Outlaw Marriages (26 page)

Rauschenberg helped him recognize that inspiration when it finally came. One morning in 1954, Johns casually mentioned to his partner that he'd had a “crazy” dream the previous night. When Rauschenberg asked for details,
Johns replied, “I was painting the American flag.” Rauschenberg didn't think the dream was crazy at all, telling his partner, “That's a really great idea.” And so Johns immediately went to his studio and began work on his first flag painting.
21

Based on the image of an American flag stretched across a canvas with the paint extending all the way to the edge with no border, Johns's work appeared to be simple. On another level, though, it was complex: was it a flag or did it just
look like
a flag? Should viewers who see it stand up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or should they approach it as pure abstraction, a rectangle holding bands of color and a cluster of stars? Like many of the pieces Johns did after it, the painting blurred the line between artwork and the object it depicted, raising fundamental questions about reality and perception.
22

After creating several paintings that featured flags and hearing enthusiastic words of support from Rauschenberg, Johns moved on to other subjects. He created works featuring the alphabet, then archery targets, and then the numbers 0 through 9. What all these items had in common, Johns later said, was that they were “things which are seen but not looked at.”
23

Leo Castelli, who owned a Manhattan art gallery, had known Rauschenberg casually for several years. On a rainy Sunday afternoon in 1957, he climbed the stairs to the artist's fourth-story loft to look at his combines.
24

After Castelli saw Rauschenberg's work, the artist insisted upon taking him down one flight so he could see what Johns had been doing. The gallery owner later recalled his first reaction. “I saw evidence of the most incredible genius—entirely fresh and new and not related to anything else,” Castelli said. “It was like the sensation you feel when you see a very beautiful girl for the first time, and after five minutes you want to marry her.” Castelli instantly offered to do a one-man show for Johns, though he didn't extend such an offer to Rauschenberg.
25

Johns's show in January 1958 hit the art world like a meteor. The city's most important art patrons came to see the works and quickly bought paintings to add to their private collections. Meanwhile, the editor of
Art News
, one of the country's most respected journals in the field, placed one of the works,
Target with Four Faces
, on his cover. Most important of all, the director of collections from the Museum of Modern Art chose four of Johns's paintings to go on permanent display at America's foremost institution dedicated to modern art. By the time the show closed, every work had been purchased. One art historian would later write, “It was the most successful debut anyone could remember, and the repercussions were felt almost immediately, from Milan to Tokyo.”
26

There were two reasons why the paintings sparked such an extraordinary response. First was Johns's choice of subjects. “Unlike the abstract expressionists,” wrote a critic from the
New York Times
, “Johns has no interest in lofty strivings or romantic ideals or heroic quests for the sublime. The only emotion suggested by his work is a cool, astringent irony.” That reviewer also said, “Johns's work is an ingenious negation of abstract expressionism. His flags, targets and stenciled numbers are emptied of all illusion or grandeur, and they make viewers wonder whether a painting, like a cup or a chair, isn't just an ordinary material object.”
27

The second point that observers made about Johns's pieces had to do with the technique he used when creating them. “He paints his images with such elegance and control that they absolutely demand to be looked at,” another
New York Times
critic said. “He lavishes great care on their execution.” Because of the great care Johns took, his surfaces had a dense, sensuous look. He also used narrow, sensitive brushstrokes that were a striking contrast to those of the abstract expressionists.
28

After Castelli had organized the one-man show for Johns, Rauschenberg went to the gallery owner's wife, Ileana, and asked her to cajole her husband into doing one for him, too. In dramatic contrast to the success of Johns's show, Rauschenberg's event was a complete failure. Critics opted not to review the show, and only a single painting was sold. One visitor commented on Rauschenberg's work through an act of vandalism. That is, when no one was looking, he scrawled two words across one of the combines: “Fuck You.”
29

By the summer of 1958, the Rauschenberg/Johns outlaw marriage was in a very good place. The two men moved to a studio where they lived and worked together, pooling their money while providing unwavering support for each other's creativity. “We were just living and working, and our world was very much limited to each other,” Johns later recalled. “We were very dependent on one another.”
30

The best moment of each artist's day came when he showed his partner what he was working on, Johns said. “The kind of exchange we had was stronger than talking. It's nice to have verbal ideas about painting, but it's much better to express them through the medium itself.” When the men needed a break, they drove their secondhand white Jaguar to East Hampton for a few days of relaxation.
31

Perhaps most laudable about the partnership at this stage was that it had weathered the kind of major shift that destroys many marriages. That is, when the two men had become a couple in 1954, Rauschenberg had been an established artist, already having had his own shows, while Johns was still struggling
to decide if he wanted to be a writer or a painter. But now, four years later, Johns was the big success, having become a sensation in the art world, while Rauschenberg was still creating works that art critics and patrons either ignored or mocked. And yet, despite this dramatic change in their roles, the partnership was thriving.
32

In 1959, Rauschenberg undertook a project to prove that he was a serious artist. Setting his combines aside, he created a series of illustrations based on Dante's
Inferno
, one drawing for each of the thirty-four cantos in the epic poem. The pieces blended Rauschenberg's own drawings with clippings he took from contemporary magazines. His modern-day Hell was populated with gas-masked National Guardsmen and athletes cut from the pages of
Sports Illustrated
.
33

The year and a half that Rauschenberg devoted to the project was well spent. For when the series was exhibited, critics loved it.
Arts and Architecture
magazine wrote, “Rauschenberg attacks the problems of illustration with a classicist's sobriety,” and the
New York Times
went so far as to say that the artist's visual depiction of Dante's poem was comparable in quality and impact to Michelangelo's
Last Judgment
.
34

