A different physique: Rauschenberg, Johns and the print

The world of fine art printmaking was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century in what is referred to as the American Print Renaissance.¹ In turn, print disciplines, particularly lithography and screenprinting, transformed the world of art, by re-engaging artists with the processes of making prints. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were key artists in the American Print Renaissance and their thoughtful engagement with printmaking would impact all aspects of their practice. Ideas derived from the actions of printing, such as pressure, transference and stencilling, informed their work, as did the implications of reproduction, the reorientation of the picture plane and the materials used for printmaking.

In the first half of the twentieth century, in the United States, printed material was abundant in a variety of commercial applications. Newspapers, product packaging and advertisements were ubiquitous. Print techniques such as offset lithography, etched printing plates and screenprinting were relied on to reproduce images economically and accurately. The close association of printed material with commerce meant that many artists would eschew these reproductive mediums for others such as painting. It was no coincidence that lithography studios for fine arts had almost entirely disappeared from the United States by the early 1950s. When artists sought out small-scale lithography at this time, they could find such studios only in Europe. This changed around 1960, when the artists June Wayne and Garo Antreasian founded Tamarind Lithography in Los Angeles, with the purpose of reviving this art form. At the same time, Tatyana Grosman’s fledgling Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in New York was beginning to expand its work to create original prints with artists. Against this backdrop, an ambitious young art student, Kenneth Tyler, joined Tamarind Lithography in 1963, moving from his native Chicago to Los Angeles to undertake an apprenticeship with Antreasian. Here Tyler would apply his technical know-how, helping to find substitute printing plates made from a ball-grained aluminium that could work just as well as the increasingly rare lithographic limestone. Tyler’s enthusiasm for both the art and science of lithography meant that within a year he became the workshop’s technical director, though he felt progressively more limited by the scale and ambition that he encountered at Tamarind. Just over two years later, in 1965, he decided to open his own workshop, Gemini Limited, which would soon become known as Gemini Graphic Editions Limited (Gemini GEL). Replete with a new hydraulic press that Tyler designed to achieve more consistent colours in print, this new workshop would reshape the printmaking landscape. What made Tyler’s workshop unique was an artist-led philosophy, where instead of confining projects to the restrictive traditions of printmaking, he actively sought artists that would ‘make demands on the medium’² and engineer the solutions to their creative ambitions. Two artists that would push the boundaries of the medium with Tyler during these early years were Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns made their first prints with master printer Kenneth Tyler at his Los Angeles workshop, Gemini GEL, within thirteen months of each other. Rauschenberg was the first, starting in February of 1967; Johns began in March of 1968. Although it is not immediately obvious, the thematic focus of their first prints at Gemini GEL was on the human body: Rauschenberg’s Booster and 7 studies print series would centre on self-portraiture in the form of his X-rayed body, while Johns would produce his Black numeral series 1968 and Color numerals series 1968–69 that encoded ideas of the body in the numerals 0 through to 9. Later, Johns would investigate signifying the body in other forms in Four panels from Untitled 1972 (colors) in 1973–74. Rauschenberg and Johns explored ideas of pressure, moulding and transference in these works: processes intrinsic to the printed image.

When Jasper Johns began working with Tyler in 1968, he revisited a motif from his early paintings in his first series of lithographs: stencilled numerals. As subject matter, numerals are unemotive and don’t appear to express anything more than the idea of the number itself. However, these unassuming works suggest something more. In 1964, Johns had professed his growing interest in ‘a thing’s … becoming something other than what it is’.⁸ His Black numeral series, followed by the Color numerals series, suggest such a transformation. Johns intended these works to reference the human body. He told the writer Roberta Bernstein that each numeral is titled as a ‘figure’, suggesting the human figure, as he wanted to have a series of figure paintings like the artist Willem de Kooning.⁹ The lithograph Figure 7 from the Color numerals series is significant in reintroducing figurative imagery into Johns’s work. An iron-on decal of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is embedded in the work, and adjacent to this is the artist’s own hand-print in white ink. These ‘prints’ within a print point to the relationship between our system of counting and the human body: the ten digits of our number system are derived from the ten digits of our hands, which link our body to this system of knowledge. Johns has also placed a ruler at the base of Figure 7, measuring inches, a unit of measurement originally derived from the width of a man’s thumb. Johns would reflect in 1993 that the incorporation of measures and rulers into his work was his investigation into measures against which the body ‘can or cannot be measured’.¹⁰ The implication here is that the human body informs our systems of measurement yet can never itself conform to a standard or a measure. The process of printing stencils incorporates both variable and defined measures—however freely or loosely ink or paint is applied, when printed it also conforms to the stencil’s shape. Johns would remark after making stencilled prints that printmaking ‘suggests things changed or left out’.¹¹

