johns, rauschenberg, et al

Jasper Johns Watermark

photo of two open copies of jasper johns artist book in a vitrine, with a thickly printed black cross hatch pattern facing a kind of bodily text by samuel beckett, at gagosian in 2026 — two examples from the edition of 250+30AP+20HC of Foirades/Fizzles, by Samuel Beckett, with etchings and lithographs by Jasper Johns, 1976, at Gagosian

It never really clicked for whatever reason, but maybe it was seeing two copies of Jasper Johns’ illustrated collaboration with Samuel Beckett in the Gagosian crosshatches show; the book just blew my mind. What a gorgeous object. And stuffed—absolutely stuffed—with Johns etchings and lithographs, and wrapped in another lithograph.

Foirades/Fizzles got a lot of attention immediately, and its origin story has been retold over the years, its anecdotes mined for insights. [This discussion in 2025 in Gagosian Quarterly is good, if a bit hype.] There was a whole book and show about it, before my time. I somehow missed how different it is from a traditional artist-illustrated edition of a text.

jasper johns 1972 untitled painting in four parts has two panels at the center with red and black flagstone shapes in or on a field of white flagstone tracery. on the far left panel a cross hatch pattern roughly the same scale as the flagstones in orange, green, and purple. on the far right, a cast assemblage of boards and body parts affixed to a tan background. this painting is in the collection of the museum ludwig now in cologne — Jasper Johns, *Untitled*, 1972. Oil, encaustic, and collage on canvas with objects (four panels), 72 × 192 1/4 in. (182.9 × 488.3 cm) overall. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, via The Brooklyn Rail’s conversation around the 2021-22 Johns retrospectives

Johns asked Beckett for unpublished texts to work with; Beckett’s response was to translate texts he’d originally written in French, only some of which had been published. Johns’s prints used elements of what he considered his most successful painting to date, Untitled (1972), part of his now-recognized process of continuing to explore elements from paintings in other mediums. And he worked with Picasso’s printer, who opened up an etching world to him. The result is its own entirely separate, integrated thing, inextricable from his entire practice.

an open spread from jasper johns and samuel beckett's book foirades-fizzles, with the outline shape of a torso unpainted/unprinted, and the stenciled word torso underneath, and a spraypainted splatter and drip spot that covers it all, except the whole thing is an etching. some beckett text on the facing page. this copy from moma shows how oil from the thickly printed ink was absorbed like a ghostly monotype into the facing page. — Jasper Johns, Torso from *Foirades/Fizzles, Folio 17*, aquatint with so much ink it made that ghost print on the facing page of MoMA’s copy

Ironically, Foirades/Fizzles‘ distinctiveness comes in spite of Johns using a classic orange/purple/green crosshatch print that appears in the endpapers and box lining for at least two other book covers: a screenprint on a 1977 Brooke Alexander catalogue, and a lithograph dustjacket on the 1977 Whitney exhibition catalogue. So maybe I can cut myself a little slack if I’d mostly seen it in artist book auctions looking familiar, and routine, when it was exactly the opposite.

this example of jasper johns and samuel beckett's artist book sold at sothebys in 2021. the grey fabric box is standing open behind it, with a purple tassel pull that matches the orange, green, and purple cross hatch lithograph lining the two faces of the box. the book is open, with impossibly sexy and tactile edges of handmade paper, to a two-page spread print by johns, with a crosshatch design on the left and a flagstone motif on the right. but this is here really for the paper — ed 44/250 of Johns/Beckett’s Foirades/Fizzles, 1976, sold at Sotheby’s in 2021

And as the photo of an edition sold at Sotheby’s indicates, this book is a deliriously sexy object. It is the paper. A raw sheaf of gorgeous paper with an image surprise on every leaf. And I somehow missed until this weekend that the paper for Foirades/Fizzles, from Moulin Richard de Bas, is watermarked with Beckett’s initials and Johns’s signature. Twenty years before Yvon Lambert had Twombly’s handwriting turned into a watermark—for an On Kawara artist book, which is weirder the longer I think about it—Jasper Johns had paper made with his own signature—AND Samuel Beckett’s. I thought I appreciated Johns’s paper game, and I did not.

