Rauschenberg, Johns & Early Warhol

Catalog description

Artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are credited with expanding the field of visual art at mid-century in terms of content and media. As members of the Neo-Dada group, alongside composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, they charted a course out of abstract expressionism that pointed away from painting as an exclusive artistic practice, and toward a reinvigoration of subject matter that culminated in pop art. Johns and Rauschenberg were both intimate partners and business partners, and their commercial design-work often brought them into partnership with Andy Warhol, who would make his mark as a pop artist a few years later. Rauschenberg, Johns and Warhol were queer men who negotiated their sexualities in different ways during the McCarthy era when homosexuality in New York city was a crime. This seminar will examine the development of each artist’s work within the context of postwar American art and criticism while charting the strategies and codes each artist employed—even the persona’s they adopted, whether it be Jasper Johns, the “Organization Man,” or Andy Warhol, the “Cool Cat”—to locate discursive space in the conformist culture of the 1950’s.