Episode #112: Modern Love--Robert Rauschenberg, with Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns (Season 13, Episode 5)
Listeners, I heard you—a bunch of self-admitting hopeless romantics who wanted to hear more about people bound by attraction, fascination. By love. Though there are examples of romantic and sexual relationships between creators that are sprinkled throughout art history as we know it, it’s true that we have the most information about relationships from folks who lived in the last century—because we have greater access to documentation recording the lives of these people, and because, as the 20th century progressed, people—artists, perhaps especially—became more vocal about their relationships, less inhibited. Modern artists, artists especially from the first half of the 20th century, lived their art, and their relationships, out loud-- writing about them, talking about them, and sometimes even creating works of art about them.
This season, I’m rounding up stories about modern artists in love, in lust, in relationships— digging into these individuals, see how their liaisons, marriages, affairs, and connections played in or on their respective works of art, and how, if anything, they affected art history as we know it. I, for one, believe that it’s time for Modern Love.
Today: we’re homing in on the love affairs of Robert Rauschenberg, moving from Cy Twombly and on to Jasper Johns—a series of relationships that lasted only briefly, but whose effects on modern art are still felt to this day.
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Episode Credits:
Research by Madison Jones. Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Theme music by Alex Davis. Additional music by Storyblocks. Logo by Vaulted.co.
ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.
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Episode Transcript
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I often share the story of my experiences with art and artmaking when I was a kid. And by my experiences, I mean: I hardly had any, with the exception of one pretty terrible art teacher when I was in middle school. That art teacher was so bad, so demanding, that she took all the fun out of art. And for me, someone who already wasn’t all that interested in art, that was a big deal. It turned me off of art even further than I already was, and that intensely negative feeling stayed with me for almost a decade, all the way until I found myself (against my hopes) in my very first art history class in college. The gist of this story is one that, I think, many of us can understand: that a person, like an art teacher, passes through our lives, or an event, however fleeing, occurs—and then the ramifications last for a long while—even decades. Throw an important relationship into the mix, whether it be professional, platonic, romantic, or more, and the stakes are suddenly that much higher. Relationships don’t always last—until they do, if they do at all. But the ramifications of those relationships—they can change you. And in some cases, they can also affect the course of art history itself.
Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. ArtCurious Season 13 is all about Modern Love, and today we’re homing in on the love affairs of Robert Rauschenberg, moving from Cy Twombly and on to Jasper Johns—a series of relationships that lasted only briefly, but whose effects on modern art are still felt to this day. This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.
I’m starting our story today not with Robert Rauschenberg, but with Cy Twombly. Edwin Parker Twombly Jr., who went by the nickname of “Cy,” like his father before him, was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia. His dad, Cy Senior, had been a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, and his nickname—and subsequently, his son’s nickname-- was an homage to Cy Young, another great American pitcher. Little Cy, though, didn’t follow in his dad’s footsteps into the major leagues. Instead, after graduating high school in 1947, Cy moved to Boston to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he stayed for two years, growing interested first and foremost in the art of the Surrealists and the Dadaists. But that wasn’t his initial influence for long. In 1950, Twombly moved to New York City and began to study at the famed Art Students League. Suddenly exposed to so many new artists, so many new ideas and new directions—especially when it came to abstraction—it’s no wonder that Twombly’s own aesthetic began to change.
The Art Students League was a turning point to more than just his work. This was also where he met the one, the only, Robert Rauschenberg, in the spring of 1951. Three years older and a little worldlier, Rauschenberg hailed from Port Arthur, Texas, where he was born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in October 1925 (he would change his name to “Robert” in the 1940s). After dropping out of college, he was drafted into the U.S. Navy, a stint in which he served as a neuropsychiatric technician for at least one year. After that, it was time, finally, for art: first at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri, and then all the way to the incredibly famous Académie Julian in Paris, before heading back to the U.S. alongside his girlfriend, artist Susan Weil, to attend… duh da duh!... Black Mountain College. I truly feel like Black Mountain has a great supporting role in this season because this is the third episode now where we’ve talked about this one-of-a-kind place, and if that doesn’t convince you of just how important that school was to the development of modern art, then we are going to have to agree to disagree, my friend.
Anyway. In 1949, Rauschenberg and Weil moved to New York, where he and Weil both enrolled at the Art Students League. By the time Cy Twombly came along, Rauschenberg and Weil had married. Their son, Christopher, would be born the following year.
Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg became fast friends and true parallels to one another, matching in ambition and wit. Both New York outsiders were raised in the South, both excited about the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement, and were drawn to experimental art education and, well, just experimentation in general. Not long after they met, Rauschenberg convinced Twombly that Black Mountain was the place to be, so the two of them hopped back down to North Carolina for the summer of 1951. Rauschenberg’s wife, Susan, was heavily pregnant and stayed behind in New York. It was a truly heady time—when changemakers not just in art, but also music and dance, like John Cage and Merce Cunningham, were teaching there. And it was a time made even headier because this is most likely when Rauschenberg and Twombly began having an affair. This was wonderful! And this was terrible, because Rauschenberg loved Twombly, and he loved Susan. So when Susan visited Black Mountain to show off the couple’s newborn baby, she learned about the affair between the two men. Distraught, she high-tailed it back to New York with Rauschenberg, who tried to patch things up with her—but alas, it was not to be. The couple divorced in either 1952 or 1953—even credible sources that I’ve found seem to disagree on this one.
This did leave Rauschenberg free to explore his relationship with Cy Twombly, though. And they were about to have an incredible opportunity to do so. In 1952, Twombly won a travel grant via the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which he would go on to use for an eight-month journey through Italy and down into Morocco. But he wouldn’t go alone. He asked Robert Rauschenberg to join him, and Rauschenberg agreed. That’s coming up next. Right after this quick ad break—remember that you can join us over on Patreon for a few bucks a month and get this show ad-free: patreon.com/artcurious.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
If I could recommend just one article to read about Rauschenberg and Twombly’s relationship, it would be a 2018 deep dive into this European and North African excursion in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. In it, the author Tom Delavan writes that not only was this trip a turning point for the careers of both of these artists, it also is the turning point for the direction of “American art in the second half of the 20th century.” And that’s a pretty big statement. To understand how and why that might be the case, let’s get into that trip and what happened therein. As Delavan notes in his excellent article, the first couple of months found the two men in Palermo, Sicily before moving to the Italian mainland and up to Rome, and there wasn’t a lot of art to be made at this point. It was all about absorbing the place, the moment, and probably each other, taking pictures and most likely acting the part of the tourist, since neither Twombly nor Rauschenberg had visited Italy before. What’s curious, though, is knowing how their travels would affect the disparate directions both artists would take. Twombly became immersed in the ancient surroundings, sculptures, and symbolism of Rome, uncovering a fascination that would play out in his works throughout his long career. Later, in Tangier, while Rauschenberg found inspiration in everyday items like old shoes or a random twig, or in the unexpected combination of items, like a bright modern spray paint graffiti upon an old ruin. Twombly began sketching prolifically, making scratchy drawings that seem like they might mean something—a series of hieroglyphs, perhaps—but didn’t seem to mean much on the surface. To Delavan, these sketches became what he called, quote, “a kind of first draft of the artist’s later painting career. For his part, Rauschenberg got heavy into found objects and found images, making collage after collage, moving forward toward what would eventually become one of his career trademarks: his so-called “Combines.” I wonder if either man knew that this was an important moment in their artistic lives, the sign of the new direction.
Not that this new direction was a smooth one (though when are new directions, I guess, right?). When the artists finished their Euro-African trip, they received the opportunity to show their works at a joint exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York City, run by Eleanor Ward. But it did not go well. Response from both critics and visitors was bad, so bad that Ward had to remove the visitor comment book from the show after hostile commentary toward the work of art therein. Rauschenberg had additional shows that year in Rome and Florence, showcasing the assemblage and found image works he’d created in Morocco, and those exhibitions went equally badly. It was clear that both artists had struck upon something—something new, something different—but that viewers weren’t quite ready for them. In retrospect, it’s interesting to see some of the ways that the artists influenced each other. Some ways are easy to spot, like the aesthetic differences of preferring black-and-white over bold color. Speaking of black-and-white, the early 1950s brought forth one of Rauschenberg’s most acclaimed series, his so-called “White Paintings,” which ended up being incredibly controversial at the time, and one which counted Cy Twombly among its creators-slash-collaborators. The “White Paintings” are just as advertised: an array of canvases that were painted completely white. Rauschenberg requested Twombly, and several other friends, to paint canvases with bright white house paint using a roller, basically making the work as flat and nondescript as possible. Could a viewer tell the difference between a canvas painted white by Twombly’s hands? What about one painted by his studio assistant, fellow artist Brice Marsden? In fact, you really can’t—and that was the whole point. Rauschenberg was interested in erasing signs of the artist’s hand, creating something in absolute contrast to the overwhelming individualism of Abstract Expressionism.