Cy’s Matters

an almost comically long gilt edged sofa upholstered in pink silk fills almost the entire width of a room in a roman palazzo. a black window or door frame in the center of the wall behind it opens onto a city view. this was apparently cy twombly and tatiana franchetti's sofa in their place in rome, photographed in 1969 by ugo mulas — if it’s 1969, I believe this photo of the Twombly sofa is by Ugo Mulas

Like I said, every Ugo Mulas photo rewrites art history, if only by making us realize every other photographer of the Twombly rooms at via Monserrato decided to censor his sofa.

Previously, very much related: Cyhaus: Bela Lugosi, Bed

Cyhaus: Bela Lugosi’s Bed

the brightly lit salon of cy twombly and tatianna franchetti's apartment in rome has six whilte leather breuer wassily chairs around a large coffee table or perhaps it's a mattress, covered with a recently unfolded, unprimed cotton canvas. a twombly painting lies unstretched and unrolled on the lower fore edge of the composition. the green marble doorway on the right wall echoes the dark warhol painting of tuna fish cans on the left. the two windows on the back wall, on either side of a crushed galvanized steel john chamberlain sculpture, are open to the view of the via di monserrato. by ugo mulas, the hidden historian of 20th century art — Ugo Mulas, c. 1969/70, the Twombly/Franchetti salon in Rome, with Warhol and Chamberlain installed properly, and a Bolsena painting, off its stretcher and unrolled ON THE FLOOR WTF, via *Cy Twombly Homes & Studios*

We still live in a Cy Twombly world Horst built. His European dealers made their own versions of via di Monserrato to live in. And whether it’s to identify works in the background, or to copy the floor, we’re all left poring over the same few photos, a dozen or so slivers from which we try to construct some meaning, to conjure a view of a place and a moment. We make do with what history has left.

Except there’s more. Photographer Ugo Mulas was everywhere in the art world in the 1960s and 70s, taking pictures of everyone and where they worked and everything they made there. Mulas published a couple of books early on, hard to find and expensive; fact is, we haven’t really seen Mulas’s world or processed it. And it feels like every one of his thousands of photos could change Art History forever, yet his only apparent option is to try to sell a dozen of the aesthetic ones as editioned prints.

There are a dozen Ugo Mulas photos of c. 1969/70 via di Monserrato in the Cy Twombly Homes & Studios book, including the one above. There’s another photo of the same room in which the large table covered with an unprimed canvas looks like a mattress. In a third photo, there are instead two acrylic coffee tables covered with photos and art tchotchkes, so the mattress was a choice, or a moment.

Those spindly floor lamps are everywhere in Mulas’ Twombly photos, and nowhere in Horst’s. So is non-Twombly artwork. Warhol, Chamberlain, Johns, Alex Hay, Picasso, the Franchettis didn’t just have an artist in the family; they had direct access to Castelli’s backroom—and a guy who could get it for them wholesale.

But when I say every single Ugo Mulas photo could change Art History, this is what I mean:

a dramatically lit bed with a green velvet cover, green pillows, and a tan fur throw sits on a green wall-to-wall carpet, lit by two chrome floorlamps. behind the bed, a warhol screenprint of a promotional still from bela lugosi's dracula about to bite the neck of a swooning white lady hovers in the blackness. a 1969/70 photo of cy twombly's bed by ugo mulas — Bela Lugosi, Bed

Is this where the mattress ended up? The bedroom is not in Horst, and this Mulas is not in Homes & Studios. The carpet, the velvet, the sheets, Twombly’s love affair with green didn’t start in Bassano. The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) is one of Warhol’s earliest screenprints, which he made himself, on paper. On November 22, 1963.

[a few weeks later update] As I was saying…

This photo of the Twombly sofa is apparently from 1969, by Mulas. Which means every photographer at via Monserrato since then decided NOT to photograph this sofa. They’re all implicated. The Mulas interior shots were also apparently for/published in Vogue Italia in 1971 [not Jul/Aug, Nov, or Dec.] Also, here is a 1968 fashion shoot in Twombly’s apartment.

