Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [133]
An example of his openness to possibility occurred one May morning when Rauschenberg woke up inspired to paint but had no money for canvas. Surveying his bedroom, he seized an old quilt and tacked it and his pillow to the stretcher before splashing them with paint. Although shocked Italian officials refused to display the work that resulted (“Bed”), Rauschenberg considered it “one of the friendliest pictures I’ve ever painted. My fear has always been that someone would want to crawl into it.” He habitually bought discount paint without labels at a hardware store. He never knew what color he would use until he pried off the lid. “It’s the sport of making something I haven’t seen before,” he said. “If I know what I’m going to do, I don’t do it.”
During the ’80s, Rauschenberg launched a self-funded crusade called ROCI (pronounced Rocky, after his pet turtle) — Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange — to promote peace through art.
JOHNS: ZEN MASTER OF AMERICAN ART. The opposite of Rauschenberg’s passionate, Jack Danielsswilling welcome of chaos is the cool calculation of Jasper Johns (b. 1930). “Jasper Johns was Ingres, whereas Rauschenberg was Delacroix,” according to their long-time dealer Leo Castelli. Yet the two swapped ideas when both had studios in the same New York loft building from 1955 to 1960. Both returned recognizable imagery to art. They even collaborated on window displays for Tiffany and Bonwit Teller. One Tiffany window featured fake potatoes, real dirt, and real diamonds. Like a Johns painting, it combined artifice and reality that glittered with unexpected gems.
SEEING, NOT JUST LOOKING. For Johns, as for Duchamp, art was an intellectual exercise. During the ‘50s and ’60s he chose familiar two-dimensional objects like flags, targets, and maps as subjects, “things the mind already knows,” he said, which “gave me room to work on other levels.” In “Three Flags,” each successive, stacked canvas of decreasing size realistically portrays a familiar object. At the same time, with its richly textured surface of encaustic (pigment mixed with wax), it is also patently artificial. By contrasting the flag’s impersonal structure to his personal artistic handwriting, Johns gave a new identity to an object which, as with O’Keeffe’s flowers, is routinely seen but “not looked at, not examined.”
Speaking of Leo Castelli’s success, de Kooning once said, “He could even sell beer cans,” which prompted one of Johns’s most provocative works: “Painted Bronze” (1960), two cylinders cast in bronze with painted trompe l’oeil Ballantine Ale labels. Here were disposable beer cans transformed, like bronzed baby shoes, into permanent trophies. Johns challenged the viewer: Are they ale cans or sculpture? Reality or art? “I was concerned with the invisibility those images had acquired,” Johns said, “and the idea of knowing an image rather than just seeing it out of the corner of your eye.”
Johns, “Three Flags,” 1958, Whitney, NY. Johns, with Rauschenberg, was first to rebel against Abstract Expressionism by returning recognizable imagery to art.
His art is a study of ambiguity and metamorphosis. Johns sometimes covered the canvas with crosshatching traditionally used by draftsmen to indicate depth but for Johns a flat surface pattern. “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it,” was Johns’s credo. His art is intentionally oblique, cool, and detached yet open to multiple interpretations.
In 1985, acknowledged as one of the most esteemed living artists, Johns began to make his paintings more personal. He introduced a figure (a shadowy self-portrait) in Four Seasons, a series exploring the passage of time. Although this work has clear autobiographical implications, as usual, Johns’s symbols puzzle more than illuminate.
HAPPENINGS
As part of the Pop scene, artists like Allan Kaprow and Jim Dine staged happenings, designed to take art off the canvas and into life.
Robert Rauschenberg