Outlaw Marriages (25 page)

Baldwin was so disillusioned after King's assassination in 1968 that he ceased his activist role in the civil rights movement and shifted his top priority back to writing. He also left the United States and moved to a farmhouse in the south of France.
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Baldwin was, by this stage in his life, in a very different place emotionally than he'd been earlier in his life. That is, now having published two critically acclaimed novels and two best sellers, he no longer depended as heavily on the emotional stability that he'd earlier been so desperate to find in his outlaw marriage with Happersberger.
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The author's productivity remained steady throughout the next decade, as he wrote four books between 1972 and 1979. While the quantity was impressive, many reviewers criticized the quality of Baldwin's writing during this period, saying none of the books rose to the standard he'd achieved with his earlier ones.
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On a personal level, Baldwin struggled with two realities. First, he was saddened by how his mentor's life had spiraled downward. By the mid-1970s, Beauford Delaney, the man who had served as Baldwin's role model for three decades, was confined to an insane asylum where he eventually died.
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The second fact that weighed heavily on Baldwin's mind was why his relationship with Happersberger was successful only for limited lengths of time. The writer ultimately blamed himself, asking his brother, David, the rhetorical question: “How could anyone feel contentment in the arms of a tornado?” In other words, Baldwin concluded that Happersberger had repeatedly been frightened away by the intensity of the writer's need for emotional security.
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True to the pattern the couple had followed since the early 1950s, Baldwin and Happersberger lived together in the French farmhouse on and off during the 1970s and early 1980s, and they also traveled together to the United States on several occasions.
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While living in the farmhouse in early 1987, Happersberger noticed that his lover wasn't as interested in conversation and good food as in the past. Only after repeated urgings did Baldwin finally see a doctor, who diagnosed him as suffering from stomach cancer.
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Baldwin's health continued to decline, and it was clear by Thanksgiving that he was near death. On his final day, he and Happersberger watched a television documentary about the life of Bessie Smith. The film included clips of her singing, which allowed the two men to relive their blissful days in the Swiss chalet where Baldwin had finished
Go Tell It on the Mountain
. When the writer took his last breath that night, Happersberger was at his bedside.
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America's leading newspapers placed the news of Baldwin's death on their front pages. The
Boston Globe
praised him as “one of the most important writers of his generation,” and the
Los Angeles Times
credited him with “awakening the consciousness of American whites to the plight of American blacks.” The
New York Times
wrote in its obituary, “Mr. Baldwin's literary achievements and his activism made him a world figure,” and then continued in a tribute, “Few writers so define a movement or a moment as did James Baldwin. In the 1950s and 1960s, he gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. His writing roused Americans, black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.”
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None of the obituaries or tributes mentioned Lucien Happersberger or the role he'd played in the author's life during the previous four decades.
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Happersberger stayed in France when his partner's body was returned to the United States where Baldwin's family, friends, and admirers celebrated his life and work with an enormous memorial service—four thousand people attended, and speakers included writers Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison—at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. The Swiss artist then continued to avoid the public eye.
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Expanding the Definition of Art

…

Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns revolutionized the art world. By incorporating popular imagery into their works, they pioneered what amounted to a new category of visual media. The two men questioned the authority of either an artist or the art establishment—particularly the abstract expressionists who'd held sway during the first half of the twentieth century—to dictate meaning. By celebrating images from contemporary culture, Rauschenberg and Johns challenged the fixed attitudes toward what could be considered art and invited individual viewers, by drawing from their own emotions and life experiences, to find an infinite variety of meanings in the artworks they were exposed to.

Critics say that Rauschenberg and Johns created their finest pieces between 1954 and 1962 when they worked and lived together as artists and lovers.
Although this eight-year period represented only a fraction of their long careers, there's no question that their time as a same-sex couple contributed enormously to the hundreds of their works that enriched the visual arts, in America and throughout the world.

Milton Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1925. His father was a lineman for the local power company, and his mother worked as a telephone operator.
1

During his childhood, Milton filled notebooks with his own versions of comic book characters—Mickey Mouse, Dick Tracy, and Popeye were his favorites. He first put his drawing talent to practical use when he served in the U.S. Navy, sketching portraits of his fellow sailors that the young men then sent home to their families.
2

Rauschenberg used GI Bill benefits to pay his tuition to the Académie Julian in Paris and then Black Mountain College in North Carolina. By this point he'd become Robert, changing his name to mark his rebirth as an artist. He'd also married fellow art student Susan Weil.
3

The first exhibition of Rauschenberg's art came in 1951 after he and his wife had settled in New York City. No one who came to the gallery bought any of his works, which consisted of flat white paint applied to canvas.
4

