The Unknown Ray Johnson Takes the Spotlight
In 1949, a young American artist named Ray Johnson left Black Mountain College near Asheville, N.C., moved to New York City and began to explore his prolix talents, both visual and verbal.
By the mid-1960s, Johnson (1927-95) had established himself in the downtown avant-garde as a multitasking workaholic: a precursor of Pop, Conceptual and 1980s Appropriation art, a founder of mail art (a term he disliked) and a writer of narratively eccentric, nearly hallucinatory prose.
Most of all he was the creator of muscular noirish collages in black, white and gray that mixed together images of Hollywood stars, male porn and recurring cartoon faces of his own invention — usually labeled with sundry names of his favorite artists and movie stars, sometimes skewed (Veronica Rake).
How did the blossoming of Ray Johnson happen? Some of what came before has been gathered into “Ray Johnson: Paintings and Collages 1950-66,” a small revelatory exhibition at the Craig F. Starr Gallery, organized by Starr and Frances Beatty, of the Adler/Beatty Gallery, which oversees the Ray Johnson estate. This is the first show devoted to this period, and it introduces an early Ray Johnson that is quite different from the one known for his later gritty samplings of popular culture. Any museum would be proud to stage it. Any visitor will find a great deal to learn about how ambition and an almost brutal work ethic can nurture innate gifts.
The artist you meet at Starr gallery is nearly the opposite of his elder. Johnson the Younger has an unfamiliar genius for color, the lapidarian technique of a jeweler and a devotion to evocative abstraction.
