On a hot spring day in Locust Valley, Long Island, the artist Ray Johnson sent out a missive to a broad swath of his New York Correspondence School. The childish cursive spelled out in looping script: “Richard Lippold died, May 31, 1974.”

Such a cryptic letter was characteristic of the content circulated within Johnson’s network of friends, fellow artists, and pen pal strangers. There is often an assumption with Johnson’s work, however, that there is a being in the know, a laugh that completes the circuit between sender and receiver and converts whatever is sent from spam to that other thing, a duet that led Johnson to tweak the spelling of his school’s name to Correspon-dance (with an A). In this particular communiqué, the dance was less funny than concerning, at least to those who knew Ray well enough to know he had been the inconsistent/consistent romantic companion of the sculptor Richard Lippold (who did not in fact die until 2002) for some 26 years. The letter was a breakup announcement.

Johnson is often summarized with the conveniently legible epithet “New York's most famous unknown artist.” It is a maxim that could easily be inverted and applied to Richard Lippold––New York’s most unknown famous artist––a sculptor widely lauded and sought after in the 1950s and 60s who is almost entirely unknown today. As I researched Lippold’s work, I became enamored with his relationship with Johnson, the peculiarity of their opposing personalities, and the turning of their legacies’ fates. As a case in point, the oft-cited phrase––New York’s most famous unknown artist––was originally published by The New York Times in a review of Johnson’s 1965 solo show at the Willard Gallery: his commercial gallery debut, and an act of nepotism secured by Lippold, who had been part of the gallery’s stable already for seventeen years.

By 1965, Johnson had still largely evaded commercial or institutional success, while Lippold was leaving the commercial art world behind for a string of high-profile commissions, creating monumental, site-specific sculptures in collaboration with architects. Yet, questions remain: What fueled the gravitational pull between these two remarkably different artists and personalities that was strong enough to sustain decades of creative dialogue? What had transpired over these three decades to lead to this metaphorical death?

With Johnson, biography is less a fact than material to be cut up and rearranged, much like his multi-dated collages. In his oral history for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, the interviewer Sevim Fesci starts, as she is wont to do, at the beginning of Johnson’s life.

RJ: Yes. Well, I find whenever one begins a tape like this that it doesn't get interesting until you're into it.

SF: Yes. It's always like that.

RJ: And your beginning questions prompt a certain silence.

Refusing her request for a clean chronology, Johnson goes on to explain his early life as akin to watching a movie through a Mutoscope, a mechanical flipbook that costs a nickel to watch. Turned by a hand crank:

You're able to control the speed. I can go very slowly or very fast. You can make it stop, and you can sort of go at it at your own rate of interest.” When Fesci tries again to pin down the date he moved to New York, he reiterates, “When I came to New York is of no interest to me because of my ideas of time and space.

In contrast, Lippold wrote his own biography, detailing his accomplishments from beginning to end. While the unpublished manuscript offers relatively scant insight into the two artists’ complex and enduring relationship, it provides certain facts that continue to elude scholars of the more slippery Johnson, alongside their private letters with friends and family. These correspondences reveal a personality that is surprisingly vulnerable, relatable, and sincere, and that eschews the mythological eccentricity and performativity of Johnson’s correspondence art. It is known that the two artists met at Black Mountain College during the summer session of 1948. Invited by Josef Albers to teach, Lippold accepted in part because of his dancer wife Louise Lippold’s close collaboration with another couple already in residence there, the composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, with whom they had become close friends. For a soundtrack to this southern summer, one can listen to Cage’s lyrical “In a Landscape,” arranged for one of Louise’s choreographies performed in a showcase one evening. Its repeating arpeggiated patterns circulate in a suspended equilibrium that evokes Lippold’s own breakthrough in sculpture earlier that year. In describing the origin of his wire forms––which less occupy space than they do hold it in tension––Lippold wrote:

During a lonely walk in a misty, moon-lit evening among the hills, I was struck by the luminescent atmosphere and wished I could make a sculpture with that mystical, silent quality.... Sometime later while sketching, a form appeared which seemed to suggest that very quality of serene spaciousness and I made that important work, New Moonlight, in which I discovered the beauty of mathematics and the complete tranquility of symmetry.

Most important, however, was the detached presence of the work, apart from me and my determining ego. It stood alone, without reference to its author, like a carving on Chartres or the Colossae of Memphis. I was overwhelmed by this event. I cried, seriously, off and on for three days... realizing that if such a thing could come through me, not by me, I must become a sculptor....

