John Cage

Mono print made with smoke and branding.

The composer, philosopher, and artist John Cage was born in 1912 in Los Angeles. Cage started painting at an early age but gave it up in order to focus on music. His work is linked to various artistic movements, including minimalism, conceptual art, and Fluxus. In 1942, when Cage left a teaching position at the Chicago School of Design to move to New York City, he was introduced to many leading figures of the avant-garde, including Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. After a groundbreaking and celebrated career as an experimental composer and music theorist, Cage returned to the visual arts in the 1970s. Despite suffering from severe arthritis, he explored etching, painting, photography, and printmaking until his death at age 79 in 1992. Cage’s prints disclose his lifelong interest in producing art on the basis of chance operations, using unconventional processes and materials. Some of his prints resemble Wassily Kandinsky’s colorful arrangements of basic geometric forms, while others bear a likeness to the notational patterns of sheet music or dance choreography sketches.

His work can be found in the collections of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; and Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, among others.

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