Twombly, eventually, would move in the opposite direction. In 1953, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he spent the following year as a cryptographer. In his off hours, Twombly engaged in something he called “blind drawings,” sitting in a dark room and allowing his pen or pencil to take the lead—unable to see what he was creating, Twombly would then find himself creating strangely curved and distorted forms, all done by hand—as expressionistic and individualistic as Rauschenberg’s works were blank slates. It would be a hallmark of Twombly’s works for years to come.
Whether or not the timing coincided with Twombly's enlistment is a big question, but we do know one thing for certain: Rauschenberg and Twombly ended their romantic relationship later in 1953. What’s wonderful is that the two remained lifelong friends, traveling together again years later and keeping in close touch. In 1957, Twombly, traveling again through Italy, met the Baroness Tatiana Franchetti, a fellow artist, whom he married two years. Franchetti and Twombly remained the closest of friends, sharing a son, Cyrus Alessandro Twombly, born in 1959. Both artists preferred independent lives, though, and remained happily married but sought relationships outside of their partnership. And for his part, Twombly chose Nicola del Roscio, a young Italian man nearly twenty years his junior, as his confidant and caretaker until his final days.
But let’s go back to 1953 for a second, with the end of the romance between Twombly and Rauschenberg. Later that year, Rauschenberg’s life was shaken by a new arrival: a new love, a new challenger, a new partner. And if his relationship with Twombly had been something special, this one was even more life changing. In late 1953, Rauschenberg first met Jasper Johns.
Born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns—the baby of our trio today—was into art when he was a kid, taking up drawing when he was still quite young, but he didn’t consider art as anything more than a pastime until he reached college. At the University of South Carolina, where he enrolled in 1947, his teachers encouraged him that if art was what he wanted to do, then of course he needed to go to New York. So he did—he transferred to the Parsons School of Design in the city, but other than that, he had no real sense of what it meant to be a working artist—nor even how to go about it. So he dropped out. And when he was drafted during the Korean War in the early ‘50s, he let matters slide. Art went on the serious backburner as he shuffled between Florida and Japan over the next two years. But after he was honorably discharged in 1953, back to New York he went—and that’s when his fortunes changed. He met Robert Rauschenberg, and it changed his life forever. We’ll get to all that right after another break. Come right back.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg began their time together as friends first, spending time casually before beginning their romantic relationship in 1954. The relationship was not only a formidable one on a personal level, but—for Johns especially—a hugely important professional one. Though Rauschenberg hadn’t yet met with artistic success, he was still wonderfully connected within the art world and beyond, and thus the associations and arrangements he made for Jasper Johns were priceless. Rauschenberg introduced Johns to Leo Castelli, his gallerist. He introduced him to his pals Merce Cunningham and John Cage (and Cage, by the way, delightfully deemed the pair “The Southern Renaissance” for their shared geographic history and their artsy experimentation—a designation that seems like it could just have easily been applied to Rauschenberg’s partnership with Cy Twombly). Inspired by Cage’s ideas of chance encounters, he, like Rauschenberg, and like many others during this period, adopted something more akin to Dada and Surrealism—art movements of the early 20th century—than to Abstract Expressionism. About this Rauschenberg later proclaimed, quote, “Jasper and I used to start each day by having to move out from Abstract Expressionism. We were the only people who were not intoxicated with [them].” Unquote.
But Surrealist experiments, the kind that was in vogue a couple of decades prior? They were intoxicated with them. A random assortment of items could become a collage, an assemblage, Johns learned. As Rauschenberg began exploring his concept of “combines” further, Johns did so, too. And by no means was he shy about admitting this—in 1955, Johns and Rauschenberg had moved into the same building, occupying artist studios right atop one another. This proximity meant that the two men flitted darted back and forth between the two studios, watching one another work, challenging each other, and coming up with ideas together. As Johns later noted to Rauschenberg’s biographer, Calvin Tomkins, quote, “We were very close and considerate of one another, and for a number of years we were each other’s main audience. I was allowed to question what he did, and he could question what I did.” Unquote.
