The Brooklyn Rail

They were friends, lovers, rivals, and each other’s sources of inspiration. Together they would write a significant chapter of postwar art history: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. All the more surprising that hitherto no museum has ventured to stage an exhibition investigating how the close, yet complex, relationships between these five artists impacted their work. To be sure, in 2012–13, the Philadelphia Museum of Art explored the impact that Marcel Duchamp’s ideas had on Cage, Cunningham, Johns, and Rauschenberg, but Twombly was left out of the equation. Now, finally, with the Museum Brandhorst in Munich and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, two German institutions have joined forces and their important collections to come up with an effort that was years in the making and certainly constitutes an exhibition highlight of 2025.

The two curators, Yilmaz Dziewior (Museum Ludwig) and Achim Hochdörfer (Museum Brandhorst), dug deeply into the archives to unearth letters, notes, and other documents that offer insights into the changing and at times tumultuous nature of the relationships between the five men. More importantly, they were able to receive loans of little-known, yet crucial works from private collections and artists’ estates. For even though the wall labels and in particular the catalogue pay careful attention to the homoerotic subtexts and point out secret codes and sexual allusions, in that way offering an idea of the precarious existence of gay life in postwar America and Europe, the curators are careful always to keep the focus on how the personal informed artistic innovation.

“Silence,” the exhibition’s first room, literally sets the tone. It displays works from the 1950s in which all five artists activated the senses and engaged spectators by omission. In Stillness (1960), Cunningham is wearing Rauschenberg’s costume while performing to the music of Cage. The latter’s seemingly improvised piano sounds are so sparse that they ultimately accentuate silence, an effect increased by the reverberations of Cunningham’s footwork and, one can easily imagine, the audience moving in their seats, becoming a constituent part. The same applies to Rauschenberg’s White Painting (1951), consisting of two identical white canvases, in which viewers can experience their reflections, an impression further facilitated by the canvases’ vertical orientation and nearly life-size dimensions.

Other takes on the monochrome by Rauschenberg, Johns, and Twombly deal with issues of non-composition and chance. A revelation is Twombly’s white Untitled (New York City) (1956), here exhibited for the first time, which displays a rectangular field of gestural doodles in the upper-lefthand corner. This take on Johns’s flags, examples of which are included in the exhibition, underlines how both artists were concerned with painterly gesture while offering alternatives to the heroics of Abstract Expressionism, then at the height of its fame. While Johns carefully controlled his hand by using encaustic—which quickly dries and doesn’t allow for long strokes—and by sticking to the confines of the (banal) objects he depicted, Twombly kept the free spirit of the Ab Ex artists, but reduced their grand performances to seemingly absentminded scribbles and shaky notations. Especially in the context of this exhibition, one might be tempted to consider this the queering of Ab Ex’s macho aesthetics.

In any case, these juxtapositions and those encountered in many other rooms convey that Five Friends seeks structural connections. By citing Johns, Twombly underlined that while their projects were related, their approaches to dealing with the legacy of Ab Ex differed. Even though things look alike, they still can be very different. This also becomes apparent in the juxtaposition of Rauschenberg’s 1953 untitled oil work, a canvas so thickly and irregularly covered with white paint that cracks appear on the textured surface, with Johns’s white Figure 1 (1955), which is equally rich in factura. Yet, whereas the Rauschenberg’s main concern seems to be chance and the emptying out of agency, Johns’s deals with issues of figure and ground, objecthood, and, of course, gesture.

This is not to say that the five artists were not directly influenced by and paid homage to each other. Examples in the exhibition include Twombly’s Untitled (Lexington, Virginia) and Rauschenberg’s Untitled (Night Blooming), both made in 1951 when the two artists had just met each other and spent the summer at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Both painted with thick, white brushstrokes in simple configurations that appear almost identical, though even here his penchant for the gestural and painterly distinguishes Twombly. A highlight certainly is Bed (1955), one of Rauschenberg’s most famous Combines, juxtaposed with Johns’s Tennyson (1958), in which two fabrics are placed on top of each other, the second folded at the top like a bedsheet. Yet while striking and unquestionably of biographical interest, such connections contribute little to a better understanding of their respective artistic projects. All the more important that Five Friends is not limited to spotting such pseudomorphisms and homages. Instead, it investigates how, precisely as a result of their exchange and close collaboration, the five artists shared fundamental structural concerns while developing their own projects and aesthetic languages.