Previously, related: Cy Twombly’s Homes, Picassos

Hilton Als on Johns’s Little Guys

jasper johns, perilous night, 1990, is a vertically oriented revisiting of the right half of a pair of 1982 drawings of the same name. this one is neater, but still watery. two pages of the score of john cage's perilous night and a disembodied hand and arm print (facing down) sit in a black and grey background segmented by tracery that hints at another drawing, maybe with a sword, probably a detail from the isenheim altarpiece. but the pale green band at the bottom with three stick figures holding paint brushes renders the grey field as the sky instead. via matthew marks gallery, which showed it in 2024 — Jasper Johns, *Perilous Night*, 1990, Watercolor and ink on paper, 30½ × 23¼ in., on view at Matthew Marks in 2024

I really wished I’d seen the show of Jasper Johns drawings at Matthew Marks when I went deep on the little stick figures motif. Perilous Night, a 1990 watercolor, was the earliest of several works in the show in which the little guys appeared.

And I REALLY wish I’d gotten the catalogue immediately, because I just picked it up this afternoon, and Hilton Als had this to say about the stick figures in Perilous Night:

The right side of this watercolor and ink on paper is a replica of a score by John Cage, a close friend of Johns for many years. Cage wrote “Perilous Night” in 1943 and 1944. A composition for a prepared piano, it’s an angry piece whose strong rhythms speak to us emotionally—he was going through a difficult time with his then wife, the surrealist artist Xenia Cage—even as we understand that Cage is asking questions about what the piano can and cannot do. Who’s to say? In Johns’s piece, the sheet music floats against an abstract field made up of vertical shapes that reach up, up, up toward the top of the page. On the bottom of the work, a strip of green field. Three little stick figures stand on that green, gesticulating. Who are they? What are they? Fallen notes from Cage’s score?(Johns doesn’t render the notes in Cage’s score; all we see are traces of notes.) Or are those tiny figures from Johns’s and Cage’s past? Johns’s Perilous Night is an exercise, too, in depth—an experiment that challenges Johns’s famous flatness. One image tells us about another: the sheet music leads us to the abstraction, and the abstraction leads us to that little strip of green. It’s a work that’s giddy with possibility, a kind of “what if” piece. What if I put a little green here? And figures there? What happens to the work? To the eye? To the eye of the ideas?

Prince & Johns: Now He’s Doing My Act

a richard prince canvas is collaged with an irregular grid of inkjet images, mostly black and white, of various prince sculptures, including sawhorses, a coffin, a bone, some muscle cars, a tightly cropped almost abstract image of a black bra on a white back. many pictures are overdrawn with loose doodle like elements, and all are outlined or roughly held into a composition with black paintlines, forming a raggedy grid. untitled folk songs is from 2022 and was shown at gagosian in nov 2025 — Richard Prince, Untitled (Folk Songs), 2022. Acrylic, oil stick, collage, and inkjet on canvas, 63 ¼ × 61 ¼ inches (160.7 × 155.6 cm) © [sic] Richard Prince. Photo: Jena Cumbo Photography, image via Gagosian

I still have to see Richard Prince’s current show at Gagosian, and from the pre-press, I thought I’d be more interested in the sculptures. But looking through the works online, a couple of good-looking paintings reminded me of his hippie drawing paintings, which are works I regularly dig. And a couple, like Untitled (Folk Songs) above, from 2022, remind me—very unexpectedly—of Jasper Johns. And those are two streams I somehow never imagined would cross on this blog.

decoy, a 1971 jasper johns painting, is a mostly black field of brushstrokes surrounding an overpainted picture of a ballantine beer can, with johns's characteristic stenciled color name text winding across it. along the bottom edge of the painting are six photo-type images of johns sculptures, like beer cans, and flashlights, reproduced in paint and outlined in brushy open pale grey strokes of paint. — Jasper Johns, Decoy, 1971, oil and brass grommet on canvas, 72 x 49 7/8 in., sold by SI Newhouse’s ghost at Christie’s in 2023, after being shown at the Whitney in 2021-22.

But maybe the surprise is from the Johns side. Just the other day @digitaldetritus posted an important but underappreciated [by me, anyway] Johns on tumblr: Decoy from 1971. Decoy was a painted variation of a complex series of prints, which were all part of a larger, retrospective reworking of Johns’ sculptures.

NGL, it was the heavily processed mechanical images of the sculptures that first made the connection. But then it was seeing the connective tissue of messy, even aggressively messy brushstrokes extend across both paintings. Prince talks a lot about de Kooning and Picasso, and there are interesting Guston shoutouts in other paintings in the show. But it was less this kind of throwback reference or direct engagement than the realization that some of Johns’s painting rhymed, or reverberated, with what Prince was doing.