And so, the Lippolds arrived in North Carolina in their 1929 Nash hearse, upholstered in bright blue velour and adorned with an abstract sculpture as a radiator ornament, outfitted with two mattresses (for the artists and their kids), and hung with reproductions of Japanese prints. It is not surprising that this 33-year-old man––already having discovered his artistic language and teaching at Princeton––made an impression on Johnson, an artist 13 years his junior.

Lippold writes:

Two or three days after our arrival, the young painting student, Ray Johnson […] came to our house with a bouquet of flowers for us. His gentle shyness, almost to the point of disappearance, was charming and amusing. Anni Albers referred to him as 'that strange boy.’ It became apparent that he was enamored of me, appearing out of the woods after Louise left for practice, singing in a sweet tenor (John [Cage] used his voice in Satie's Socrate).

This inconspicuous, strange boy is documented in photographs by Hazel Larsen that summer, his earliest artistic production preserved in several drawings given to his budding love. In one, he inscribed “a star in an egg for richard from ray,” a splattering of yolk yellow gouache is intersected by five arms, which in turn support a lattice of radiating lines. The quiet drawing, similar to others given to Lippold as gifts over the following years, is undeniably evocative of Lippold’s drawing practice that commenced in earnest that year; it reads as a direct study for a tiny, jewel-like construction given in return to Johnson (Hand Piece: A Star), a sculpture made to be turned in one’s palm. “He is using my little drawings,” Johnson writes.

These traces of an innocent beginning are followed in the archive by a string of heartbreaking letters to Johnson’s close friend Frances Profumo, whom he met at Black Mountain College. “He was troubled. Afraid of his involvement with me because of my wife and children.” Lippold continues, “I tried to reassure him that it was only 'summer fun,' but by the end of our stay I too was hooked and in agony over our separation." Explaining Johnson’s flight to San Francisco, where he followed his fellow students Ruth Asawa and Albert Lanier, Lippold writes to Profumo on October 21, 1948, awaiting his subsequent return:

This is a difficult letter to write, because life is being very good to a few people at the expense of many others... Things I wanted to tell you when I saw you last, and should have, were impossible in my state of suspension, waiting for Ray to come [….]

He must never be obvious—that he came East to be with me, not because of trouble in [San Francisco]—although that's what he told me over the telephone. We loved each other during the summer and his absence made clear our need for each other. What "good" or “bad” hangs in his balance is the same in mine, & I was miserably happy when you and Hazel compared us as being identical. Louise understands this situation & alternates between patience and bitterness and her well-being is my one worry, although I am helpless now to do more than learn from Ray all that I need to know about myself, and have avoided to know for many years. It is terrible that my family needs to suffer, but you know me well enough to know that my private hells have not been without reality, & in this situation some one or two will need always to suffer […]

Ray can tell you that he has loved other men before me & I am not his undoing. We have much to learn from each other. For how long we don't know, and it seems irrelevant now. We are happy in each other and this is our reality. Forgive me, Frances, for wounds I did not wish to inflict, although I could not go on without inflicting them either on myself or on others, & no one possesses such nobility as to destroy himself for anyone but his beloved.

In a subsequent letter to Profumo, Johnson writes:

Richard said that the only true reality is loneliness, which the artist is lost in. He feels that aloneness in the photographs of Hazel, also in John Cage’s music. Forgive me if I caused too much anguish to you about my coming East. I went West to see from far away what happened to me during the summer.

Lippold sent for Johnson to return by cross-country bus and, upon his arrival, he packed a suitcase and told his wife of eight years that he was leaving her and their children to live with him. Lippold consulted Cage for advice, as Cage and Cunningham had notably begun their own affair at Cornish College, also as a teacher and a student, while the former was married to the artist Xenia Cage, whose contributions to these queer circles are often also relegated to the margins (similarly, letters log visits with Bob and Sue [Weil] Rauschenberg from this time).

