Dialogues: Duchamp, Cornell, Johns, Rauschenberg

Featuring around 50 major works by these pivotal artists, including Duchamp’s Green Box and Johns’s Device, Dialogues reveals the complex and rich exchange manifested in their art.

This book traces the visual and conceptual relationships evident in the works of Marcel Duchamp (1887—1968), Joseph Cornell (1903—1972), Jasper Johns (b. 1930), and Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925). Although scholars have previously explored the biographical contact between these four artists, this is the first close look at the aesthetic consequences of their interactions. Dorothy Kosinski argues for a notion of dialogic exchange rather than influence, noting a number of shared characteristics in these artists’ works including iconography (for example, appropriation of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa), process (assemblage and collage), form (boxes), integration of text into the visual field (sardonic subtitles, nonsense inscriptions, etc.), and shared fascination with simple machines.

Featuring around 50 major works by these pivotal artists, including Duchamp’s Green Box and Johns’s Device, Dialogues reveals the complex and rich exchange manifested in their art.

Dorothy Kosinski is Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture and The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. She is the author of Henry Moore: Sculpting in the Twentieth Century and The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso, both published by Yale University Press.