Jasper Johns Is [Not] Over Painting

a jasper johns print with an oval-shaped image of a skeleton figure holding a skull at its crotch and wearing a hat standing among alphabet stencils and asl charts, and other johns imagery, all askew as if it's stored in a jumble against a brick wall, which has been overpainted in thin white acrylic, lightening but not obliterating many of the composition elements. a 2025 work at matthew marks gallery — Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2025, acrylic over print, via Matthew Marks Gallery

Turns out Jasper Johns has not stopped painting after all. Matthew Marks’ preview for Art Basel Paris includes an untitled work from 2025 that’s an overpainted print. It’s a mode he’s used a lot, for many years. I think it’s like this one from 2018, with the skeleton in Johns’s image basement.

a 2018 jasper johns print with an oval-shaped image of a skeleton figure holding a skull at its crotch and wearing a hat standing among alphabet stencils and asl charts, and other johns imagery, all askew as if it's stored in a jumble against a brick wall

Johns showed a variety of skeleton-related works, including paintings and monotypes, at Marks in 2019, including, obviously, several works with the Little Guys stick figures. Besides the use of acrylic, the other thing to note about this new painted work in Paris is that it has no Little Guys. And the only conclusion I can arrive at is that I have made too much of a public deal about this motif, and Johns has set out to obliterate them from his work. My bad.

Universe And Little Guy

an untitled 2021 jasper johns work on paper is largely black with a vector map of slice of the universe, a contruction of red and blue dots representing, i think, galaxies or galaxy clusters along threads reaching across space, with a concentration in the center that bears an unusual resemblance to a stick figure spiderman, which may feel more prominent because the trompe l'oeil sheet of paper taped to the center right of the composition is of a lone stick figure with a raised brush, a familiar johns motif, here seemingly drawin in graphite. via matthew marks gallery — Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2021, acrylic and graphite over etching on paper, 16⅞ × 21⅛ in., via Matthew Marks

I’d like to go back to contemplating one little guy confronting the slice of the universe that looks, now that you mention it, a lot like a stick figure, please.

[tbf I was actually looking back through these recent shows from after the CR cutoff, to find out how wrong I might be about Johns only making one alphabet painting by looking for when the sign language alphabet motif came in, and did it happen in any paintings, and I don’t think so, even though I remember thinking there sure was a lot of sign language alphabet in one of those Marks shows, but maybe it’s all in prints and works on paper? And then yes, there is sometimes a very prominent stencil of the entire alphabet behind that skeleton getting worked on by the little guys, but not in the paintings, or at least not in the ones he showed. But after 60 years, Johns should feel free to revisit a motif if he wanted, and making it the stencil tool, not the letters themselves, does help rein in the chaos a bit.]

We Don’t Know Johns’s Alphabet

screenshot of deborah solomon underscore truly's intagram of a snapshot of barbara jakobson smiling with a dark brown bob as she stands in front of a bulletin board filled with clippings and photos, and a smallish square painting of the alphabet with a wooden slat frame, a replica of the jasper johns painting she used to own. rip barbara — “You can guess which one is in the photograph.” via ig:@deborahsolomon_truly

Collector and longtime MoMA trustee Barbara Jakobson died at 92. She was a sharp, funny, insightful hoot. I got to know her a bit when I became co-chair of the successor to the Junior Council, which she’d led back in the day. But that’s not important now.

I also knew her as one of Jasper Johns’s earliest collectors. Writer and Johns biographer Deborah Solomon posted the news of Barbara’s passing on instagram, alongside some magnificent photos. Like the oddly shaped blank ghost on the wall after Jakobson sold a massive Frank Stella. And this photo of Barbara posing with what looks like her and her then-husband John’s first Johns. They purchased Alphabet new, in 1959. She got it in the divorce.

Johns only made one Alphabet painting. Solomon said he decided there were too many variables, and it felt chaotic, so he stuck with numbers.

In 1989 Jakobson sold Alphabet it at Christie’s [for $3.52m]. It has since found its way, through the Edlis Neesons, to the Art Institute of Chicago. So what’s this? A copy Barbara had made when she sold it. And so now there were two.

a small painting of the alphabet stenciled in five rows, in brushy, multicolored, and hard to read strokes primarily of blue yellow and red encaustic, a 1959 painting by jasper johns now in the collection of the art institute of chicago — Jasper Johns, *Alphabet*, 1959, 12 x 10 1/2 in., encaustic and collage on fiberboard, collection Art Institute

This is a whole, underappreciated category of copies I love: replicas or replacements made for owners of the work. Or former or soon-to-be-former owners.

