such things as flags and numbers. The simplicity and familiarity of the subject matter piqued viewer interest in both Johns' motivation and his process. Johns explains, "There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists." One of the great influences on Johns was the writings of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In Wittgenstein's work Johns recognized both a concern for logic, and a desire to investigate the times when logic breaks down. It was through painting that Johns found his own process for trying to understand logic. Johns' concern for process led him to printmaking. Often he would make counterpart prints to his paintings. He explains, "My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences
- #20 The fast-setting medium of encaustic enabled Johns to make each brushstroke distinct, while the forty-eight-star flag design — contiguous with the perimeters of the canvas — provided a structure for the richly varied surface, which ranges from translucent to opaque. he explained, the imagery derives from "things the mind already knows," utterly familiar icons such as flags, targets, stenciled numbers, ale cans, and, slightly later, maps of the U.S. White Flag" of 1955, recently acquired by the Metropolitan from the artist's own collection, exemplifies Johns's early style, which engendered a wide range of subsequent art movements, among them Pop Art, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art. During the 1950s and 1960s Johns frequently appropriated well-known images (such as targets, flags, and beer cans), elevating them to cultural icons. Throughout his oeuvre — which includes painting, prints, drawings, and sculpture — images are constantly recycled and combined in extensive series "White Flag" is the largest of his flag paintings and the first in which the flag is presented in monochrome. By draining most of the color from the flag but leaving subtle gradations in tone, the artist shifts our attention from the familiarity of the image to the way in which it is made. "White Flag" is painted on three separate panels: the stars, the seven upper stripes to the right of the stars, and the longer stripes below. Johns worked on each panel separately. After applying a ground of unbleached beeswax, he built up the stars, the negative areas around them, and the stripes with applications of collage — cut or torn pieces of newsprint, other papers, and bits of fabric. He dipped these into molten beeswax and adhered them to the surface. He then joined the three panels and overpainted them with more beeswax mixed with pigments, adding touches of white oil.
- #21 The use of plaster casts is an example of another favorite medium of the time: here they are taken from the same model, though carefully rearranged to avoid the impression of a sequence that had been inadvertently produced by the steady relaxation of the model's jaw throughout the casting, thus avoiding the impression of a mouth opening to speak. The wooden structure in which the casts are contained, despite its slightly sinister regimentation, provides another sort of the compartmentalization that Johns frequently employs."
- #22 Collage includes book pages, astrological charts, and other possibly meaningful fragments like “History and Biography” above.
- #23 Jasper Johns, Do It Yourself (Target), 1960
- #24 Painted Bronze (Ballantine Ale) 1960
- #25 JOHNS, JasperPainting with Two Balls1960Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects165.1 x 137.2 cm (65 x 54 in.)
- #28 In Periscope (Hart Crane), the straightedge "device" has sprouted a hand, and it looks as though the periscope is opening onto the blue sea, helpfully labeled "BLUE" in the lower panel. A black arrow on the right points downward. In Pictures of Nothing, his posthumously published lectures on abstract painting at the National Gallery, Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, mentions Johns' "title mania." Doesn't the title encourage us to think of Hart Crane's suicidal dive into the Gulf of Mexico in 1932, after he was beaten up for coming on to a crew member? Doesn't that extended hand suggest a crucifix, an image, presumably, of gay martyrdom? But Weiss—and probably Johns, too—will have none of this. The periscope is a mechanical device, like the compass and quadrant that Crane mentions in his poem At Melville's Tomb. The painting, Weiss argues, is really about "the compound relationship between instrument and body," which in turn "recalls the Target paintings with plaster casts."
- #29 Diver. 1962Oil on canvas with objects (five panels)7' 6" x 14' 2" The 1962 work, on five panels, is 7 1/2 feet high and 14 feet wide. In Diver (1962), his first monumental, multipanel work, and a series of related paintings, Johns turned to spiritual themes. Diver has generally been interpreted as an illustration of the suicide by drowning of the South Carolina-born poet Hart Crane, whom Johns read and admired.(13) The figure schematically represented by hand and footprints at the center of the composition has been identified as Crane diving into a stormy sea. The painting also appears to represent the crucifixion of Christ.(14) In the magnificent large-scale drawing which, atypically for Johns, began as a study for the painting (but was completed after, in 1963), a series of fines and arrows sweep out in arcs to the left and right of the lower set of handprints, so that a spreading of the arms is indicated. The resulting posture is that of an inverted cross. In the Diver painting, the crucifixion image is set in the midst of a dispersed, multipart composition rendered in radiant colors The painting incorporates all of the known themes - a target, the words ''Red,'' ''Yellow'' and ''Blue,'' and angular blocks of color - that the artist worked on in the early 60's
- #30 A set of seven inflatalble plastic pillows that are painted wilth images taken from Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 1915-1923 that were created for Merce Cunningham's Walkaround Time dance performance 1968.