Johns and Rauschenberg soon became known as neo-dadaists, and their work was said to be a far cry from the heroic machismo of Pollock and de Kooning, though not such a far cry in terms of employing elements of chance (the older artists were heavily influenced by Freud and ideas of the subconscious). There was an intimate and feverish exchange of ideas. Jasper Johns playfully inverted Duchamp's idea of the readymade with Painted Bronze (Two Ale Cans), 1960įor a period in the 1950s Johns and Rauschenberg were lovers, and Cunningham and Cage remained life-long partners until Cage’s death in 1992. And nowhere did it have as profound an impact than on Johns, Rauschenberg, Cunningham and Cage. It was this idea, that an artist could take a functional non-art object and “repurpose” it as a work of art, that had such profound implications for artists. Thus, much of what came during this seismic art shift really didn’t resemble art at all, or certainly not as anyone might have recognised it before, and deliberately so.ĭuchamp’s single most influential idea was the readymade. Without their “mentor” (one can see his influence as more of a dialogue than a direct imprint, though there is quite a bit of that, too) we would almost certainly not have had such a dramatic shift from what Duchamp dismissively called “retinal art” – works that appealed primarily to the eye rather than to the mind and that were often based, on some level at least, on painterly realism. These are the two visual artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage. He himself moved from Paris to New York in 1915, though he largely remained a peripheral figure – that is until he was embraced by the four postwar American artists who feature in the Barbican’s intelligent and ambitious exhibition. Still, one might concede that the second half of the century belongs firmly to the enigmatic Frenchman who gave us conceptual art. We would never have had the art world’s big leap across the Atlantic from Paris to New York. We would never have had Abstract Expressionism were it not for these two vying giants of European painting.
Of course, the first half of the century belongs to Picasso, and perhaps to a lesser extent that other goliath of Modernism, Matisse. Mutt and presented to the world in 1917, the single most influential artwork. It is often argued that Marcel Duchamp is the single most influential artist of the 20th century, and that Fountain, the porcelain urinal he signed R.
An exhilarating dialogue between the father of Conceptualism and four great postwar American artists
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