After selling them, Hubert de Givenchy and his partner Philippe Venet remade their Giacometti tables. And their Picassos. And their Miro. And their Leger. Or maybe they just replaced the Miro with a “homemade” Leger? Architectural Digest’s story not quite clear.

As part of the settlement to donate it to the Nelson Atkins Museum, super-reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark got a copy of a Degas that had been stolen from her by a servant, and later acquired by the H&R Block guy.

Isabelle Dufresne’s Large Flowers was so big, (7 x 13 ft) she had to hang it vertically in her living room. Visiting with a collector friend, I asked if he thought she’d ever sell her Warhol. He replied with a laugh that she already had, and that the Flowers were the replacement.

I can’t find it now, but I swear I just read [or heard?] about auction houses offering to make reproductions of works to win consignments.

a small nearly abstract painting on a wood block by jasper johns titled small numbers in color, rows and rows of tiny stenciled numbers in various multicolored brushstrokes of red yellow blue and white, as installed in his show in philadelphia in 2022 or whenever that was — Jasper Johns, *Small Numbers in Color*, 1959, 10 1/8 x 7 1/8 in., encaustic & collage on wood printing block, installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for Mind/Mirror, collection:the artist

And very specifically, though in a sub-category of its own, the small size and dense composition of Jakobson’s Johns Alphabet reminds me of Small Numbers in Color, a tiny painting Johns made for himself in 1959 before the larger Numbers in Color (1958-59) was shipped off to the Albright Knox.

What to make of the unparalleled aspects of these replicas? Their connection to ownership, and their function as literal replacement of the original? Whatever the experience was of living with the work, for the owners themselves, these copies seem to be [close] enough. Which feels wild: that a fresh copy can effectively replace everything except the market value.

Solomon proposed the question of which Alphabet was in the photo, and I have to assume that it’s what she calls the “cheap copy.” But. Every stroke looks like Johns’s original, which, on a painting like this, is no mean feat. Perhaps it’s a photo-based reproduction. I guess my point here is, I’d love to see it.

Black Rain, Gold Screen

a six panel gold leaf folding screen, commonly known in japan as a kinbyoubu, is streaked with long vertical traces of sooty black, left by black rain falling through the damaged roof of a house in hiroshima after the united states dropped an atomic bomb on the city in 1945. the screen here sits within a glass vitrine at the peace memorial museum, and the exterior windows of the museum reflect in the vitrine glass. this photo was taken by bryan hilley in october 2024 and posted to bluesky in august 2025 — Gold folding screen [*kinbyoubu*, 金屏風] at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 2024
photo: @bbhilley.bsky.social

“There is a six-panel folding screen, donated just recently by a Hiroshima family, whose gold expanses are streaked by black rain: the most terrifying abstract painting I have ever seen.” So wrote Jason Farago in the New York Times, after visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum before the 80th anniversary of the US nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Bryan Hilley knew exactly what Farago was talking about, because last year, he’d seen it, too. And when I saw Bryan’s photo paired with Jason’s quote, I thought it, too, the most terrifying abstract painting I have ever seen.

But then I realized we were all exactly wrong. This is not a painting, and most importantly, it is not abstract. The way we immediately read it as such, though, underscores Farago’s larger point, which is that we largely lack the cultural references needed to recognize this object, where it came from, and why it’s as urgent to understand it now as it’s ever been.

This specific error is worth chasing down. The screen does not look like an abstract painting; abstract paintings look like it. Which is itself an overwhelming realization, until it isn’t.

Jasper Johns Little Guys in Print

a mostly black on white jasper johns print is a dense composition of recognizable elements from his work in 1992 and before: trompe l'oeil paper prints of barnett newman etchings and a large photo of a spiral galaxy sit on top of an outline traced from the isenheim altarpiece, recognizable as something figural, or copied, but hard to discern. in the lower left corner is his optical illusion vase made from two profiles of, presumably, himself. on top of the galaxy are printed ladder fragments, a silhouette of a small child, the latter in blue, and inside [sic] the vase, three stick figures with brushes are printed in red against the grey gradient interior, hard to pick out. these elements all match up to etching plates from the seasons, a print johns made two years earlier, in 1989-90, so this is a crossover combo of several sets of elemtns, or series of images. a gift of the artist to the walker art center — Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1992, intaglio & aquatint, 43 1/2 x 53 1/2 in., with little guys in the vase, via WAC

You’d think I’d have taken the hint sooner. Like after seeing the big jump around 2001 of appearances of the three little, brush-wielding stick figures in Jasper Johns drawings—because they were in the prints he was reworking. Or after finding little guys gazing at the stars in the 1997 etching he made for Leo Castelli’s 90th birthday portfolio.

