Some of the most amazing artworks in S.I. Newhouse’s collection are coming up for sale, and of the sixteen works at Christie’s next month, Jasper Johns’s Alley Oop is the one I’d place an insider petroleum futures trade about the reopening of the Straits of Hormuz for. Actually, no, but it is l0w-key the best, even among some greats.
Though it is similar in form to Johns’s two Flag on Orange Field paintings that precede it, it’s based on an entirely different found image: a comic strip about ae thrown-out-of-time caveman named Alley Oop, collaged onto a piece of cardboard, and abstracted with gestural brushstrokes in oil.
The provenance is tight, not because it was in S.I.’s collection, but because Johns made it for Rauschenberg, and it stayed with him until Newhouse bought it in 1988. Rauschenberg sold his art collection to finance ROCI, his multi-year international initiative to foster cross-cultural understanding and appreciation of differences through art.
It was first seen in public in 1964, in Johns’s show at the Jewish Museum, but it is a painting for one person, or rather, for two. Jonathan D. Katz did important work tracing Alley Oop to comic strip references in two of Rauschenberg’s early combines made in 1954—Collection and Charlene—artworks that the artists lived with throughout their time together. Rauschenberg actually used three copies of the same comic strip, from multiple copies of the same day’s newspaper, in the two works. But the twist is, the comic was called Moon Mullins, and it used the original acrobat-related meaning of Alley Oop as a punchline about the reckless things a boy does to impress a girl.
Whatever its meaning—and Katz floats several possible queer theory-based interpretations as he maps out the context of these artists at this moment in their lives, and at this moment in their homophobic culture—Alley Oop was a reference Johns and Rauschenberg shared. It’s an example of the private language of couples that appeared in both of their work at a pivotal point in their practices, when such personal, autobiographical, and expressionistic content was supposedly stripped from their art.
It turns out it’s there, but it was just not meant for you, or me, or anyone else to recognize. And I love that for them.