Five FriendsJohn Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly

Visual images, sounds, and movements from everyday life were interwoven to form a conceptual framework. 

While Cage and Cunningham had been professionally and romantically linked since the early 1940s, Rauschenberg and Twombly met in the spring of 1951 in New York. From that summer, they attended the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Cunningham and Cage were on the faculty. The four quickly forged close connections. Cage wrote on the artists and collected their pieces, while they in turn incorporated his theories into their work. Using chance operations, visual images, sounds, and movements from everyday life were interwoven to form a conceptual framework.

At Black Mountain College, Twombly and Rauschenberg collaborated on a monochromatic series of White Paintings that has previously been ascribed to Rauschenberg alone. After traveling together through Europe and North Africa in 1952/53, Rauschenberg and Twombly shared a studio on Fulton Street in New York. It was here that they developed their personal languages of form, Rauschenberg in his Combine Paintings and Twombly in his graffitiesque “scribbles.” Soon afterwards, in 1954, Jasper Johns joined the group of friends. Rauschenberg and Johns worked side by side until 1961 and established a form later added to the canon as “painting-as-object.”

Cunningham’s choreographies place the aesthetics of camp in the foreground. 

The collaborative spirit of these artists is probably most apparent in the dance performances of Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), founded in 1953 at Black Mountain College. Cage was its musical director until his death in 1992 and was initially also its tour manager. Rauschenberg was artistic director from 1954 to 1964, with responsibility for lighting, costumes, and stage sets. Johns always supported him in creating these elements until the couple separated in 1961, and took over Rauschenberg’s position as artistic director in 1964 when the latter fell out with Cunningham on MCDC’s world tour. Johns likewise designed stage sets, including a 1968 collaboration with Marcel Duchamp for Walkaround Time, as well as the costumes for the 1970 piece Second Hand, a homage to another figure of the French avant-garde of crucial importance to Cage: Erik Satie.

Merce Cunningham’s choreographies also express the aesthetics of camp, a concept distinguished by its stylization and exaggeration of phenomena of popular culture; he incorporated dance elements from vaudeville and tap, as well as movements from American football. In the burlesque comedy Antic Meet (1958), for example, a man falls in love with a society whose rules he does not know, and spends the entire piece vainly striving to keep up with the movements of the other dancers (representing the society).

Focusing on these artists’ friendships and creative relationships, the exhibition brings the queer aspects of their art to the fore. The group’s works contain numerous hidden references to non-heteronormative desires, in rejection of the machismo-dominated rhetoric of the Abstract Expressionists. Many of the exhibits reference queer protagonists in the history of art, music, and literature, among them Frank O’Hara, Hart Crane, and the ancient Greek poetess Sappho. The artists concealed coded indications of their sexuality in their work in the repressive McCarthy era.

The work of all five was pervaded by the political context of the Cold War and the increasing advance of technology in society. Rauschenberg was virtually obsessed by symbols of the USA and its power; Johns’ most famous works involve appropriations of the American flag and targets as allusions to national interests and military affairs; Cage was influenced by the anarchism of Henry David Thoreau and was fascinated by concepts of media theory such as the “global village.”

Twombly’s thematization of the ancient classical world in his paintings of the 1960s, seemingly detached from reality, in fact often points up concrete events in political history such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Twombly and Rauschenberg particularly reflected advances in space flight in their work; Rauschenberg’s 1970 Stoned Moon Book was actually a NASA commission, and Twombly’s 1968 painting Orion III drew on plans for a new type of nuclearpowered rocketry.

The artists’ perceptions of nature and art were profoundly influenced by the moon landing and the first satellite images of the Earth from space. The exhibition concludes with works from the 1970s, a time when the five were once again engaged in intense collaborations, building on their early projects and taking them in different directions. Many of these works seem to hail from a prehistoric or archaic era; they combine waste from our civilization with organic material and abandon the entrenched dichotomies of nature/culture, material/spirit, chance/intention.

The exhibition thus traces an arc from the 1940s to the late 1970s: an era in which these friends’ art, friendship, and love intertwined as a crucial driver of their creative output. As Rauschenberg reminisced: “All of us worked totally committed, shared every intense emotion and, I think, performed miracles, for love only.”

With over one hundred and fifty works of art, scores, stage props, costumes, photographs and archival materials, the exhibition provides an insight into the interplay between the five befriended artists.

The exhibition is organized in cooperation with Museum Ludwig in Cologne.