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John Cage
Greetings Jack, 1956
In 1956, a special project brought together an impressive group of American creatives. Composer John Cage and dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham were fundraising for a recital in Rockland County, New York. Along with their close friends, enamel artist Paul Hultberg and his artist wife Ethel Hultberg, Cage and Cunningham approached renowned textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen to help fund the performance.
Interior designer Barbara Dorn had introduced Cage to Larsen in 1952, and around the same time Paul Hultberg had been hired to produce textile designs for Larsen. In those years, Cage and the Hultbergs were living in the Gate Hill Cooperative in Stony Point, New York, an experimental artist colony that was populated by a number of Black Mountain College alums, including artist Robert Rauschenberg.
As a way of contributing to the recital, Larsen commissioned Cage to design his company’s 1956 Christmas card.
While sharing breakfast with the Hultbergs in their kitchen one morning—a frequent activity for the friends—Cage proposed the Christmas card design he had in mind: an unfolding card on newsprint that would fit into a lightweight elegant box to be mailed out to Larsen’s clients and friends.
Cage sketched out the letters’ shapes and sizes and determined their placement and composition. The Hultbergs cut everything out according to Cage’s specifications and pasted it together at their kitchen table.
Cage selected the words, articles, subjects, and images from multiple newspapers—$3.60 worth,” explains Robert Aibel Ph.D. of Moderne Gallery. “Those were likely not random choices, because he could have simply used various parts of one newspaper. There appears to be a method to his madness, even though random choice would make sense considering his interest in chance and indeterminacy.
The resulting collage is 70 inches long and 12 inches wide. The original was taken to a local commercial printer to be reproduced, folded, and mailed out to Larsen’s list, which included Rauschenberg.
John Cage (1912-1992) is lauded as one of the most influential and important American composers of the 20th century. He championed non-traditional composition through his use of chance procedures, and propounded innovative uses of musical instruments, including his invention of the prepared piano. Cage is famous for his revolutionary approach to music as both behavior and as artistic practice, and for distinguishing the relationships between and among composers, performers, and listeners. He is perhaps best known for his notoriously tacit composition, 4’33”, consisting of three movements performed without a single note being played, where he bestowed equal importance on both silence and sound.
| Dimensions | 12 × 70 in |
|---|---|
| Style | |
| Date | 1956 |
| Artist |
