Five Friends at the Brandhorst Museum: Friendship, Art, and Multimedia Revolution
Till August 17th, 2025, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich hosts Five Friends. John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly—a vivid chronicle of five visionaries who, between the 1940s and 1970s, redefined the boundaries of music, dance, and visual arts. More than 180 works—including paintings, Combines, scores, stage sets, costumes, photographs, and archival materials—retrace a bond forged through love affairs, rivalries, road trips, and long nights of rehearsals in off-Broadway theaters.
LEFT: Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1968, Paper (Rives, with watermark), screenprint, 105 x 68 cm, © Jasper Johns, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Museum Ludwig, Cologne / Donation Ludwig Collection 1976. Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln; RIGHT: Robert Rauschenberg, Odalisk, 1955-58, Wood, fabric, paper, and other materials, 205 x 58 x 58 cm, © Robert Rauschenberg, VG, Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Museum Ludwig, Cologne / Donation Ludwig Collection 1976. Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Black Mountain College: The Epicenter
The exhibition begins at the legendary campus of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where in the mid-1940s John Cage (1912–1992) and Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) taught experimental courses blending chance-based music, deconstructed dance, and concrete poetry. It was there that the younger artists Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) and Cy Twombly (1928–2011) learned to take risks: Rauschenberg abandoned the idea of a "closed painting" to invent the Combines—hybrids of painting, sculpture, and photography—while Twombly began etching graffiti and cryptic symbols onto stark white canvases. In 1954, Jasper Johns (1930) entered the scene: with his flags and targets, he transformed national symbols into painterly riddles and quickly became part of the circle of friends.
LEFT: Cy Twombly, Bed, n.d. Colored dryprint on cardboard, Edition 1/6, 43,1 x 27,9 cm, Udo und Anette Brandhorst Collection, © Cy Twombly Foundation, Photo: Sybille Forster, Bayerische, Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, Munich; RIGHT: Jasper Johns, Flag on Orange Field, 1957, Encaustic on canvas, 167,5 x 124,5 cm, © Jasper Johns, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Museum Ludwig, Cologne / Donation Ludwig Collection 1976. Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln
Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Twombly never formed a movement, nor did they sign any manifesto. Yet, in the quiet of their studios and through decades of shared dialogue and experimentation, they built a network of cross-influences that profoundly shaped contemporary artistic thought. Their works—whether Cage’s musical scores, Cunningham’s revolutionary choreographies, Rauschenberg’s Combines, Twombly’s allusive abstractions, or Johns’s silent targets—still seem to speak to one another today, like a long, interrupted conversation composed of pauses, tensions, and resonances.
LEFT: Exhbition View: Five Friends, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Photo: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, Munich; RIGHT: Robert Rauschenberg, Décor for Minutiae, 1954/1976, Oil, paper, fabric, newsprint, wood, metal, and plastic with mirror and string, on wood, © Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection, Gift of Jay F. Ecklund, the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, Agnes Gund, Russell Cowles and Josine Peters, the Hayes Fund of HRK Foundation, Dorothy Lichtenstein, MAHADH Fund of HRK Foundation, Goodale Family Foundation, Marion Stroud Swingle, David Teiger, Kathleen Fluegel, Barbara G. Pine, and the T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2011
On the Black Stage of the Cunningham Dance Company
Descending to the lower level of the Brandhorst, visitors enter a completely black room—an homage to the performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Here, one encounters hand-painted costumes by Rauschenberg, modular stage sets by Johns, and visual scores by Cage that invite you to “play” silences, breaths, and accidents. The moving body becomes the space where all the arts converge—and collide.
LEFT: Exhbition View: Five Friends, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Photo: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, Munich; RIGHT: Exhbition View: Five Friends, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Photo: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, Munich
Art, Politics, and Desire in the Heart of the Cold War
During the era of McCarthy’s blacklists and the space race, the “five friends” turned current events into iconographic material. Rauschenberg obsessively manipulated flags, eagles, and newspapers; Johns reduced the U.S. flag to a mere surface of signs; Twombly evoked NASA in “Orion III” (1968) and in canvases inscribed like dusty blackboards. Beneath it all, their intimate relationships—Cage with Cunningham, Rauschenberg with Johns and later Twombly—forced each of them to encode desire in cryptic marks, allusions, and erasures. In this light, Johns’s “Targets” can also be read as crosshairs aimed at queer identities still unacknowledged at the time.
LEFT: Cy Twombly, Orion III (New York), 1968, Dispersion paint, crayon and pencil on canvas, 172,5 x 216 cm, Udo und Anette Brandhorst Collection, © Cy Twombly Foundation, Photo: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, Munich; RIGHT: Cy Twombly, Untitled (Roma), 1962, Dispersion paint, oil, crayon and pencil on canvas, 165,5 x 201 cm, Udo und Anette Brandhorst Collection, © Cy Twombly Foundation, Photo: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische, Staatsgemäldesammlungen,Museum Brandhorst, Munich
Exhibition Pathway
Ground Level: Friendship as a Laboratory. Documents from “Black Mountain College”, Cage’s early scores, mid-1950s paintings by Johns, and Rauschenberg’s Combines in direct dialogue with Twombly’s graffiti-inspired works.
Lower Level: “The Black Stag”—a continuous cinema of MCDC performances; original costumes, lighting sketches, and 16mm projections that reactivate movement and gesture.
Cold War Focus: Works themed around space exploration, newspaper collages, and the “Stoned Moon” lithographs commissioned by NASA (1969–70).
Sentimental Archive: Letters, private photographs, and notes on tracing paper reveal a web of complicity, jealousy, and affection among the five friends.
LEFT: Merce Cunningham in Antic Meet, 1958, Photo: Richard Rutledge, 1958, © Courtesy of the Merce, Cunningham Trust and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library; RIGHT: Exhbition View: Five Friends, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Photo: Haydar Koyupinar, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Museum Brandhorst, Munich
When information travels at the speed of a feed and politics builds new walls, the example of the “Five Friends” feels more urgent than ever: fostering dialogue between differences, embracing chance, and practicing silence as a form of attention. In this vision, art is not an ivory tower but an open field, where the sound of a footstep or the flicker of a shadow carries as much weight as a flag or an overt gesture. It is a space where technology meets vulnerability, and where formal exploration coexists with affection, uncertainty, and desire.
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