But no, it took finding little guys in Johns’s 2008 Artists for Obama print that made me realize there was much I didn’t know about Johns using the little guys motif in his prints. And it turns out they’re all over the place. Johns is a printmaker who paints, and his imagemaking crosses mediums with the ease Canadians used to have crossing the US border. So I was missing a big part of the little guys story.

Jasper Johns Little Guys For Obama

a jasper johns etching has two horizontal rows of squarish images, like a comic strip, in gradations of grey. most of the panels have an element that looks like an eye or a sun, in space or in a larger circle. the upper right panel has the three stick figures johns began using as an occasional motif in the 1980s, but especially after 2000. — Jasper Johns, *Untitled (from the Artists for Obama portfolio)*, 2008, etching and aquatint, 8 x 20 cm image, 21 x 30 cm sheet, ed. 13/150, selling as a loosie on 3 Sept 2025 at LA Modern [kinda wild that such a low edition number was broken up for parts]

Whoops, missed another one. I might have to check all the benefit print portfolios Johns contributed to in the last 30 years, to see if there are any more little guys out there.

Meanwhile, these little guys are in a little print—just 8 x 20 cm, smaller, even than the Ellsworth Kelly print in the same Artists for Obama portfolio.

a detail of jasper johns's 2008 print for obama comprises the upper right panel where three barely drawn stick figures are in motion against a gradient sky sprinkled with stars. the stars and guys are drawn in line,and the sky is brushed in around them all. feels kind of quick, looks kind of provisional — Jasper Johns, detail, *Untitled (from the Artists for Obama portfolio)*, this little scene is like 5 x 5 cm

And they’re pretty lyrically drawn, too. No stamps here. I assume those are pens in their hands, encouraging people to register to vote.

3 Sept 2025, Lot 310, Jasper Johns, Untitled, est. $2-3,000 [lamodern]
Gemini GEL got 14 Artists for Obama in 2008, tho technically they were Artists for the DNC [moma]
Previously, related: Jasper Johns Little Guys for Leo

Erased Cage Score, 2025

In 1995 Larry Rinder and Nayland Blake organized In A Different Light, one of the first exhibitions of 20th century art exploring the queer experience, at the Berkeley Art Museum.

The first section of the show was “Void,” with works “suggesting blankness, absence, and loss.” And the first work on the checklist—which I uploaded to the Internet Archive because it was somehow not there before—is David Tudor’s 1989 reconstruction of the score for John Cage’s 4’33”.

It’s one of the works which “suggest the emptiness of what might be called a state of ‘pre- being’ that precedes the birth of a new identity. Seen negatively, such works evoke the repressive alienation of the ‘closet.’ Seen in a more positive light, they represent a blank slate of unlimited possibility.”

Cage’s original score for 4’33” was dedicated to Tudor, who performed it in 1952. It was made in traditional Western musical notation, with a tempo and length to indicate the duration of each of the work’s three movements. Tudor gave the score back to Johns when he was preparing another copy, this time in graphic notation, which he dedicated to Irwin Kremen. Then Tudor’s copy was lost, and so Kremen’s copy, from 1953 is the earliest surviving score. David Platzker acquired it for MoMA in 2012.

Larry Solomon’s 1998 essay on the history of 4’33” does a pretty good job of tracking Cage’s various editions, but not Tudor’s. James Pritchett’s website is a clearer exploration of 4’33” and its origins, and related works.

this sheet of music paper is not blank, but contains the first 32 seconds of john cage's 4'33", as reconstructed in 1989 by david tudor, who premiered the piece in 1952, an reconstructed this score from memory in 1989 — the first movement of John Cage’s 4’33” in David Tudor’s 1989 reconstructed score, 12.5 x 9.3 in., via James Pritchett

Tudor’s reconstruction of the original 4’33” score seems related to the differences introduced in published versions. It measured 60 quarter notes at 4/4 time to be 2.5 cm, or roughly 1 inch of score, so the first 32 seconds of the 33 second movement fit on one 9.3-inch wide page. I think that makes Tudor’s score ten pages long. [Somehow Edition Peters needed the Getty’s help to recover this reconstruction for inclusion in the current, Cage Centennial edition of 4’33”. And they still reduced the page size and mooted Tudor’s calculations.]

