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The Arts Intel Report

John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly

Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1968.

Theresienstraße 35a, 80333 München, Germany

“All of us worked totally committed,” said the artist Robert Rauschenberg, “shared every intense emotion and, I think, performed miracles, for love only.” By “all of us,” he meant his inner circle of nascent postmodernists—choreographer Merce Cunningham, composer John Cage, and fellow painter Cy Twombly. The group came together at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, where Cage and Cunningham developed their strategies of “chance” in the creation of music and dance, and chance further infiltrated the concepts of collage and mark making that informed the art of Rauschenberg and Twombly. In the 1950s, Jasper Johns entered the fold with his own radical pictorial language. This monumental exhibition brings the men back into conversation, tracing their friendships and artistic affinities through 180 works. —Elena Clavarino

© Jasper Johns, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024, Museum Ludwig, Köln. Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln