Happy 90th birthday, Jasper Johns! Many thanks for sharing your present with who knows how many thousands of people. Most of them honor you as a superb and radical visual artist, but you may be less well known to them as artistic advisor to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1967 to 1976. And not just an advisor, but the guy who, like his partner Robert Rauschenberg, designed and … [Read more...]
Merce Cunningham Redux
James Klosty’s Merce Cunningham Redux is a big book in several ways (try lugging it to a sunny spot; it weighs about six pounds). Published late in 2019 by Brooklyn’s powerHouse Books and selling for $75, it first came into the world as Merce Cunningham in 1975 (Saturday Review Press) and reappeared in paperback with a new introduction in 1986 (Limelight Editions). In those earlier decades … [Read more...]
Dancing around the Bride
“May I have the next dance, Marcel?” “But of course, John!” “Thank you. By the way, Bob and Jap hope to have a chance too. Merce, of course, is already leaping about somewhere.” Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp, the stunning exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (through January 21), affirms the close artistic and personal connections among John … [Read more...]