Among these, Rauschenberg especially admired Johns’s richly worked pencil drawings of dried oranges (Illustration), their murky forms barely emerging from the darkness of the page. Collage was the dominant process in a small work that Johns had made while still working at the bookstore, one night folding and tearing an order form and painting over the resulting grid pattern in flickering shades of green (Illustration). Other pieces suggested the impact of the time he spent at Rauschenberg’s studio. Just as Rauschenberg was constructing from scavenged crates paintings that verged on the sculptural in their inclusion of ledges, shelves, partitions and niches, so too did Johns make several constructed works, including Star and a shallow box containing the plaster cast of a friend’s face (Illustration). Painted white, they evoked the quiet poetry of Joseph Cornell, an artist whose assembled boxes he and Rauschenberg greatly admired. In the work with the plaster cast, Johns covered the upper panel with collaged papers ranging from receipts to images of an ear, a man’s torso, and a house. Similarly, in Construction with Toy Piano, Johns used a miniature musical instrument as a surface for pasted papers heavily worked with graphite; the composition was topped by the numbered keys of the toy piano, which sounded notes when struck.

      A closer look at Construction with Toy Piano reveals the complexities of Johns’s growingrelationship with Rauschenberg. Its connections between making art and making music echo Music Box, a 1953 sculpture by Rauschenberg. Music Box was owned by Rachel Rosenthal, a mutual friend of Rauschenberg and Johns who had helped Johns find his loft; a small, roughly hewn wooden box, it was studded with nails and contained a few pebbles.[16] When the box was picked up and shaken, the pebbles would strike the nails and inner walls of the box, giving off sounds – like Johns’s toy piano, Rauschenberg’s work encouraged viewers to “play” it.

      Furthermore, at the right side of Construction with Toy Piano is a small sticker reading “Hotel Bilbao.” Rauschenberg had incorporated such stickers in one of several collages he made while travelling in Europe and North Africa between 1952 and 1953. Johns could have easily picked up the Bilbao sticker from the materials commonly strewn about Rauschenberg’s loft, but other circumstances suggest that his appropriation was a more intimate act. Very few people in New York even knew of the existence of the works Rauschenberg brought back with him from this trip, and showing them to Johns – who became the owner of several of them – was a great gesture of trust. Construction with Toy Piano seems to be a response to Rauschenberg’s collages, most of which were meant to be handled: the entire composition of his collage with the Bilbao stickers, for example, is visible only when the collage is opened up like a greeting card. Johns’s work similarly solicited the viewer’s participation in its invitation to press the toy piano’s keys.

      Johns’s use of collage in these early works also forms a tentative response to what was beginning to happen in Rauschenberg’s own practice. With Johns looking on, Rauschenberg was intensifying the physicality of his paintings by incorporating a growing range of materials and objects into his art; verging on a fusion of painting and sculpture, the resulting works would eventually be named “combines.” Some of the objects that Rauschenberg had begun including in the red paintings and the early combines, such as mirrors and light bulbs, addressed the work’s relation to its surroundings and to the viewer by encouraging participation and making the viewer, through his or her reflection in the mirrors, become a part of the work.

      Rauschenberg used a straightforward, grid-based compositional structure to integrate the increasing heterogeneity of his materials – which now encompassed socks, umbrellas and, most conspicuously, the stuffed birds that he had discovered at a taxidermist’s shop in his neighborhood – and he used large swaths of dripping paint, signs of expressivity in Abstract Expressionist painting, to unite these disparate objects. In the early combines made in 1954, as his relationship with Johns intensified, personal materials – letters from his family, photographs of them, newspaper clippings about them, even drawings by artist friends – were dominant, raising the question of their status: was a letter from the artist’s mother, pasted into the early combine Charlene, more revealing of the artist’s “true self” than the drips and smears of paint many