By 1953, Rauschenberg had divorced his wife and was romantically involved with artist Cy Twombly. That fall, Rauschenberg had his second exhibition at a New York gallery, this time the works consisting of solid black paintings. He again didn't sell anything, and a reviewer for
Arts and Architecture
magazine said of his work, “There is less than meets the eye.”
5

Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930. His parents, who were farmers, divorced and abandoned their son when he was two years old. He was then shunted back and forth among various relatives living in the rural South.
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After graduating from high school, Jasper attended the University of South Carolina for three semesters and a commercial art school in New York City for six months, dropping out after being told he had no talent. He was then drafted into the U.S. Army and served for two years.
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In 1954, Johns returned to the Big Apple and worked as a clerk at a bookstore. He spent a good deal of time reading and began thinking about becoming a writer, but he also enjoyed drawing. “I had no focus. I was vague and rootless,” he recalled many years later.
8

Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns met on a winter night early in 1954 on the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. Johns was walking
home from his job at the bookstore, and Rauschenberg was with a friend who knew both men and introduced them.
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They were immediately attracted to each other, but it was Rauschenberg, his relationship with Twombly having ended, who made the first move. This happened partly because Rauschenberg was five years older and considerably more comfortable with his sexuality.
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After they met, Rauschenberg urged Johns to quit his bookstore job so they could work together creating window displays. This freelancing arrangement would give them time to paint, doing the displays only when they needed to pay the rent and buy food. Rauschenberg had been designing windows for various stores, and he was eager to collaborate on the work with Johns. “Bob and I began to get jobs together,” Johns later recalled. “I realized I could do what he did—work only when I was broke and needed money. So I quit my regular job.”
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Rauschenberg suggested that they move in together, but Johns said he wasn't ready to take that step. So they rented two loft apartments in the same building but on different floors. They generally slept at Johns's place because he had a refrigerator, while Rauschenberg didn't.
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By the spring of 1954, Rauschenberg and Johns were supporting each other's creative efforts. “Jasper and I literally traded ideas,” Rauschenberg recalled years later. “He would say, ‘I've got a terrific idea for you,' and then I'd return the favor by finding one for him.”
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This sharing of ideas was critically important to the pair of artists because they faced the Herculean task of breaking away from the style of painting that dominated the art world at the time. Rauschenberg and Johns would get out of bed in the morning and immediately begin talking about what each of them planned to paint that day. “Jasper and I used to start each day,” Rauschenberg said, “by having to move out from abstract expressionism.”
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Artists at the center of that powerful movement applied their paint rapidly and with force, striving to create works in which they expressed emotions that they believed viewers could understand—if they looked long enough and hard enough. Brush strokes typically were large, and paint sometimes was even thrown onto the canvases. Leaders of the movement such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock made no effort to represent their subject matter, arguing that the spontaneity of the painting process released the creativity of their unconscious minds.

The support Rauschenberg received from Johns gave him the confidence to experiment with new techniques. His paintings now were no longer flat but
included shapes extending out from the surface. He created these textural elements—often two or three inches thick—by tearing newspaper pages into strips, adhering many layers of them to the canvas, and then painting over the protrusions.
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Johns's unequivocal support then gave Rauschenberg the confidence to take another step and begin incorporating objects into his paintings. He liked having another surface to work on besides the canvas, and he also liked that a picture reached out toward the person looking at it. The results were three-dimensional and sometimes free-standing, placing them somewhere between paintings and sculptures, thereby prompting Rauschenberg to coin a new term to describe his works: combines.
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He began with small objects such as a necktie and a pad of steel wool, and then he gradually moved on to larger items. One day he was walking past a taxidermist shop on Sixth Avenue and saw a stuffed Plymouth Rock hen that he couldn't resist—it reminded him of his childhood pets. The hen found its way into a free-standing combine. Another memorable piece consisted of three empty Coke bottles standing upright and inside a wooden frame that was flanked by wings on the two sides.
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An example of Johns helping his partner involved a stuffed goat. Because of the animal's size, Rauschenberg knew the work it became part of would have to sit on the floor rather than be mounted on the wall, but he struggled with how to make the goat look like it belonged in a painting. Johns suggested that Rauschenberg construct a platform that would extend out from the canvas and serve as a stylized pasture, the proper setting for such an animal. Rauschenberg instantly took his lover's advice. The work became one of the artist's signature pieces, as well as one that critics labeled a “seminal” work of the 1950s.
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The support Johns received from Rauschenberg was even more significant. “Before that time, when anybody asked me what I did,” Johns later recalled, “I said I was
going to become
an artist. Now that I was with Bob, I decided to stop
becoming
an artist and to
be
an artist.”
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Johns's first step was to destroy all the paintings he'd created before beginning his outlaw marriage. He told a reporter many years later, “I got rid of everything because I wanted to change the form of my thought and the content of my work.” The artist then stopped painting for a few months, waiting for inspiration.
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