Johns would pay homage to Duchamp’s restatement and reproduction of his work in 1971 with his Gemini GEL lithograph series Fragments—according to what 1971. Made with Tyler, this series of lithographs is based on Johns’s 1964 painting According to what, which, like Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, summarised the artistic themes and motifs from his career. In restaging this painting as a series of prints, Johns saw an opportunity to take what was in the painting ‘out of that space again … [and show] a thought that at one time didn’t just exist in the painting, but separately’.²³ To make this series more than just a reproduction of his painting, he introduced deviations to the work’s original form and rescaled what were previously small details into larger works, such as the print Bent “U” 1971. In many works from the series, simple print techniques, including hinges and stencils associated with the pochoir technique used by Duchamp are depicted. In the lithograph Bent “Blue” 1971, three-dimensional letters of the word ‘blue’ appear to swing back and forth, leaving an impression of the word on both sides of a dividing line, as though they were print matrices or stamps. In the upper right corner, a unique monotype transfer of a newspaper has been struck through with a large ‘X’, another familiar process in printmaking where a printing matrix is defaced to ‘cancel’ the work and prevent further reproduction. This is also applied to his own signature in Hinged canvas 1971, as though it were a denial of authorship or act of self-erasure. In this print, Johns depicts a corner of his painting, part of which incorporates the projected shadow of Marcel Duchamp’s Self-portrait in profile 1957. Johns recalled that for the painting he ‘took a tracing of [Duchamp’s] profile, hung it by a string and cast its shadow so it became distorted’.²⁴ By reproducing this distorted profile in the print, Johns again places himself in a lineage with the senior artist while also provoking questions regarding authorship and what we may consider to be an original, an indexical trace, or a reproduction.

The work of Rauschenberg and Johns does not resemble how we see the world as we move through it. A landscape painting, or perhaps a portrait, resembles what we may see when we stand looking out at the world, or at another person. But the work of Rauschenberg and Johns more accurately resembles what we see when looking down at a table or surface where objects are scattered. Their surfaces are horizontal, a quality art critic Joseph Steinberg noticed in their work and shared in his 1968 lecture ‘Other criteria’.²⁸ He saw this as a radical reorientation of a picture’s logic and called it the ‘flatbed picture plane’. Significantly, Steinberg borrowed this term from the flatbed presses used for printmaking and would compare such work to printer’s proofs and cancelled plates: ‘any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed’.²⁹

This idea of the flatbed picture plane draws our attention to Johns’s and Rauschenberg’s intuitive replication of the logic of printmaking: images are created through impressions from the horizontal contact between a print matrix and a support. Steinberg would describe Johns’s artworks as ‘surface[s] observed during impregnation, observed as it receives a message or imprint from real space’.³⁰ This can be seen in Johns’s use of his own body as a stamp in Face, in the artist book Foirades/Fizzles he created with poet Samuel Beckett in 1976. This image was originally created by Johns covering his face in mineral oil, and then pressing his oiled face onto paper. The paper surface was then dusted with pigment that adhered to the oil, revealing the moment of contact between the artist and the sheet of paper for us to observe. Similarly, Rauschenberg would create works using solvent transfers, whereby pressing down on magazine images he could transfer them onto a new surface. Steinberg marvelled at Rauschenberg’s ‘imaginative confrontation[s] … produced by pressing down on a desk’.³¹ This technique was developed in the spring of 1958, while Rauschenberg and Johns were in Cuba. By dousing a newsprint image in lighter fluid, Rauschenberg discovered he could transfer a pale mirrored version of the original to paper through rubbing the back of the newsprint with an empty ball-point pen. A variation on this technique would serve one of Rauschenberg’s most radical print series, Hoarfrost editions 1974. In his studio, Rauschenberg had noticed that while cleaning a lithography stone with solvent, the image drawn onto the matrix would transfer back into the folds of the cloth he used to wipe the stone, just as his solvent transfer drawings had reproduced their form by being pressed upon over a decade earlier. Inspired by the soft blur of the images through layers of cloth, he took the idea to create editions at Gemini GEL. With works such as Scrape, Pull and Ringer 1974, the Hoarfrost editions discarded the traditional print matrix, such as a lithography stone or etching plate, and instead used thickly layered newspapers, magazine pages, and offset lithographs as the source of the impression. By creating a thick bed of such material and then spraying this with solvents, Rauschenberg softened the inks so that when he put the magazine papers through a lithography press, the images transferred onto a silk fabric surface. Rauschenberg commented that the delicately blurred images that resulted ‘were almost like brushstrokes’,³² despite them being achieved using printmaking processes.