Johns also took his art in a new direction during the late 1950s. Still committed to focusing on subjects with the literal qualities of the flags and targets he'd been painting but now moving into sculpture, he created pieces that depicted everyday items such as flashlights and lightbulbs. He liked these objects, he told a reporter, because, “I can retain a great deal of what they are but still alter them.” When Leo Castelli displayed the sculptures in his gallery, he had no problem finding buyers.
35

The success that Castelli had with Johns's new works angered abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, who bitterly joked about the gallery owner, “You could give that son of a bitch two beer cans and he could sell them.” When Johns heard the comment, he turned the insult into inspiration. He created a piece consisting of two cans of Ballantine Ale, standing side by side, that he cast in bronze and painted so carefully that a viewer could easily mistake them for the real thing. When Castelli placed the work in his gallery, a collector bought it for $900. (When the collector put the piece up for auction in 1973, it sold for $900,000.)
36

One of the illustrations that Rauschenberg created as part of his
Inferno
series showed Dante's description of the fate of sodomites. According to the poem, men who had sex with men were sentenced to run barefoot, for all of eternity,
over hot sand. As part of his piece illustrating the punishment, Rauschenberg included a drawing of his own foot, outlined in red crayon. His public showing of this piece in 1960 marked the beginning of the end of his outlaw marriage.
37

Specifically, the force that came between the two men was Johns's fear of being publicly identified as a homosexual. Rauschenberg including his foot in the illustration about sodomites was too explicit for his partner, creating a crack in the relationship that gradually grew larger. Johns objected to Rauschenberg using his own body part in an illustration about men who had sex with men, while Rauschenberg said the reference was too obscure to worry about.
38

By 1961, various friends of the couple sensed there were problems, saying Johns often seemed guarded and withdrawn, sometimes bitterly sarcastic. Johns also bought a house on Edisto Island off the coast of South Carolina and began going there alone for lengthy periods.
39

The final break came during the summer of 1962. At that point, Rauschenberg bought a house on Captiva Island off the coast of Florida. The split was painful for both men, and they had no contact whatsoever with each other for a full decade.
40

Neither Rauschenberg nor Johns ever spoke publicly at any length about either their romantic relationship or their homosexuality. The most direct acknowledgment of their shared life came from Rauschenberg during a 1990 discussion with a writer from
Interview
magazine.

RAUSCHENBERG: “I'm not frightened of the affection that Jasper and I had, both personally and as working artists. I don't see any sin or conflict in those days when each of us was the most important person in the other's life.”

INTERVIEWER: “Can you tell me why you parted ways?”

RAUSCHENBERG: “Embarrassment about being well known.”

INTERVIEWER: “Embarrassment about being famous?”

RAUSCHENBERG: “Socially. What had been tender and sensitive became gossip. It was sort of new to the art world that the two most well-known, up-and-coming studs were affectionately involved.”
41

Johns's fear about being identified as gay was fueled by the stigma that continued to be attached to homosexuality during the era. The nation's newspapers routinely referred to such men as “sex perverts” or “sex deviants,” and law enforcement officials proactively worked to identify homosexuals. Any man who was found to have had sexual relations with another man was promptly fired and sent to jail.
42

Throughout their careers, Rauschenberg and Johns avoided talking with reporters about any aspect of their personal lives, repeatedly saying they wanted their art to speak for itself. Johns was particularly reticent about granting interviews, agreeing to them only when a gallery owner or museum director insisted on such a session to promote an upcoming exhibition.
43

The single Rauschenberg work that had sold during his one-man show at the Castelli Gallery in 1958 had been purchased by Alan Solomon, the curator of the Cornell University art museum in Ithaca, New York. Solomon's stature in the art world rose in 1963 when he was hired to direct the Jewish Museum on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
44

To draw attention to the museum's recent expansion, Solomon organized fifty-five of Rauschenberg's works into a show that included examples of his art from the previous dozen years, including his austere white paintings as well as his combines and his
Inferno
illustrations. When critics and art patrons saw how Rauschenberg's art had evolved, their opinion about the artist instantly changed.
45

The
Nation
called Rauschenberg's art “the most significant now being produced in the United States,” and the
New York Times
observed, “His creations force a redefinition of what art is all about.”
46

In the wake of that triumph, officials at the Museum of Modern Art acknowledged Rauschenberg's stature by adding one of his combines to its permanent collection; the combine, which Rauschenberg had completed in 1961, includes an automobile tire as well as a license plate. Later in the year, officials at the museum also acquired his
Inferno
series.
47

Rauschenberg's star soared even higher in the summer of 1964 when he became the first American ever to win the grand prize at the Venice Biennale, the international art world's highest honor. On the night the announcement was made, a crowd of revelers hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him around St. Mark's Square like a conquering hero.
48

And so, by the mid-1960s, Rauschenberg and Johns were both major artists. Indeed, no museum anywhere in the world that claimed to have a first-class modern art collection could call its holdings complete unless it had several examples of each artist's work.

Still more acclaim came the men's way with the emergence of pop art, as observers credited them, because of their work in the 1950s, with being the godfathers of this new style of painting. Rauschenberg incorporating everyday objects into his pieces and Johns painting flags and targets, critics
said, had laid the groundwork for artists such as Andy Warhol celebrating the Campbell's soup can and Roy Lichtenstein elevating comic book imagery into high art.
49