Category: johns, rauschenberg, et al

Even MoMA lists it as 1960, and they got their copy from the artist in 1961, so maybe. But the exhibition being announced here, Jasper Johns’s first show in Europe, absolutely took place in the Summer of 1961.

I get the confusion, though. Because the poster—most were actually mailers—reproduces a Johns lithograph, signature, date, edition number and all. 0-9 (ULAE 3), 1960, was published in an edition of 35. And whoever got No. 28 photographed it for this poster. Did the Galerie Rive Droite produce the poster, with Johns’s name in his already distinctive stencil? Or was it made in the US? That freeform accent over the Saint-Honoré makes me wonder. In any case, it has a nearly uniform handmade elegance that belies its offset print reality.

Galerie Rive Droite was around the corner from the US Embassy where, in the week after his opening, Johns, Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, and Niki de St-Phalle organized an art-filled performance for pianist David Tudor. June 20, 1961.

Johns sent flowers in the shape of a target* and whipped up a painting in the Paris studio of Alabamian ceramist Fance Franck. Though there was no actual intermission and the action never stopped, Entr’Acte was placed on stage for 15 minutes. Like the Sculp-metal 0-9 collage in the exhibition, Entr’Acte was bought by the secretary at Galerie Rive Droite, Georges Marci.

But was it really? To Google her now, Georges Marci shows up in the provenance of various blue chip artworks, is repeatedly called the “grand dame of contemporary art in Switzerland,” which has to be a self-anointed thing, and is known for opening the first gallery in Gstaad. But I guess people never thought the tapes would be made public, because in her 1974 oral history for the Archives of American Art, dealer Judith Richardson basically called Marci a thief who murdered her husband.

Richardson worked for both Sidney Janis and Ileana Sonnabend, Castelli’s ex. Which meant she worked with many overlapping artists with Galerie Rive Droite, run by Jean Lecarde. Lecarde wanted to open a gallery in Switzerland, and to get around the residency requirements, he transferred all the inventory to Marci’s name. And then she just froze him out and kept it, and he went bankrupt. This is how Arman tells the story, Richardson said. Arman was there, she said he said, when Marci set her depressed Egyptian husband up with the pills he used to kill himself. And then she got all his Coptic art.

Anyway, where were we? Johns found encaustic in Paris, borrowed a studio, and made this painting in like a day or two. While also finding time with Bob to shoot some paintings at St Phalle’s. Eric Doeringer just saw one at the Tate, shot by both Rauschenberg and Johns, and texted me about it. Turns out it was in St Phalle’s show that opened June 30, 1961. A busy summer in Paris.

Previously, related: The Performance Art in Embassies Program
* I have long wanted to see, then make, this flower arrangement, but I can’t remember where I’ve ever seen a photo of it. Somewhere, though. I’ll look.

In her MoMA retrospective, Leah Dickerman had a photo of Rauschenberg painting on stage while David Tudor played the piano. But she also said Johns carried his painting on stage to signal intermission, while Tomkins said Johns refused to go on stage. Both could somehow be true.

I knew I’d seen it somewhere. A closer look at Roberta Bernstein’s chronology shows Johns was booked and very busy in Paris: he made two plaster casts** in Tinguely’s studio; his costumes appeared on Merce dancers June 12; his show opened June 13; Tudor’s performance on the 20th; and he helped install Saint-Phalle’s show, which opened on the 28th. Also, what part of this itinerary did Shunk & Kender plan to be there for? Because it is amazing that they were around for an impromptu concert that came together in a matter of weeks.

** About those plaster casts: they were made from moulages made of the sculp-metal 0-9 and a similar Figure 3 from the Rive Droite show. So a 2nd generation cast. Which Johns used to promptly cast four more 0-9 in aluminum and, in 1997, four Fig. 3 in bronze. I low-key love that this feels like Johns wanting to keep engaged with works of his own that he expects not to see again, at least for a while.

With so much to worry about and so much to do about it These Days, sometimes you gotta just let some other things slide. Like until we get the rule of law back, and the government can’t just grab you off the street and yeet you to a jungle gulag with no recourse or due process, I’m gonna stop getting annoyed by people breaking up print portfolios and selling them for parts. Especially fundraising portfolios, which are sort of a grab bag to begin with.

Besides, this Jasper Johns lithograph, Cicada, is absolutely the best work in the Eight Lithographs to Benefit the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, Inc. portfolio. I mean, the other fellas’ prints are nice, but this is the one that pops out.

Obviously it’s the red. Johns made a whole series of Cicada screenprints in 1979-81, in eight different color variations, starting with the crosshatch classic, red/yellow/blue. And in 1981, he also made two larger lithograph Cicada prints. All somehow have identical crosshatch patterning, with different text format along the bottom edge. In addition to the red on the red stone, I think the FCA portfolio Cicada swaps in red for the black crosshatches that give the print its structure. The result: a lot of red. I like it.

8 Apr 2025, Lot 131, Jasper Johns, Cicada, 1981, est. $25-35,000 [update: unsold] [bonhams]

A lot of Twombly tabs open, as is the custom. After watching Art Institute curator Katie Nesin’s lecture about it, I checked out her 2014 book, Cy Twombly’s Things, an art historical close read of the artist’s sculptures.

Nesin examines at great length Twombly’s practice of painting his sculptures. It’s something Twombly referenced in one of his few artist statements, and which curators addressed, too. I know what they all mean, I really do, and so do you, but it is really hard to read statements coming straight outta Lexington like, “The reality of whiteness may exist in the duality of sensation (as the multiple anxiety of desire and fear). Whiteness can be the classic sttae of the intellect, or a neo-romantic idea of remembrance—or as the symbolic whiteness of Mallarmé. The exact implication may never be analyzed, but in that it persists as the landscape of my actions, it must imply more than mere selection.” And Kirk Varnedoe talking about “the increasing self-consciousness of his commitment to white,” and Nesin concluding “it is white’s susceptibility to contamination that remains the point,” in 2025 and think it all stays neatly contained in the art box.

Anywho, that’s a dissertation for another day. I mention it because Nesin traces the development of Twombly’s practice of painting his sculptures white with a picture of one of the few, early sculptures he didn’t paint white. Untitled (1953) is white on the inside. It’s a tiny plastic box filled with little rolled up balls of paper. Nesin argues that it’s also “derivative” because its size and nature refer to the scatole personali, the little fetish boxes, objects, and constructions Robert Rauschenberg showed in their two-person show in Florence in mid-March. [In a sharp detour from whiteness, Twombly showed geometric tapestries he constructed from textiles he bought in Tangier.] Which, yes, I see the connection.

But there is a closer reference in 1953. In the then-couple’s Fulton Street studio, Robert Rauschenberg filled a glass case with tissue paper from shoe boxes and called it a paper painting. Did Twombly take some of Rauschenberg’s tissues and make them into balls he could keep in his pants? Did they make their his & his tissue boxes together? Whose personal fetish are we talking about, actually? While it’s impossible to say for sure who came first, it does seem likely these two came together.