Five Friends - John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly

Together they had a key shaping influence on the art of the twentieth century: musician and theorist John Cage, choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, and painters and sculptors Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. The unique friendships connecting the five artists were marked by collaborative work, intense debate, intimate relationships, and painful separations. In their common search for new forms of expression, they addressed similar issues: technology and progress, silence and chance, tradition and radical innovation. The accompanying book publication is published by Schirmer/Mosel in two separate editions in German and English. On the basis of substantial essays by 15 authors, 415 illustrations in color and black and white of more than 180 works of art, scores, costumes and archival materials as well as numerous documentary photographs, the work of the five friends becomes tangible for the first time as the product of its own artistic cosmos of American modernism. In addition to an overview of the individual artists' oeuvres, the reader is given a synthetic analysis of a synergy that is very rare in art history in terms of intensity and innovative power. Furthermore, the volume depicts an epoch that stretches from the early 1950s to the late 1970s and casts a light on the late work of the artists, of whom only Jasper Johns is still alive today. With contributions by Ilka Becker, Daniel M. Callahan, Yilmaz Dziewior, Trajal Harrell, Achim Hochdorfer, Anna Huber, Helen Hsu, Alex Kitnick, Laura Kuhn, Nick Mauss, Carrie Jaures Noland, Kerstin Renerig, Kenneth E. Silver, Deborah Solomon, Leonore Spemann.