On their own at last, the absconded lovers wandered the area around Princeton, New Jersey, sleeping in the Lippold family hearse. They eventually settled in a stone mill in Bucks County that had only electricity and a water tap outdoors. Lippold recounts cooking his first meal ever on a kerosene heater and hot plate ––“burnt stuffed peppers.” Johnson describes, in a letter to Profumo, those heavy early months:

We have a sad heavy dark Byzantine Madonna on a gold background I sometimes put on the whitewashed stone wall. She is so heavy and somber compared to Richard’s sculptures, I want to reduce everything to the most beautiful, the most useful and necessary. Louise feels that for so many years she has been in Richard’s shadow. She now feels she can go out and do things herself and it will all come from her. Richard says maybe the one who loses something has the most to gain.

Almost as soon as it began, however, Lippold’s reliance on the structure of family life came into conflict with Johnson’s more ascetic proclivities, and Lippold quickly began to spend weekends with Louise and the children, relegating his living with this strange boy to his "work week” in their shared studio. The three decades that follow can only be described as a queer pas de trois––at times challenging, and at many others loving, at least once Ray and Louise found a mutual fondness. As Lippold later wrote, “So began the thirty years of this double life."

In 1951, Lippold and Johnson moved into a loft at 326 Monroe Street (a building nicknamed "Bozza Mansion" after its landlord) that had been developed by Cage and occupied by artists including composer Morton Feldman and painter Sonja Sekula. A kind of laboratory for Cage and Cunningham’s various collaborators, letters record visits from Sari Dienes, Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, fellow Willard Gallery artist Morris Graves, composers David Tudor and Christian Wolff, and dancers from Cunningham’s company.

Cage later describes the layout of his apartment, which he had asked Lippold to design for him. He recalls his friend arranging his piano in the corner––“the piano became light / it seemed to float / in a garden”––an eight-foot avocado plant behind it.

On tan cocoa matting were matching corduroy-covered mattresses that formed an L-shape around a piece of gray-white-violet Italian marble that he had found on the street. Above one of the beds, Lippold hung the first five sculptures from a series he called Variations Within a Sphere, which he had given to Cage in 1947. The gift prompted Cage to dedicate to Lippold the penultimate movement of his landmark Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano––named after the sculpture, Gemini––and both bodies of work were intended as expressions of the permanent emotions of the rasa Indian aesthetic tradition, as the artists shared an interest in the teachings of historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.

Lippold had moved to the building shortly after completing his seventh variation in his series (the sixth was an exchange with Anni Albers’s for her landmark 1947 “pictorial weaving” La Luz I). In this larger experiment, Lippold realized upon the core’s completion that it “needed freedom from earthly contact.” He extended the work so that it is hung suspended between floor and ceiling and recalls that:

Arriving one morning I found that during the night Ray had painted the walls and ceiling of the already dim studio—it had only two small skylights—pitch black. Groping my way to my area, I installed spotlights and 'Variation #7' looked like a full moon in a night sky and that became its subtitle.

The sculpture, Variation Number 7: Full Moon, was shown at the Willard Gallery as a one-work exhibition in 1950 and acquired by Alfred H. Barr Jr. for the Museum of Modern Art for $3,000. Life magazine ran a feature on the work just weeks after, and Lippold’s reputation seemed set in stone.

Lippold and Cage both write effusively about their shared dialogue at the Bozza Mansion, with Cage acknowledging in his lecture “Experimental Music” (1957) a parallel between Lippold’s constructions of glinting wire, shadow, and open space and his own explorations of the equivalency between notated sounds and the silences that appear in between:

The glass houses of Mies van der Rohe reflect their environment, presenting to the eye images of clouds, trees, or grass, according to the situation. And while looking at the constructions in wire of the sculptor Richard Lippold, it is inevitable that one will see other things, and people too, if they happen to be there at the same time, through the network of wires. There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot.

More simply, Lippold proclaimed in an interview at the time: "In the twentieth century, we do not look at things, we look through them.” He evokes a fragment from Emily Dickinson’s “Poem 1315” as an explanation: “Which is best—the Moon or the Crescent? / Neither—said the Moon, / That is best which is not..."

He recalls speaking with Cage of the “spaces” of music and the “silences” of sculpture. The only other artwork that hung in Cage’s loft was one of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings; it too … “receptive, a home for shadows, an airport for dust.”

