As Johns embarked on his life as an artist, Rauschenberg was by his side. After he moved into Johns’s building, they saw each other almost daily. Temperamentally, they were opposites. Rauschenberg embraced the world, was willing to let almost everything into his art, and moved with friendly, easy enthusiasm through the world around him, while Johns was quieter, more reflective but also more critical in his thinking. According to Rauschenberg, Johns was jarred by his companion’s “sensual excessiveness,”[35] and in fact Rauschenberg’s combines soon became less personal and sentimental in their content, a possible result of Johns’s own turn away from personally revealing subject matter.
As determined as Johns was to keep out of his work anything he associated with other artists, he still included indications of his artistic exchange with Rauschenberg in his own work, as Rauschenberg began to refer to John’s work in his. Some scholars think that Johns’s Flag may be in part a response to Yoicks, one of Rauschenberg’s red paintings with striped fabric, and in turn Rauschenberg soon made a work called Bed after Johns made Flag. Most of Bed’s surface consists of a quilt that Rauschenberg attached to a stretcher one day when – in an explanation strikingly similar to Johns’s account of Flag’s creation – Rauschenberg woke up wanting to paint but, lacking materials, decided to use his quilt instead, adding a pillow as the finishing touch to the work. In turn, Johns’s Tennyson, a solemn grey painting, features an expanse of doubled canvas that Johns folded back in much the same way that one turns down the sheets before getting into bed; the painting is named for the Victorian poet whose works include an elegy to a recently departed friend that is also an impassioned paean to male friendship.[36]
Johns and Rauschenberg knew each other’s work and interests so well that they could trade ideas, each able to guess what would benefit the other. Out of curiosity, Johns tried his hand at making a “Rauschenberg” or two, and Rauschenberg asked for the chance to paint a stripe on one of Johns’s flag paintings (predictably, he left an unwanted drip). Rauschenberg brought home a map of the United States for Johns to paint – an apt response to Johns’s predilection for stencils and such familiar images as flags – while Johns provided a solution to a combine including a stuffed goat that had long troubled Rauschenberg: why not, suggested Johns, put the painting flat on the floor and the goat on top of it, as if being set out to pasture. The resulting work, Monogram, became one of Rauschenberg’s best-known combines.
In 1956, organisers of an important annual exhibition in which Rauschenberg had previously exhibited decided not to include new artists. This was a change from the past, when prior participants could invite new artists. Rauschenberg had wanted to invite Johns and Susan Weil, his ex-wife, the mother of his son and an artist in her own right, and when he learned that this was not possible, he included paintings by them in Short Circuit, a combine painting he submitted, smuggling them in and thus “short circuiting” the show’s structure.
Of course, Rauschenberg was not the only viewer of Johns’s work, even at this early stage of his career. While relatively unknown to the coterie of artists associated with various uptown galleries, Johns had a small group of friends who watched his art develop with growing interest and respect. Most important, perhaps, were his and Rauschenberg’s friendships with choreographer Merce Cunningham and his companion, the composer John Cage. Cage had been an early admirer of Rauschenberg’s work, seeing in it important parallels to his own interests. Stimulated by the study of Zen Buddhism, Cage was interested in developing forms of music that were not limited by the composer’s taste, moods and personality, and he would be an important source of inspiration and support in Johns’s decision to make an art that did not depend on self-expression for its authenticity.
Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), Bed, 1955. Combine painting: oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 191.1 × 80 × 20.3 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Leo Castelli in honour of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Art © Robert Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
White Target, 1958. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 105.7 × 105.7 cm. Collection of Steven A. Cohen. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Flag (with 64 stars), 1955. Graphite pencil and lighter fluid (?) on paper, 21.5 × 25.7 cm. Collection the artist. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Johns’s interest in making paintings that could produce sounds through a viewer’s response – in Tango, a small key connected to a hidden music box protrudes from the painting’s surface – would have likely found enthusiastic encouragement from Cage. Like Rauschenberg, the composer was concerned with helping people take notice of and appreciate their environment. Musically, this meant being mindful of the sounds around them, whether music, what was commonly considered noise, or apparent silence. In fact, one of Cage’s compositions, 4’33”, consisted of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence and was inspired by Rauschenberg’s white paintings. Johns’s and Rauschenberg’s relationship also proved inspirational to Cage and Cunningham:
We called Bob and Jasper “the Southern Renaissance.” Bob was outgoing and ebullient, whereas Jasper was quiet and reflective. Each seemed to pick up where the other left off. The four-way exchanges were quite marvelous. It was the climate of being together that would suggest work to be done for each of us.[37]
After embarking on his new life as an artist, Johns began showing a work here and there in a few group shows, but he largely devoted himself to his art, since he had few expectations of finding a gallery sympathetic to his concerns. That would change one day in 1957, when Rauschenberg, who had been without a gallery for two years, had a visitor to his studio. After years as an insider in the art world, Leo Castelli was opening his own gallery and wanted a roster of distinctive young artists who were veering away from Abstract Expressionism. While visiting Rauschenberg, Castelli learned that the artist who made an intriguing painting of a target he had recently seen in another gallery’s group show lived in the same building and was moreover Rauschenberg’s friend.
Castelli asked to meet Johns and see his work and was so astonished by it that he offered him a show on the spot, momentarily forgetting about Rauschenberg. Castelli soon corrected his oversight (Rauschenberg’s exhibition would follow Johns’s debut), but this awkward moment in some ways prefigured what was to come. Johns’s show would be a sensation, but it would also provoke a veritable crisis in the art world. In reviews of Johns’s show, critics struggled to find language for such unusual work and were especially disturbed by its extreme reticence and its refusal to present itself as a direct expression of the artist himself.
This correspondingly put pressure on viewers to come to terms with the work on their own. Most were initially unable to do so, and some reviews presented their authors’ responses as a catalogue of irresolvable choices. “Is [Johns’s Flag] blasphemous or respectful, simple-minded or recondite?” wondered one critic, while another described his work as “pyrotechnic or lyric, earnest but sly, unaggressive ideologically but covered with aesthetic spikes.”[38] Johns himself summed up the prevalent reaction: “Two meanings have been ascribed to these American Flag paintings of mine. One position is: ‘He’s painted a flag so you don’t have to think of it as a flag but only as a painting.’ The other is: ‘You are enabled by the way he has painted it to see it as a flag and not as a painting.’ Actually both positions are implicit in the paintings, so you don’t have to choose.”[39]
This undecideable quality, an apparent determination on the artist’s part to have it both ways, and a freedom of interpretation that actually seems to have provoked a sensation