This book presents a comparative study of two pairs of collaborative artists who worked closely with one another. The first pair, Cezanne and Pissarro, contributed to the emergence of modern art. The second pair, Johns and Rauschenberg, contributed to the demise of modern art. In each case, the two artists entered into a rich and challenging artistic exchange and reaped enormous benefits from this interaction. Joachim Pissarro's comparative study suggests that these interactive dialogues were of great significance for each artist. Taking a cue from the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, he suggests that the individual is the result of reciprocal encounter. Paradoxically, the modernist tradition has largely presented each of these four artists in isolation. This book thus offers a critique of modernism as essentially monological and as a tradition that resists thinking about art in plural terms.

Author Biography

Joachim Pissarro is Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is the author of many articles and books on aspects of modern art, and has contributed to several exhibition catalogues, most recently Then and Now and Later: Art Since 1945 at Yale.