Jasper - Studio, NYC #6

In the 1950s Robert Rauschenberg distinguished himself as an artist with his “combines,” collages of newsprint, painting material, and found objects that blended aspects of painting and sculpture. However, photography, which he had studied in school, was always essential to his work—“I’ve never stopped being a photographer,” he stated—and he incorporated photographs into his combines while steadily recording family and friends with the camera. Rauschenberg photographed fellow artist Jasper Johns in his studio in front of two of his Target paintings, which would be exhibited in Johns’s first one-man show at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. This photograph attests to an intensely collaborative relationship between the two men, at a time when Rauschenberg’s reputation was still fresh, and that of Johns was yet to be established.