Gray Alphabets, 1956. Beeswax and oil on newsprint and paper on canvas, 168 × 123.8 cm. The Menil Collection, Houston. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
One early combine, Self-Made Retrospective, made an especially strong impression on Johns. Now lost, it consisted of a shallow box containing small paintings made specifically for the work, each harking back (as the title implies) to a different period of Rauschenberg’s career. There was, in miniature, a painting from the time of his 1951 show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, a white painting, a black painting, and a red painting, all created anew but individually recalling a specific moment in Rauschenberg’s past. Johns was particularly struck by the way Rauschenberg made the Parsons-era painting “from scratch,” reaching back to the way he had worked more than three years earlier to create a painting Johns found “fresh and interesting.”[17] Rauschenberg’s canny act suggested that the style in which an artist’s work was made, like its materials and colours, was by no means necessarily an expression of the artist’s self: no one style of work from the Self-Made Retrospective was more “authentic” than the other.
Johns seems to have quickly recognised that his connection with Rauschenberg was making something possible for him as an artist:
You get a lot by doing. It’s very important for a young artist to see how things are done. The kind of exchange we had was stronger than talking. If you do something then I do something then you do something, it means more than what you say.[18]
Johns’s comment can be understood most simply in a practical way. Making paintings, for example, involved a series of specific steps that ranged from stretching and priming the canvas to knowing how to mix paints to the desired colour and consistency – Johns knew some of this already, but he also probably learned much from Rauschenberg’s example. Johns would have also learned other skills from his window-decorating work with Rauschenberg. Using the pseudonym “Matson Jones” so their commercial work wouldn’t be confused with their artistic efforts, they had considerable success with their meticulously realistic displays, such as Old Master still lifes created in three dimensions with painted plaster fruit or a miniature winter landscape for Tiffany’s that glittered with diamonds.
Yet Johns’s comments also suggest the difficulties he must have experienced in the beginning of his relationship with Rauschenberg, namely that his lack of experience left him struggling to keep up his end of their exchange. To be sure, he contributed to Rauschenberg’s artistic efforts early on, providing the hand-lettered label to the mat framing the Erased de Kooning Drawing, and it may have also been Johns who provided the name “combine” to Rauschenberg’s new mode of working.[19] Nonetheless, in the early months of their friendship, they used Johns’s loft for their freelance assignments: Rauschenberg’s was for “serious” work.
To carry on the sort of mutual exchange described by Johns requires more or less equal footing for both participants in order for each to benefit. Before Johns and Rauschenberg met, Rauschenberg had shared such a relationship with a young artist named Cy Twombly. Drafted into the army in the fall of 1953, he was away when Johns and Rauschenberg were first becoming acquainted but would be discharged in August 1954. Twombly kept many of his works at Rauschenberg’s large Fulton Street studio, where Johns would have likely seen them, and he continued to work there sporadically until Rauschenberg had to give up his studio at the end of 1954, when Rauschenberg would move into a loft in Johns’s building after his own was slated for demolition. During this time, Twombly was beginning to explore the relationship between drawing and painting, but he was also making sculptures from found objects that he then painted white. Their quietly totemic character also has a kinship with Johns’s early white works, such as the box with the plaster cast.
Although Twombly and Rauschenberg worked separately, they shared many of the same interests, and the model of their relationship, their mutual exchange and support, may have also been important to Johns. Twombly had been with Rauschenberg on his trip to Europe and North Africa, and it may be possible to think of Johns’s incorporation of the Bilbao sticker into his own work as a sort of reference to their relationship as a model of reciprocating creativity.[20] Yet something more had to change for Johns’s exchange with Rauschenberg to reach a comparable level, and – given Johns’s understanding of what it meant to be an artist – it is no surprise that he realised the change had to involve his very identity.
Since Johns had left the army, he had been wondering “when I was going to stop ‘going to be’ an artist and start being one.”[21] Waiting for such a moment to arrive in the future had resulted in a strong feeling of being disconnected from his present situation: “At a certain point it occurred to me that I was leading my life right then: why shouldn’t I be doing what it was I was going to be doing right then?”[22] After all, he now had a growing relationship with Rauschenberg, someone supportive, open, and already accustomed to a generously reciprocating exchange with another artist. Moreover, Rauschenberg had already demonstrated by his own example that perhaps the most important thing an artist could do was to recognise that the artist he was and the art he would make were the results of conscious and deliberate decisions. The power to change was within one’s own reach.
Sometime in the fall of 1954, Johns decided it was time to take “responsibility” for himself and his work.[23] He later described the act that followed as “an attempt to destroy some idea about myself.”[24] With the exception of a few pieces that were already in the hands of others, Johns destroyed all the work he had made up to that moment. In addition to creating a new situation for himself, Johns’s destruction of his work was also an extreme enactment of a strategy that would remain integral to what followed in his art. As it turned out, taking responsibility meant something quite specific to Johns:
I decided to do only what I meant to do, and not what other people did. When I could observe what others did, I tried to remove that from my work. My work became a constant negation of impulses.[25]
Johns’s act should be understood perhaps foremost as an ethical one. His childhood desire to become an artist also involved the idea that an artist was “socially useful” as well as being “a good, exciting person.”[26] As Johns would put it many years later, he hoped as an artist “to do something a little more worthwhile than oneself.”[27] Taking advantage of the achievements of others was no way to achieve this goal.
In part, Johns’s destruction of his work may have been a gesture of respect to Rauschenberg, his partner in their ongoing professional and personal conversation, but it was perhaps also an act of independence as well. As such, the challenge it presented should not be underestimated. Johns’s decision that his art should exclude anything that had a place in another artist’s work occurred in the context of a relationship with someone whose art had begun to encompass almost everything imaginable – dripping paint, picture postcards, stuffed chickens, comic strips, and T-shirts.
Given the extremely deliberate nature of Johns’s decision to destroy his work, the act that accompanied it appeared seemingly as a bolt out of the blue. One night around this time, Johns dreamed he was painting a large American flag. He woke up, got the materials he needed, and began. A painting prompted by a dream suggests a process of sudden, impassioned creation, and the fact that he has on occasion described the painting’s support as being a sheet heightens the sense of quick and decisive action in the grips of awakened inspiration. However, this impression is contradicted by the fact that Flag is not the continuous