By the time that he died, in 1995, at the age of sixty-seven, in an apparent suicide by drowning, Johnson had become a cult figure, and was more famous as the mad genius behind the mail-art phenomenon known as the New York Correspondence School than as a gallery artist. For much of his career, he tended to keep his work in his studio, and he backed out of more shows than he mounted. But Johnson’s pieces were intimate and insinuating, not imposing, rarely much larger than a comic book and easily overlooked. It was Pop before the style had a name his appropriated Elvis images predate Warhol’s. Ray Johnson, a master of the collage, made work that was cryptic, obsessive, and densely allusive.
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