ArtCurious · Jennifer Dasal/ArtCurious

Episode #112: Modern Love--Robert Rauschenberg, with Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns (Season 13, Episode 5)

May 29, 2023·36 min·3 clips

How did Robert Rauschenberg's secret affairs with two fellow artists reshape the course of American modern art?

Some encounters linger. The host opens with her memory of a demanding middle school art teacher, the kind of person whose brief presence can sour a whole stretch of life. That becomes the doorway into artistic relationships, where friendship, romance, work, and influence refuse to stay in neat boxes. Rauschenberg and Twombly get a tender treatment. Their romance ends in 1953, but the episode does not treat that as a clean break, because they remain lifelong friends and travel together again. Twombly keeps moving. In Italy, he meets the artist Baroness Tatiana Francetti, marries her two years later, and has a son, Cyrus Alessandro Twombly, born in 1959. The marriage has its own arrangement. Francetti and Twombly stay close while also seeking relationships outside the partnership, and Twombly later chooses Nicola del Roscio as confidant and caretaker. Then the thread returns to Rauschenberg. After Twombly, he meets Jasper Johns in 1953, and the episode treats Johns as a new love, a challenge, and a partner. Johns gets his own origin story too. Born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930, he draws when young but does not treat art as more than a pastime until college. Teachers push him toward New York. After enrolling at the University of South Carolina in 1947, Johns is told that if art is what he wants, New York is where he should go. So he goes. The result is warm art history without the glass case, more interested in how people mark one another than in scandal. Nobody is treated like a footnote. The pleasure is in hearing influence behave like a relationship: romantic, practical, lifelong, and rarely tidy.

As heard by us

A clear, intimate ArtCurious episode about Rauschenberg, Twombly, Johns, and the messy afterlife of artistic love.

ArtCurious frames Robert Rauschenberg through the relationships that altered his life, first with Cy Twombly and then with Jasper Johns. The episode begins with a plainspoken point about how one person can change the shape of a life for years, then applies that idea to artists…

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Why you'd press play

You want modern art history that feels like a romance, a rupture, and a good conversation.

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