In their discussion of the show in for their AAA oral history, recorded in 2016, Blake recalls various aspects of the show, and mentions “Void” also containing a piece by Bay Area artist “Rudy Lemcke who had erased a—John Cage’s score for 4’33″.

Lemcke has made a lot of Cage-inspired work, particularly in Cage’s chance-operations texts and mesostic poems, but also involving the score of Perilous Night (1944), Cage’s pivotal chance-related composition for prepared piano, which also coincided with Cage’s pivot from his wife Xenia to Merce Cunningham. But I can’t find any mention of Lemcke doing an erased Cage score. And Lemcke’s work on the exhibition checklist, right next to Tudor’s, is Untitled (Performance Score for Percussion), 1977, which sounds related to a different series Lemcke was working on over several years.

I’ve reached out to confirm, but if an Erased Cage Score doesn’t exist already, it must be realized immediately, because it sounds absolutely obvious and fantastic. [a few minutes later update] Lemcke confirms that though Cage was an influence on his early work, and particularly his exploration of chance operations and graphic notation, the work shown at Berkeley was not 4’33” related, and he has not erased a Cage score. So now I will.

It would complete the circle, or perhaps spiral outward, from Rauschenberg’s early influence on Cage, who felt the White Paintings of 1951 gave him permission to write “the silent piece” he’d been contemplating for several years already. And the painting Rauschenberg gave to Cage, which he then overpainted black when he was crashing at Cage’s apartment.

From a more limited vantage point, this could have been seen as Blake misremembering, when it is clear that artist prophets walk among us, and they were manifesting Erased Cage Score into being. It should not have taken this long.

Twombly’s Warhol Electric Chair

a warhol painting of an electric chair is black silkscreen ink on ultramarine blue ground, with a lot of black. sold by the twombly foundation in 2014 — Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair, 1964-65, oil and silkscreen on linen, 22 x 28 in., acquired by Cy Twombly and sold by his Foundation in 2014

The electric chair paintings are some of Warhol’s absolute best, but the little blue electric chair owned by Cy Twombly is a standout. The Christie’s lot description for the Twombly Foundation’s unloading of the painting extols this specific painting’s heavily inked contrast:

Housed for many years in the private collection of the artist Cy Twombly, it was this divergence between shadow and light that attracted the artist to this particular painting—an admiration bolstered by his understanding of chiaroscuro gained from his detailed study of Italian Renaissance painting undertaken during his time in his adopted homeland.

According to Christie’s Lisa Paulson’s youtube feature, Twombly & Warhol traded works “in the mid-60s,” through Leo Castelli, who also was Italian, with an admiration for settling his artists’ accounts in kind.

[a week later update]

A black and white Ugo Mulas photo from 1969/70 of the biggest Chamberlain foam sculpture ever, on a pedestal in between two marble framed doorways, in the Franchetti-Twombly’s palazzo in Rome, with a tiny picasso drawing of a woman's head on the floor to the left, and through the other door, a warhol tunafish disaster painting of a grid of poisoned tunafish cans, and a breuer wassily armchair as published in Cy Twombly Homes & Studios

I totally forgot that there was a huge Warhol Tunafish Disaster painting in the background of Ugo Mulas’s photo of a massive John Chamberlain foam sculpture at the Franchetti-Twombly palazzo. I feel like a more systematic look is called for.

Away From A Slant Step Theory of Postwar Sculpture

a child-sized plywood chair with a slanted seat, and a back, seat, and front lined in dark speckled linoleum, that was originally created for lifting your feet up while sitting on a toilet to improve your shitting, became an object of fetishized mystery among several generations of male post-minimalist and conceptual artists after it was acquired at a thrift store, is here depicted in black and white on the cover of a catalogue for the third exhibition it inspired, in 1983.

