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When examining art history, we find that many artistic relationships often mirror life partnerships. Partners influence each other, which can be reflected in their individual artistic styles as well as the art that they create together. For example, the surrealist artists Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst had a mutually supportive creative partnership. Most recently, Tanning’s painting Arizona Landscape (1943-47) was displayed in the Entry Gallery last winter. Arizona Landscape was inspired by the artist’s love for Sedona, Arizona, where she resided with Ernst before his death in 1976.
Artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were another pair whose styles reflected each other, though their connection was broken by social pressure and artistic differences. If you examine the styles of Johns and Rauschenberg, many similarities become clear; particularly their use of familiar symbols and everyday objects in abstract forms. After their split in 1961, the artists went their separate ways in style as well. Some of the work of Jasper Johns, in particular, contains elements of grief, such as his painting Regrets (2013), which depicts a colorful figure in a void of murky blues, sitting across from another figure that blends into the muted background. It is a piece that conjures a very specific emotion – isolation in your own life, in your own relationships. One can only imagine that this reflected how Johns felt alone, after such an enlightening period of romance and creative passion. Currently, Jasper Johns’s recent piece, Untitled (2025), is on view in the Entry Gallery. Untitled is an example of Johns’s figurative work. The figure holds a skull in its hands, drawing the eye downward and to the crotch. In the background, we see familiar textures and symbols – the alphabet, wood, bricks, ASL hand signs, and a bicycle wheel. It is an unfamiliar figure surrounded by familiar language and environment, possibly making Untitled a commentary on the human condition and sexuality. It is interesting that these themes linger on, though it may be speaking to the overall experience of being a homosexual man in America, rather than to this particular relationship.
Notably, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and artist Ellsworth Kelly were all influenced by the famous choreographer/composer pair Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Rauschenberg was most influenced by Cage, whereas Johns and Kelly were fascinated by the dance work of Cunningham. Cage and Cunningham had a fluid collaborative style, focusing more on the natural generation of artistic material rather than narrative and form. This is reminiscent of the style used by Johns and Rauschenberg, Neo-Dadaism, which focuses on absurdist contrast over personal emotionalism. Additionally, a sort of dance can be seen in the drawing work of Ellsworth Kelly, whose artistic repertoire includes a series of flowing floral lineworks that revere the plant form as if it were a beautiful body.
Read more about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg below, and see pieces by Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns for a limited time in the Entry Gallery! The Schneider will be closing for an exhibition change on December 14th, which marks the end of our current exhibition, "Modern Language".
https://fineartmultiple.com/blog/jasper-johns-robert-rauschenberg-relationship/
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