Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns

There are six links below

RR: “I’m not frightened of the affection that Jasper and I had, both personally and as working artists.
I don’t see any sin or conflict in those days when each of us was the most important person in each other’s lives.”
~Rauschenberg, with Affection by Richard Meyer

Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in Johns’s Pearl Street studio, New York, c.1954,
photo by Rachel Rosenthal

Short Circuit by Robert Rauschenberg
1955 / Oil, fabric, notebook paper, postcard, printed reproductions, concert program, and autograph on canvas, wood supports, and cabinets / MoMA, NY, NY

A painting by his former wife, artist Susan Weil, appears behind the right door, and a flag composition by Jasper Johns once sat behind the left door. (It went missing in 1965 and was replaced at Rauschenberg’s invitation with a facsimile by the artist Elaine Sturtevant.)

Target with Four Faces
by Jasper Johns
1955 / Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas surmounted by four tinted-plaster faces in wood box with hinged front / Art Institute of Chicago, IL

The faces were cast over the course of several months. He used a friend and neighbor as a model. The faces are abstracted by their having been cropped at the eyes. They become a kind of banner above the target.