One wonders how much of an effect Rauschenberg’s history-making work from 1955, titled Bed, had on Jasper Johns. I’d have to think that considering the timing and their professional and personal links that it would have been rather significant. It’s hard, sometimes, to explain the importance of Bed to someone new to the art world, because it seems simple on the surface—just like abstract expressionist works sometimes seem simple on the surface, and “simple” is sometimes seen as synonymous with “shallow” or “unimportant.” Not so here. Bed isn’t actually a bed—it’s an approximation of one, a kind of visual joke. Comprised mainly of a large-wall mounted piece of wood, Rauschenberg then attached a quilt, sheets, and a pillow to the wooden support before splashing it with paint and scrawling ink across its surface—scrawl, by the way, that many art historians have noted as strikingly similar to Cy Twombly’s own. It’s like a perfect little mix of Rauschenberg’s combines and a sly, knowing wink to AbEx painting, all with a sense of humor. It would go on to be a sensation, and is, still, one of those big-moments-in-modern-art pieces. It’s a sculpture and a painting. It lives in this middle realm between Pop and Abstraction. It's an intimate self-portrait of the artist—works bearing his own bedding—without actually showing the artist’s face. It’s what it seems, and yet so much more than it seems.
Some of the artists we’ve covered thus far during this “Modern Love” season of ArtCurious lived that gorgeous happily-ever-after fairy tale—or at least they stayed committed to one another in some form for years and years. I’m thinking especially of Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight here, or Anni and Josef Albers. But in an age where same-sex marriage was decades away from legalization and widespread acceptance, an official-on-paper partnership between Rauschenberg and Twombly was pretty much out of the question, so we aren’t to expect that kind of pat and rather infantilizing happy ending here. But unfortunately, we don’t get a cheery long-term partnership in this case, either. And some of that might have to do with Jasper Johns’s rising star. In 1957, the artist had a banner year, an explosion of sales and publicity stemming from a one-two punch of landing the cover of ArtNews magazine (still one of the top art magazines in the U.S. today), and the purchase of three of his works by the Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA. While this was incredibly great news, it actually came as a surprise to Johns… and to Rauschenberg. The story goes that it led to tension between the two men, and over the next year, they gradually moved further and further away, emotionally, from one another. By 1959, the men only saw each other intermittently, and by 1960, their romantic pairing was over.
We don’t know much about the end of their relationship, as both men were understandably wary about discussing it—again, see my previous notes about the lack of support for same-sex relationships at this time—but we do know that it was intense and rocky. Both of them, though, had their work to fall back upon. Johns’ style, moving toward what we would now describe as “Pop Art,” began to be defined by a bright and colorful palette. His most famous series, known as his Flag series, presents your typical American flag that—just like Bed—is anything but what you’d expect right off the bat. Take Flag, from around 1955, the same year as Bed and both now in the collection at MoMA. It trades in the everyday—a concept that we, as Americans, see all the time. It represents so much—liberty, a love of country, and more complicated feelings, too. As curators at MoMA have noted, the flag could also represent McCarthyism and the so-called “Red Scare” of the 1950s, spurred on by a fear of communism; it is a reminder of war—first the Korean War, and, later, Vietnam. Each of his flags, each a little different—some scraped with palette knives, some with the flag itself almost barely visible. But each time, there’s an ambiguity there, leading to an understanding—or an interpretation—that is different for each of us. And that ambiguity is one of the greatest things about a Jasper John work. It is interesting to note, by the way, that one of Johns’ first flags had a backing made out of a cut piece of bedsheet. So, yeah. I think I’ll go ahead and answer my own question—I think that we can point to ways in which Jasper Johns received inspiration both direct and indirect from his lover, Robert Rauschenberg.
For Rauschenberg, he of course did find his way into the art history textbooks, with Bed and his other “Combines” taking precedent. Those works, like those of Jasper Johns, also traffic in the ambiguous: he created sculptural pieces that are at once highly personal (like Bed) but also keep the viewers at a distance. There’s a coolness in his works, and I don’t mean that negatively: I simply mean that he invites us in, as viewers, but also holds us back from truly understanding the artist behind the works. And that was just fine with him. Rauschenberg worked steadily throughout his career, enjoying several career highs. He continued to collaborate with his lifelong friends, Merce Cunningham and John Cage; he spent an entire summer working alongside the French artist Nikki de Saint-Phalle. And he carried on spending time with his equally great friend, Cy Twombly. And like Twombly, Rauschenberg spent the remainder of his life with a long-term partner, the artist Darryl Pottorf.