It’s been told and retold enough that even if you’ve somehow never heard it or seen its inspiration, it’s clear that several generations of artists ascribe to the Slant Step Theory of post-minimalist and conceptual sculpture: In 1965 William T. Wiley bought a plywood & linoleum stool with a steeply slanted seat at a Bay Area thrift shop. Installed in the studio of his student at UC Davis, Bruce Nauman, the Slant Step’s nonfunctional mystery and alluring form made it an aesthetic fetish object. It inspired at least two shows in the 1960s and several more since. It got passed around, stolen and rescued, surviving as an intentionally absurd teaching prompt until it entered the collection of UC Davis’s museum.

As far as I can tell, the first time it was publicly recognized as a stool for helping you squat on the toilet and take a better shit was only in 2014, well into the Squatty Potty era. Even so, it’s not clear that later shows have addressed this fundamental reinterpretation of an enigmatic totem as a highly specific, utilitarian, biological tool.

It reminds me of the novel-for-some-mundane-for-others theory of paleolithic tally sticks as lunar or menstrual calendars. And of Ursula K. Leguin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, where human experience can be understood through narratives other than violence and conflict, and motives other than competition, killing, or subjugation. The Slant Step Theory may be similarly narrow and incomplete. It’s not a mystery; it’s just you.

a bruce nauman sculpture in dark grey green resin and fiberglass cast from a plywood chair-shaped box with an angled seat and back, it belonged to cy twombly, then his foundation sold it off in 2014 — Bruce Nauman, Device to Hold a Box at a Slight Angle, 1966, fiberglass and polyester resin, 29 5/8 x 23 1/2 x 30 in., acquired by Cy Twombly in 1969, and sold by the Foundation in 2014

Nauman made Device to hold a box at a slight angle in 1966, with the Slant Step in his studio. It had already been shown twice before Philip Johnson’s partner David Whitney curated it into Nauman’s first show at Castelli in 1968. It went from there to documenta 4, and when it came back, Cy Twombly bought it, in 1969.

The Cy Twombly Foundation sold it in 2014. What happened to it in those 45 years? I don’t know of any photo of Twombly interiors in which Nauman’s Device appears. Did Twombly study it? Contemplate it? Respond to it? Store it away? If a revision of the Slant Step History of contemporary sculpture is in order, who knows what might be learned by tracing Twombly’s connections to and from this Nauman he kept for so long?

Act In The Gap Between Art and Handwriting

bent priorities photo of an example of a 1973 robert rauschenberg exhibition of white paintings at ace gallery in los angeles, where all the text is written in rauschenberg's lyric block text. it's square like some of the paintings. — via Bent Priorities

Sure Cy Twombly using photos of himself on his exhibition announcements is great, but have you ever considered the ones he wrote? In 2021 Yvon Lambert reissued Twombly’s exhibition posters, which is kind of amazing.

a 1972 announcement for a group show at yvon lambert, where all the artist names are written by cy twombly in an extrordinarily messy hand, even for him. — via Yvon Lambert

The earliest Lambert poster is for a 1972 group show, Actualité d’un bilan, which is great, but honestly, is also kind of a chaotic mess.

So when Dimitris, the ephemera dealer at Bent Priorities, says that two handwritten Rauschenberg exhibition announcements from 1973 show “similar techniques for the use of written word with his long time friend and companion Cy Twombly,” part of me wants to disagree. Because I can actually read Rauschenberg’s posters.

rauschenberg's handwritten gallery announcement for a 1973 show at sonnabend in paris is printed on a sheet of brown paper, folded like a newspaper. via bent priorities — via Bent Priorities

But I do think he’s right. Rauschenberg’s mountainous signature had already become a logo, but that looseness began bleeding into the announcement for a Spring show of White Paintings at Ace Gallery in LA. By the opening of his September show at Sonnabend in Paris, it had soaked all the way through.

It’s worth noting that Twombly and Rauschenberg were together a lot during this moment, mostly long winter stretches in Captiva. The next time Bob showed his Early Egyptian Series was in his two-man show—with Twombly—at Castelli. So whether Rauschenberg used some of Twombly’s techniques, or Twombly used some of Rauschenberg’s, will require closer consideration. But the announcement for that show was, of course, a photo of the two artists.

Rauschenberg White Paintings Ace Gallery show invite, 1973 [bentpriorities]
Rauschenberg Early Egyptian Series Galerie Sonnabend show poster, 1973