Ray Johnson: Five Decades

The American artist Ray Johnson, who came to prominence in the 1950s, created enigmatic work that touched on pop art, Fluxus, and neo-Dada, among other movements, yet never aligned with a single style.

Accompanying the exhibition Ray Johnson: WHAT A DUMP at the 19th Street gallery in New York, this presentation focuses on the evolution of the artist’s preferred medium—collage—over the course of his five-decade career. Responding to the collision of disparate visual and verbal information that characterizes contemporary society, Johnson’s collage works reflect his encyclopedic erudition, his promiscuous range of interests, and an uncanny ability to discover connections between a myriad of images, facts, and people.

Ray Johnson, c. 1968 (detail). Altered photo by David Gahr

“Collage became for Johnson the ultimate metaphor for the way he experienced the world. Through collage, he created a seemingly unending array of juxtapositions using the material evidence of the world—what he would find in newspapers or on the street, receive through the mail, hear in a phone conversation, or come across in a motel room.”

—Donna De Salvo, “Correspondences,” in Ray Johnson: Correspondences, 1999

The 50s

Johnson attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1945 to 1948. There, he studied with Josef Albers, whose teachings on color and form heavily influenced Johnson’s early abstract paintings. The artist later destroyed most of this work after turning to collage.

Ray Johnson

Calm Center, c. 1949-1951

Oil on board in artist's frame

28 5/8 x 28 5/8 inches (72.7 x 72.7 cm)

Private Collection

“Ray sharpened his vision through a partial rejection of whatever he’d mastered.… He started out as a first-rate abstract painter who heretically began infusing his paintings and collages with illustration.”

—Tim Keane, “I Is an Other: The Mail Art of Ray Johnson,” Hyperallergic, 2015

Ray Johnson

James Dean (Lucky Strike), 1957

Collage on board

11 1/8 x 8 1/8 inches (28.3 x 20.6 cm)
Framed: 18 x 15 1/2 inches (45.7 x 39.4 cm)

Ray Johnson

Untitled (Moticos with Four Men in Bathtub), c. 1954-1960, 1990

Collage on board

11 x 7 inches (27.9 x 17.8 cm)
Framed: 15 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches (39.4 x 29.2 cm)

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In 1949, Johnson moved to New York City, where he became active in the downtown art scene. There, he absorbed in particular the ideas of his neighbor John Cage, who espoused notions of chance, radical indeterminacy, and performativity as the basis for any creative endeavor.

By 1954, Johnson was making irregularly shaped “moticos,” his name for small-scale collages on which he pasted images from popular culture such as Elvis Presley, James Dean, Shirley Temple, and department store models.

Eschewing conventional modes of display, Johnson carried boxes of moticos around New York, sharing them with strangers on sidewalks, in cafes, and at Grand Central Terminal.

Ray Johnson

Untitled (Moticos with Red Ground), 1958

Collage on cardboard panel

11 1/8 x 7 1/2 inches (28.3 x 19.1 cm)
Framed: 20 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches (52.1 x 39.4 cm)

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Ray Johnson's "Moticos" installation, c. 1955

“[Johnson’s] collages Elvis Presley No. 1 (1955) and James Dean (1957) stand as the Plymouth Rock of the Pop movement.”

—Henry Geldzahler, in Pop Art: 1955–70, 1985

The 60s

“New York’s most famous unknown artist.”

—Grace Glueck, The New York Times, 1965

Ray Johnson

Roscoe Arbuckle, 1968

Collage on illustration board

24 x 15 1/2 inches (61 x 39.4 cm)
Framed: 24 7/8 x 16 1/4 inches (63.2 x 41.3 cm)

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By the late 1950s, Johnson was counted among a nascent group of pop artists, along with the likes of Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist. His approach was distinctive, however, in its pursuit of the random and ephemeral (he referred to his work as “Chop” instead of pop art). Johnson participated in unofficial performances and “happenings” and produced “mail art”—collages and letters that he would post to other artists and friends, sometimes asking for the recipient to embellish and return or send them on. By 1962, his pool of contacts had grown into a network that eventually spread across the country and around the world. The movement was dubbed the New York Correspondance (sic) School.

Ray Johnson

Untitled (Seated Baby Moticos with Rat), c. 1958-1960, 1970

Collage on illustration board

19 1/2 x 12 inches (49.5 x 30.5 cm)
Framed: 20 x 12 1/2 inches (50.8 x 31.8 cm)

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On June 3, 1968, the day Warhol was shot and two days before the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, Johnson was mugged at knifepoint in lower Manhattan. Shaken, he moved to Glen Cove, Long Island, and shortly afterwards, in 1969, to nearby Locust Valley, where he continued to work prolifically.

