America witnessed a return of Dadaist practice in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. A liminal moment in the history of postwar American art, neo-Dada was at once a response to the presumed emotive possibilities of abstract expressionism, a challenge to the rigors of high modernist criticism, and a resurrection of early European modernism.

Despite the close collaboration of Rauschenberg and Johns during the 1950s, their work remained markedly distinct. Where Rauschenberg’s early “combines” looked back most emphatically to German Dada and the collaged work of Kurt Schwitters, Johns’ iconic flags, targets, maps and numbers resurrected the French Dadaist tradition of Marcel Duchamp. Further, where Rauschenberg’s early work asserted a deeply personal iconography amidst its array of art historical and pop cultural references, Johns’ early work insisted upon the resolute impersonality of the pictorial sign.

In the ensuing decades, Rauschenberg evacuated the personal from his surfaces, withdrawing from the photographic and allusive invocations of the self and foregoing the painterly gesture for the impersonality of the mechanically transferred, silkscreen image.

From the 1960s onwards, Rauschenberg’s work functions as an expansive visual archive of contemporary popular and political culture. Johns’ work, in contrast, has maintained its sustained painterly engagement in the contested status of the pictorial sign, even as it has adopted the pictorial strategies of repetition, tracing and appropriation. Reversing the trajectory of Rauschenberg’s work, Johns’ work has moved, albeit obliquely towards a more self-revelatory iconography of indexical trace and shadowy figural presence.