A hand-drawn map of the building by Johnson indicates that their loft looked out on the Williamsburg Bridge, and it is easy to imagine the influence of such a magnificent structure on both Lippold’s constructions and Johnson’s carefully engineered paintings. Although most of these early compositions were later destroyed––purportedly in Cy Twomby’s fireplace––a few significant examples were stubbornly saved by Lippold, with many other compositions detailed in letters to Profuma and Asawa. Influenced by the Albers’ teachings, Johnson’s labored abstractions might be described as systems of correspondence: carefully calibrated lines of color, delineated shapes and lattices that resist a clear focal point, forming a field of distributed attention instead. While anticipating Agnes Martin’s grids, Frank Stella’s Black Paintings, or the subsequent Minimalists, Johnson and Lippold resist pure formalism, reaching towards a cosmological kind of subject matter instead; Johnson’s titling connect the abstractions to St. Sebastian, Duchampian erotic forms, a sunset, the moon. In a letter to Asawa, Johnson shares insight into his process on a work in progress:

I work with the idea of a straight vertical line––like a faith, or a spine. From that can radiate so many other forms––like lines or forms or reachings into space to other forms, dots, lines. Like leaves of flowers. I feel the need for always greater and greater simplification; more concentration.

In April 1950, Richard Lippold, Robert Motherwell, and Alfred H. Barr, Jr. moderated a closed symposium organized by Robert Goodnough at Studio 35 with the intention of defining New York’s burgeoning modernist art movement. At the end of the closed session, Adolph Gottlieb suggested that the assembled artists protest the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s announcement of a juried exhibition, arguing that the jury was dominated by conservative artists and administrators hostile to the advancement of modern art. The protest became nationally famous when Life published Nina Leen's photograph of the group in January 1951 under the headline "The Irascibles."

Lippold, interestingly, is not among the signatories, and in the wake of the protest, he submitted a proposal to the Met’s Curator of American Art, Robert Beverly Hale, for a monumental sculpture that was to be the culmination of his Variations Within a Sphere series. Conceived while Lippold visited a gallery containing “six or seven magnificent, Oriental carpets,” and intended to be sited there under a single skylight, the work subtitled The Sun was unexpectedly commissioned by the museum three years later. Developed over the following three years, the work came to incorporate more than two miles of gold-plated wire, measuring sixteen feet across, eleven feet high, and five and a half feet deep. Composed of a series of nine intersecting discs that form a rotating, floating core, the work is then suspended within a maze of soaring fan-like planes, held together by 14,000 soldered joints. It was the museum’s first non-functional commission and a major commitment to contemporary art, with a budget of $10,000, then a staggering sum.

The Sun’s completion is documented in a film shot by John D. Schiff, which was later edited by Cage, following chance operations in the only early example of the composer working in moving image. Amidst the flurry of the commission, Johnson found that his time with Lippold, limited to the work week already, was insufficient. Lippold recalls:

Near the end of that work, Ray said he wanted out of our relationship, not for anyone else, but to try to find where his life was going. He felt he was getting only dessert, while Louise had the main courses. I was shattered, not comprehending his need in my own selfishness. I had been faithful to him—and Louise—for the nearly eight years since we had met. I pleaded, begged and contrived, but one day, after repeating his desire to be left alone, he walked into the street, hailed a cab and rode, I believed, out of my life.

While this was not the end of their relationship, it marked the beginning of a divergence. Johnson writes to Lippold in August of 1956, while Lippold is staying in Vermont with his family, quoting a poem by William Blake:

If the Sun and Moon

should doubt,

They’d immediately

go out.

He continues:

Sunday evening

The sad carnival is packing to leave. The ferris wheel is half-down. Negroes pack the parts on trucks. It dismantles quickly.

Monday morning

It is gone.

In the following period, Lippold’s career soars. Commissioned in 1959 by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson to make a sculpture for The Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building, Lippold’s resulting work was composed of hundreds of slender gold-dipped bronze rods suspended by an intricate system of cables. In 1962, Lippold was profiled across thirty-four pages of The New Yorker by Calvin Tompkins for the unveiling of Orpheus and Apollo, an ensemble of 188 Muntz metal plates cascading from the ceiling of the new Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. In 1963, Walter Gropius invited Lippold to create a work for the Pan Am (now MetLife) building, a paean to the space age entitled Flight.

While Johnson’s star takes longer to rise, it is precisely when Lippold begins The Sun that Johnson begins to develop his own novel idea of the “motico.” These asymmetrically shaped collages––often formed from paintings done on the cardboard of Lippold’s dry-cleaning shirt boards––were arranged outdoors on New York sidewalks or in alleyways or sent to friends like Asawa to be played with by her kids. Notably, during this period, Johnson is working as an assistant to Ad Reinhardt. One must wonder what influence the elder artist’s comics and meta-art world commentaries, such as Museum Landscape (1950), might have had on Johnson’s burgeoning interest in the art world as a system of relations, soon to be realized in his Correspondance Network, which emerged in a nascent stage with the addition of a stamped “Please send to…” on his letters in 1958.

