Dialogues: Duchamp, Cornell, Johns, Rauschenberg

Thursday, 22 September 2005 14:30

DALLAS, TX.The first exhibition to explore the artistic exchange among Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg will be presented by the Dallas Museum of Art . Dialogues: Duchamp, Cornell, Johns, Rauschenberg features more than 40 works, more than half of which will be drawn from the Museum’s own holdings and from the Marguerite and Robert Hoffman Collection, which was recently committed to the DMA. “Dialogues is a groundbreaking exhibition that looks beyond traditional assessments and categorizations of artists to examine the subtleties and nuances of artistic influence and exchange,” said John R. Lane, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “This exhibition, which features major works from the DMA’s growing collection of modern and contemporary art, fosters a reevaluation of the dynamic connection between these four seminal artists and furthers the Museum’s commitment to new scholarship on the art of the twentieth century.” The exhibition will reveal the aesthetic dialogue and shared visual vocabulary evident in the work of Duchamp, Cornell, Johns, and Rauschenberg. Set in motion by Duchamp, this dialogue was shaped through time by the artists—sometimes through direct contact, often through intense collaboration, and always through deep artistic and intellectual engagement. The dialogue is also intertwined in the art-making philosophies and strategies of Dada, Neo-Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. The exhibition will trace visual and conceptual motifs common to the artists, including the use of specific forms, such as boxes; the manipulation of motifs; the integration of language into art; the fascination with simple machines; the appropriation of icons; and the incorporation of collage, assemblage, and found objects. “While the personal and biographical connections between Duchamp, Cornell, Johns, and Rauschenberg are well documented, the aesthetic dialogue evident in the work of these four artists is a rich and complex interaction that has yet to be explored,” said Dr. Kosinski. “The exhibition traces the process of interaction—of statement, listening, and restatement—that is the foundation of these artistic exchanges and is revealed in the works presented. These artists believed in the continuation of the dialogue through the active participation of the audience, who engage in their own conversation with the work of art.” The fascination with simple machines is another common link between the artists—between Duchamp and Rauschenberg in particular. Duchamp’s Green Box is filled with images, diagrams, and notations that refer back to the machine rendered in the Large Glass. Rauschenberg’s three-part print Autobiography (1968) may be informed by Duchamp’s diagrams, and also documents Rauschenberg’s own interest in machines. One of the large-scale prints includes a photograph of Pelican, one of Rauschenberg’s many performances that incorporated flying machines. In Device (1962), Johns also recalls the diagrams and pencil sketches found in the Green Box by creating his own simple machine, affixing two wooden slats to the corners of the canvas and then using them like windshield wipers in the wet pigment to form circular imprints. In the tradition of recent DMA-organized exhibitions on the modern and contemporary art, such as Degas to Picasso: The Artist and the Camera, 1999, and Henry Moore, Sculpting the 20th Century, 2001, Dialogues pushes the viewer to reconsider the work of these seminal artists of the modern tradition through a new lens.

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