Untitled
1972
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
lithograph on Arches paper
Dimensions
image: 56 x 38 cm (22 1/16 x 14 15/16 in.)
Classification
Portfolio
Department
CG-W
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of the Collectors Committee
Accession Number
2001.145.1.a
Art Historical Context
John Cage's *Untitled* (1972) is a striking lithograph on Arches, measuring 56 x 38 cm, housed in the National Gallery of's portfolio collection (Department CG-W). Gifted by the Collectors Committee, this work exemplifies Cage's boundary-pushing experimentation, bridging his revolutionary music career—famous for pieces like *4'33"*, which embraced silence and chance—with visual art. In the early 1970s, amid the rise of conceptual and minimalist movements, Cage explored printmaking as a democratic medium, often incorporating aleatory processes inspired by the I Ching to introduce unpredictabili...
About the Artist
John Cage
John Cage (1912–1992), born in Los Angeles to inventor John Milton Cage Sr. and journalist Lucretia "Crete" Harvey, an amateur artist, initially explored painting during travels in Europe in 1930 but soon pivoted to music. His early visual pursuits were sparsely documented, yielding no surviving works, as feedback favored his compositions. He married artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff, a bookbind...