Admittedly, it took Twombly a little longer than Johns and Rauschenberg to reach that big-name status, but he did get there. In T, the New York Times Magazine, Tom Delavan hypothesizes that Twombly suffered from a bias in mid-1960s America that prioritized macho, counterculture and definitely anti-war men. Twombly was not that. When he was profiled in an article for Vogue magazine in 1966, he came across as what Delevan calls, quote “a charmed expatriate with a wealthy wife… effete: anti-American and, worse, unmodern.” Unquote. He just wasn’t edgy and cool the way that Johns and Rauschenberg were, but with the dawn of the 1980s, super brushy, expressionistic painting became hot again. And thus, so did Cy Twombly. Pieces like 1962s Leda and the Swan suddenly became so much more popular, and Twombly grew to art god status. Leda, another work within the Museum of Modern Art’s prodigious collection, is a lyrical abstraction referencing the old Greco-Roman myth wherein the god Jupiter seduces the human princess Leda. But this isn’t like a Renaissance painting that represents the scene so traditionally. It's an explosion of the myth, less about what it presents to us and more about how the story might make us feel. Like Abstract Expressionist works, it feels casual, cast-off, just a bunch of scribbles and doodles. But like AbEx, too, it is intricately planned, filled with small references to the symbols of the myth itself. It’s AbEx but moved to the next level through its freedom of gesture. Of Twombly, the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wisely noted, quote, "the crux of his achievement was not so much to overturn [Abstract Expressionism]," ... but to connect Abstract Expressionism to other forms of culture." Unquote. And I couldn’t agree more.
Though we’ve talked about three key figures in modern art today, it’s clear that the linchpin here is Rauschenberg. It’s Rauschenberg whom Twombly and Johns both loved, but other than running around the same small world of art, sharing the same art dealer—Leo Castelli— and certainly being familiar with one another and each other’s works, there didn’t seem to be much of a friendship between Johns and Twombly. It was Rauschenberg that they orbited, Rauschenberg who formed a center for at least a part of each man’s life. What’s both surprising, and not surprising at all, is how little these men’s personal relationships is mentioned in many traditional outlets. From gallery labels to exhibition catalogues to critical reviews, only a smattering here and there mention the love between Rauschenberg and Twombly, and then Rauschenberg and Johns. Or if any of the men are mentioned in the same breath, it’s via vague or potentially coded phrases, like calling them “close friends.” But these men were in homosexual relationships, and though they weren’t out in the way that many people are today, they weren’t necessarily hiding the fact, either, at least not with those within their closest circles. Again, this has a lot to do with the era in which these men’s careers skyrocketed and isn’t a judgment upon them as individuals. But to me, denying the romantic relationships that Rauschenberg had with Twombly and Johns also minimizes the impact that he experienced in his career, too, thanks to his partners. With Twombly, he grew, traveling the world and edging closer and closer to those history-making Combines. With Johns, he found a challenging sounding board that pushed him into his most mature creative period. Together and apart, these three charted a course that bridges the gaps between Abstraction and Pop, between painting and sculpture, between classical and modern. They changed what a segment of American art looked like—just as they changed each other.
Next time on ArtCurious, we’re featuring two photographers inspired by Surrealism—and let me just tell you, I fell hard for one of these artists, and I can’t wait to share her works with you.
That’s coming up in two weeks. Don’t miss it. Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal. HUGE thanks to Madison Jones for her writing and research help for this episode. The ArtCurious theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, and our podcast is co-produced by Kaboonki - podcasts, creative video, and more. Subscribe to their show, Subgenre, a podcast about the movies, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at subgenrepodcast.com. Kaboonki: Leave your mark. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space, Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com.
The ArtCurious Podcast is also fiscally sponsored by VAE Raleigh, a 501c3 nonprofit creativity incubator, which means you can donate tax-free to ArtCurious to show your support, and you can join us at Patreon for the price of a cup of coffee. Check back with us soon as we explore some of the most unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful Modern art lovers in art history.