One can look as early as the creative ferment of 1948 for the beginnings of this movement away from the art object towards life itself. Johnson begins a letter to Profuma with a quote by Gertrude Stein: “What is known as work is something that I cannot do.” He continues:

I am so very excited I cannot sleep. Everything is rushing, rushing by in my head. I have suddenly got the idea in my head that I want to study dance… probably with Merce. Everything seems to have led up to this excitement and I feel it is what I should [do]. Of course I shall be off on another direction tomorrow, but it is the excitement that is important.

I do not feel I want to paint or draw, but learn to use my legs and arms––to do something with them. Not to do anything important but to just learn something. I feel I must go that way.

Johnson and Lippold’s lives continued to be intertwined across the following decades. As the Lippolds purchased a home in Locust Valley, Long Island, following the completion of The Sun, Johnson frequently stayed with the family, watched the house when they were gone, and the artists shared many encounters in the city, according to letters. Following a mugging in June 1968, Johnson moved to Locust Valley, purchasing a house the following year nearby in which he would remain through the end of his life.

In 1974, Johnson’s fictitious announcement of Lippold’s death was prompted by the entrance of a fourth character: the younger Augusto Gianni Morselli, who moved into the Lippolds’ home in 1974, much to Louise’s chagrin. Johnson’s curator and archivist Bill Wilson later theorized, in unpublished notes, about a postcard sent to Lippold, which bore a collaged image of an antique car that has been overturned:

Richard has overturned their romantic relationship by replacing Ray with Gianni, a later model. The car, its position reversed, shows its wheel not engaged with a surface, so that the vehicle could spin its wheels. The wheel has an obvious center to its circularity, an empty hub. For Ray, an empty hub is like an empty vessel, a precondition of creativity.

Wilson goes on to quote a poem by Douglas Allchin:

The empty hub at center

Allows a wheel to roll

The vacancy within defines

The function of a bowl

The openness within a house

Provides the places to reside

The open space that is the heart

Is where ten thousand things abide

Lippold was a collector of cars (he reserves a section of his autobiography to cataloguing every car he had ever owned), and Johnson references Lippold in several of his collages through the presence of automobiles. In one particularly touching late letter from 1990, Johnson writes:

Thank you for reading to me your autobiography pages. I enjoyed it very much.

I just remembered the time we chased G. Garbo across 57th Street in your black hearse. You’d better include that in yr. book.

Love,

Which he then signed with a vintage stamp of a little boy driving a Model T.

In respond to Lippold’s new relationship with Gianni, Johnson reportedly broke into the Lippolds’ home to quietly deface one of his own early works. The painting Calm Center (c. 1949–1951) is the most remarkable surviving example of Johnson’s painting. Organized as a grid of smaller squares containing distinct geometric patterns, each cell is autonomous, and at its center is a plain black square, within which Johnson scratched a heart. The calm center of the work’s title becomes a symbolic space that houses the dialogue that defined the artists’ twenty-seven-year relationship.

Shortly after sending the death announcement, another follows:

Ray Johnson’s History of Richard Lippold

May 31, 1974 Richard Lippold died.

June 2 And then a small dead turtle.

The "dead turtle” is explained in a letter sent to Lippold over a decade later, on April 7, 1986. Set amidst mundane conversations about Louise and the kids (whom Johnson remained close to until the end), a request for a small amount of money in exchange for a collage he had given, and updates on his career, Johnson notes:

Today to my delight I found a large dead turtle near Mill Neck [….] The turtle symbolizing My/House/Shell delighted me since I have been doing more snail art than turtles though I do do turtles.

Jumping through time, the conflation of Lippold with the turtle and its shell recalls two early drawings from the couple’s earliest years. “A shell for Richard,” a snail ensconced within a triangle of radiating lines, and a drawing of a turtle. Pointing to each of the latter drawing’s appendages, Johnson writes:

Richard Lippold’s back left leg

Richard Lippold’s front left leg

Richard Lippold’s head

Richard Lippold’s front right leg

Richard Lippold’s bag left leg

Richard Lippold’s tail