The 70s

While during the 1960s, Johnson had presented his work informally, at underground events, through the mail, or with the moticos “wrapped in newspaper under my arm, like a Fuller Brush man,” as the artist described, the ensuing decade brought critical attention and institutional exhibitions.

Ray Johnson

David Bourdon, 1971

Collage on illustration board

26 1/2 x 18 1/4 inches (67.3 x 46.4 cm)
Framed: 27 5/8 x 19 1/4 inches (70.2 x 48.9 cm)

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In 1970, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented Ray Johnson: New York Correspondance School. Solo exhibitions were also held in the early 1970s at galleries including the Richard Feigen Gallery, the Angela Flowers Gallery in London, and the Betty Parsons Gallery.

Ray Johnson

Untitled (Cupid with Ad Reinhardt), 1974

Collage on illustration board

20 x 15 inches (50.8 x 38.1 cm)
Framed: 23 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (60.3 x 47.6 cm)

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“Johnson is a highly self-conscious artist whose work is filled with visual and written references to art history and his personal life. He loves puns and his collages and correspondence form a continuum of interlocking cross-references.… The only sad note about Johnson’s Whitney diversion is it seems a shame to catch a living thing in flight, to pin it down.”

—Kasha Linville, Artforum, 1970

Ray Johnson

Cow 1, 1972

Collage on panel

17 5/8 x 17 inches (44.8 x 43.2 cm)

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Despite declaring the “death” of the New York Correspondance School in an unpublished letter to the obituary Department of The New York Times in 1973, Johnson continued to practice mail art.

In 1976, he began his Silhouette project, creating profiles of friends, artists, and famous people, which would often become the basis for collages. Subjects included prominent figures in the New York art scene: Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Frances Beatty, William S. Burroughs, Nam June Paik, Peter Hujar, and Roy Lichtenstein, among others.

Ray Johnson

Douglas Baxter, 1977

Collage on Masonite

15 7/8 x 15 7/8 inches (40.3 x 40.3 cm)
Framed: 21 3/4 x 21 3/4 inches (55.2 x 55.2 cm)

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The 80s

“When we hear the word ‘collage’ … we should think of Ray Johnson. And, when we hear ‘Ray Johnson,’ we apparently should no longer think exclusively, or even mainly, of his New York Correspondence School.… For Johnson, since the ’60s, has also been the creator of an infinite variety of collages.… Art at its best is a private world gone public.”

—Gerrit Henry, Art in America, 1984

Ray Johnson

Untitled (Max Ern with Elephants and Swans), 1982, 1994

Collage on illustration board

17 x 13 1/4 inches (43.2 x 33.7 cm)
Framed: 19 7/8 x 16 inches (50.5 x 40.6 cm)

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“Despite being wonderful vortices of wordplay, personalities and connectedness, these collages begin with the unending mystery of how they were made, which still looks new.”

—Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 2015

Ray Johnson

Picasso’s House, 1985

Collage on illustration board

15 x 14 inches (38.1 x 35.6 cm)
Framed: 16 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches (41.9 x 39.4 cm)

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Ray Johnson, 1976

“It was … a very delicate vision. Ray’s work has a different kind of feeling than, say, Roy Lichtenstein’s or Andy Warhol’s or mine. It was a much more personal, private experience, a discovery kind of thing, not smack dab in your face.”

—James Rosenquist, quoted in The New York Times, 1999

The 90s

“I am always very excited by artists who create their own very specific codes, languages and grammars. He’s speaking his own language and talking to and about specific people, but he also loves to share it with you.”

—Matt Connors, quoted in The New York Times, 2015

Ray Johnson

Untitled (Mae West, Rum and Potato), 1991, 1994

Collage on illustration board

9 x 9 3/8 inches (22.9 x 23.8 cm)
Framed: 15 x 14 3/4 inches (38.1 x 37.5 cm)

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Ray Johnson

Untitled (Dear Christo De Menil), 1979, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1992

Collage on illustration board

12 1/4 x 10 inches (31.1 x 25.4 cm)
Framed: 18 x 15 3/4 inches (45.7 x 40 cm)

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A Note on Dates

Ray Johnson created many of his collages over a period of years, repeatedly returning to and reworking them; they are all accumulations. Some include fragments of earlier works that he reused as source material, while others were continuously “in process” until the year leading up to Johnson’s death. He assigned multiple dates to some (often in pencil in a lower corner), indicating some of the specific years—sometimes even the specific days—when he returned to the work.

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