Steinberg was to conclude that the flatbed picture plane was the invention of a pictorial surface that ‘let the world in again’.³³ The scholar Branden Joseph traces a similar idea to the influence of Hungarian painter and photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In his 1938 book The new vision Moholy-Nagy saw modern painting progressing to a ‘final simplification’ as ‘an ideal plane for kinetic light and shadow effects which, originating in the surroundings, would fall upon it’.³⁴ This idea resembled Moholy-Nagy’s own work, such as his Photogram (pipe and glass) c 1926, created by placing objects on a photosensitive surface and exposing this to light. Rauschenberg and Johns would use a similar technique using photosensitive blueprint paper for their commercial work dressing department store windows under the pseudonym Matson Jones in the 1950s. According to Joseph, the composer John Cage drew a parallel between Moholy-Nagy’s ideas and the work of Rauschenberg. This then influenced the course of Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s work, as both began to investigate methods that would decentre the authorial voice of the artist and allow the viewer and surrounding environment to become a part of the work itself. This became a strategy for navigating the homophobia of the 1950s. Rauschenberg would use ‘less specific’ images in odd combinations ‘so that there is room for everyone’s imagination’,³⁵ while Johns would make clear that he was interested only in ‘looking at things, not in deciding … what they ought to be’.³⁶ Extending these ideas, both Johns and Rauschenberg would invite the viewer to become a part of the picture. Johns’s Target 1970 demonstrates this idea by inviting the audience to partake in the colouring of one of his iconic target motifs, by setting watercolour pigment pots below the work and leaving room for the viewer to sign the work alongside Johns’s signature.

Rauschenberg would make environmentally responsive works using mirrored surfaces, including Star quarters, a four-panelled screenprint made in 1971. It depicts fictional figures that form constellations in the night sky, on a mirrored Perspex surface in which we can simultaneously view ourselves and our surroundings, fulfilling Rauschenberg’s desire in his practice ‘that the room would become a part of the [artwork]’³⁷ and explore his idea of ‘the extremely dangerous possibility that you might be art’.³⁸

Integral to the work of both Rauschenberg and Johns during their time working at Gemini GEL was the experimentation led by Tyler into new materials that could alter the boundaries of traditional printmaking. Tyler began his career concerned that the materials available for lithography were inadequate and those available were difficult to source. During his training at Tamarind Lithography, Tyler was closely involved in the investigation of European printing papers to test their suitability for printing from lithography stones.³⁹ The strength, stretch and receptivity of these paper surfaces came under question and would lead to Tyler’s extensive journey to revive handmade papermaking for artists in the United States. During the early years of these investigations, Rauschenberg and Johns would play an instrumental role in experimenting with printing surfaces, and the material conditions would inform their work’s development.

Banner Image: Jasper Johns signing the edition of Target, Gemini GEL, Los Angeles, 1971. Kenneth E Tyler Collection archive, NGA Study Collection, photograph: Malcolm Lubliner.

Header image: Jasper Johns signing the edition of Target, Gemini GEL, Los Angeles, 1971. Kenneth E Tyler Collection archive, NGA Study Collection © photographer, Malcolm Lubliner