Jens Haaning, white paintings, and what is a 21st-century masterpiece

The story of Jens Haaning made headlines last month when he was ordered by a Danish court to repay the $70,000 he was paid by a museum for delivering two completely blank (but framed) canvases. Haaning ironically called them "Take the Money and Run".

In 2021, the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art asked Haaning to produce some artworks about physical currency and he gave them, well, nothing - two blank white canvases, nicely framed in natural wood - which ended up being displayed in the museum's exhibition. But that wasn't the performance. Haaning was actually given the money on the condition it was to be repaid, minus his expenses, after the exhibition finished. His final act was to refuse to give the money back, saying "So more important than the absence of money is that I’ve taken the money." Naturally, he was ordered by the court to give that money back (minus his expenses as agreed).

"Take the Money and Run" as exhibited at the Kunsten Museum (Henning Bagger / AFP / Getty Images).

The successful Danish collector Jens Faurschou described it in April as "a 21st-century masterpiece". Saying that he wants to buy it, and exhibit it with Rauschenberg’s Erase de Kooning. In this iconic work, Rauschenberg approached the then very successful de Kooning for a drawing to erase, which he reluctantly provided. By this act, Rauschenberg was questioning whether art could be created by the negative act of erasure, rather than by any positive act of creation. (SFMOMA later defeated these intentions by conducting an infrared scan on the work to understand which drawing de Kooning had volunteered up for destruction).

Rauschenberg's 'Erased de Kooning drawing' (1953), and Ryman at work

Rauschenberg himself, in 1951, created "White Painting" - a series of blank canvases in different sizes. He painted them with the intention of looking like they had not been painted. When exhibited, the composer John Cage wrote an accompanying statement for them, saying "To whom: no subject, no image, no taste, no object, no beauty, no message, no talent, no technique, no why, no idea, no intention, no art, no object, no feeling, no black, no white, no and."

Around this same time, Robert Ryman was beginning to paint in his apartment in New York. Ryman is best known for his white-on-white paintings. In the same vein that Haaning handed up an unpainted canvas, Ryman worked hard on his surfaces to create paintings, just of all white ("Ryman worked with white, and the different kinds of whiteness different paints and pigments produced throughout his career. Lead, zinc, barium and titanium, chalky whites and hard industrial whites, silky whites and bone whites, kitchen whites and shroud whites, numinous whites and dead whites", described by Searle). Ryman describes his work as connected with existentialism, and tells people to stop looking at them as if they were paintings of something. You have to accept that they are paintings of nothing, and maybe he's saying that's the same of life too.

The works of Rauschenberg and Ryman were seen as manifest statements on painting at the time. In an age where the most provocative statements by artists have been the shredding of a painting (Love is in the Bin) and a banana taped to a wall (Comedian), it also seems fitting that the act of doing nothing qualifies as a modern day artistic masterpiece.

George