Rauschenberg and Johns: Striking Against the Old Guard:
We gave each other permission – Robert Rauschenberg (1)
In New York, 1953, Robert Rauschenberg, then 28-years old, produced one of the most defiant art works of the twentieth century. He approached the well-established abstract painter, Willem De Kooning, and asked for a drawing, which the younger artist intended to erase. De Kooning gave him a piece which he would miss, one which he also thought would be almost impossible to erase. Rauschenberg rubbed away for months, with a variety of erasers, until almost every trace of the drawing had been removed. The result, ‘Erased De Kooning Drawing’, stands as a kind of Oedipal moment, whereby the old guard is literally and figuratively erased by the next generation. It marks the symbolic erasure of the hyper-masculine, ‘heroic’ scene of the Abstract Expressionists by a young gay artist who could never fit into that stifling, macho milieu. Rauschenberg’s lover at this time, Jasper Johns, had the drawing framed in gold, and added an ‘official’ art inscription in the mount-board.
Rauschenberg and Johns met in 1953, introduced by artist Suzi Gablik. Shortly afterwards they moved into adjacent studios. And then they fell in love.
Rauschenberg’s very brief marriage to artist Susan Weil, which produced a son, Christopher, had been ended in the previous year, due to his affair with Cy Twombly, a fellow art student at the progressive Black Mountain College, North Carolina. The pair travelled through Europe on an art pilgrimage, during which they photographed each other. In one shot, in Rome, Cy stands in front of the enormous, disembodied marble hand of the Emperor Constantine. In another, he is snapped sequentially as he walks down the Roman steps, the focus cropping ever more intently on his approaching crotch.
Robert Rauschenberg's photograph of Cy Twombly on the Roman Steps.
Rauschenberg mounted an exhibition with Twombly in 1953, at Stable Gallery, where the gallerist noted that she had to remove the guest book because of the obscenities being written into it. The general public was sensing unspoken queer encoding in these abstract works.
Early in their relationship, Rauschenberg and Johns worked as window
dressers under the pseudonym company name Matson Jones. In a letter to a
friend, Rauschenberg wrote: ‘our ideas are beginning to meet the insipid needs of the
business. Our shame has forced us to assume the name of Matson Jones Custom
Display.’ (2)
They were paid $500 per project and were well-known on the commercial scene. Andy
Warhol, then a highly successful magazine illustrator, would soon refer to the
pair as the ‘staple gun queens’, while they told friends they considered Andy
‘too swish’. (3)
This was a period when any hint of male effeminacy could ruin reputations, and Rauschenberg and Johns were very conscious of passing for straight men, at least in public. In private, and in the studio, was another matter – but even here, any reference to same sex love had to be encoded. The 1950s was the most homophobic decade in the twentieth century. It was not until the end of the 1960s that the Stonewall Riots ushered in the birth of the modern gay liberation movement. Gay men had every reason to keep their sexuality and relationships concealed.
The pair began to make their studio work in opposition to
the prevailing Abstract Expressionists. Those older, aggressively heterosexual artists
had been focused on exposing raw, exaggerated emotionalism through their paint
swipes and drips. Whereas Rauschenberg and Johns introduced a new, ‘domestic’, everyday
element to their own abstract works. Quotidian, actual objects such as socks,
neckties, cutlery, printed fabric, pieces of furniture, taxidermised farm
animals appeared in these pieces. Paintings became sculptural, emerging into
the viewer’s space, or as freestanding 3D objects. So closely were the pair
connected that for several years it is sometimes hard to distinguish some of Rauschenberg’s
work from Johns’, conceptually and physically. Rauschenberg said, ‘Jasper and I
used to start each day by having to move out from Abstract Expressionism. We
were the only people who were not intoxicated with it.' (4)
Johns said, ‘For a number of years we were each other’s main audience, working
on a daily basis to the exclusion of most other society.' (5)
As gay men of this period, neither could afford to lay bare
their own emotional life in their work, as the previous generation of painters
were intent on – to do so would be dangerous. As early as 1951, Rauschenberg had
produced a series of pure white canvases, in which previous paintings had been
whitewashed over, sealing their secrets forever under a blank surface. The
avant-garde composer John Cage, himself a gay man who would have been keenly
aware of the necessity to hold certain information private and silent,
attributed these works as the inspiration for his seminal ‘silent’ composition,
4’33 (1952). (6)
In their studio work, Rauschenberg and Johns did what gay men had done
for centuries – they hid in plain sight. Using in-jokes, ‘camp’ references and gay
signifiers they forged a unique and subversive track for themselves, and in the
process single-handedly became a bridge between the old ways and the fresh,
youthful, camp immediacies of Pop Art, which was just waiting to burst onto the
scene. In effect they altered the course of C20th American art.
The old guard was definitely not amused by what was perceived as a ‘feminine’ or
‘unnatural’ encroachment. In 1959, the acerbic art critic Hilton Kramer wrote
of the ‘breakdown in standards’ in the pair’s work, and, in a barely disguised negative
reference to their homosexuality, described Rauschenberg as ‘a designer with a
sensitive eye for chic detail who shares the [other] window decorator's
sensibility.’ (7)
Homosexuals had long been targeted by right-wing zealousness. Throughout the McCarthy era and beyond, gay men and lesbians were amongst several groups hounded and banned from government jobs. It was believed that they were much more likely to be Communist sympathisers and a risk to national security. Known as the Lavender Scare, it was an intense wave of hysterical homophobia which drove gay people ever deeper into secrecy. Consequently, any work from artists who were perceived as being gay was highly suspect.
It is arguable that by creating hybrid works which were somewhere in between painting and sculpture, neither one thing nor the other, and by rescuing and repurposing discarded, forlorn objects and items that were otherwise unloved, the pair was creating a visual and physical representation of their own state of existence.
In Johns' series of ironic paintings of the U.S. flag, begun in 1954 and numbering over 40 versions, the flag itself is at once a symbol and a surface; both a decorative motif and an emblem; the thing itself as well as what it represents. The paintings forced a reconsideration of the flag, and called into question its cultural/political value, given that a large section of the population did not feel protected under its coverage.
Jasper Johns sitting beneath the first of his flag paintings, 1954.
The following year, working with a similar notion of iconography, Rauschenberg made his work, Bed (1955). Consisting of a pillow, sheet and a traditional, decorative quilt, the ‘bed’ is upended and presented vertically against the wall. The top section is liberally covered with an ejaculatory spattering of paint, and even nail polish. Like Johns' flag paintings, Bed was the thing itself and a symbol of broader sociopolitical elements, blurring the boundary between the public arena and private domestic space. It announced that the previous era of hetero male-dominated, heroic painting was forever compromised.
Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955.
In 1955, Rauschenberg purchased a stuffed Angora goat on New York's Seventh Avenue. In the studio, he worked through several versions over the next few years, finally creating Monogram, in 1959. In this, the long-horned goat stands on a freestanding platform, which is bedecked with ‘significant’ painted and collaged material. The goat’s face has been smeared with coloured paint, in a self-conscious, ironic reference to Abstract Expressionism, and the animal has been half-inserted into a tyre, its tread painted white, which encloses its mid-section. In 1980, the art critic Robert Hughes called the work ‘one of the few great icons of male homosexual love in modern culture.’(8) But by that dawning decade, the general public was beginning to be able to untangle and decipher encoded signifiers that would have been unthinkable just two-decades before.
1. Quoted in Jonathan D. Katz, ‘The Art of Code: Jasper Johns & Robert Rauschenberg’ in Significant Others: Creativity & Intimate Partnership, Thames & Hudson, 2018, p190.
2. Robert Rauschenberg in a 1955 letter to Rachel Rosenthal, an artist and close friend of the couple. Quoted on the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art website: SFMOMA.org.
3. Kelly M. Cresap, Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naivete, University of Illinois Press; First Edition (July 20, 2004).
4. From the catalogue of the National Gallery of Australia’s exhibition, ‘Rauschenberg & Johns: Significant Others’, 11 June 2022.
5. Ibid.
7. Hilton Kramer, ‘Month in Review’, Arts 33, No.5 (Feb 1959) p49.
8. Robert Hughes discussed Monogram in his eight-part BBC television series, ‘The Shock of the New’, 1980.
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