Famed Writer Susan Sontag Had a Brief Affair With Jasper Johns—and It Ended When He Left Her at a New Year’s Eve Party

A new biography of writer Susan Sontag (1933–2004) by Benjamin
Moser reveals that the famed essayist once had a short-lived affair
with the painter Jasper Johns.

The revelation about the unexpected affair is included in an
832-page book, Sontag: Her Life and
Work, published this month by Ecco.

“In early 1965, Susan began a relationship with Jasper Johns,”
Moser recounts in a passage excerpted on Literary Hub. “Like
many of the men she had affairs with, Johns was mostly gay; and as
with most of the men Susan was involved with, the relationship was
brief.”

(Johns, now 89, also had a six-year relationship with Robert
Rauschenberg; Sontag’s partner, from 1989 to 2004,
was photographer Annie Leibovitz.)

Already famous for his
painting Flag (1954–55), Johns likely
appealed to Sontag because “he was a master—a teacher,” Moser
writes.

Sontag was also a fan of his art—although you might not think so
from her writing. She once called Jasper Johns “boring,” while
noting that “most of the interesting art of our
time is boring.”

“For Susan, this uninterestingness was a virtue, implying a
refusal of the easy accessibility she associated with commercial
entertainment,” Moser writes.

Sontag’s friend, the writer Stephen Koch, told Moser that she
was attracted to Johns’s egoistic and dominating personality.

“Jasper is as dominating, as egotistic, as ready to assume that
anyone around him is going to take a secondary position, as the
most besotted heterosexual male alpha who ever lived,” Koch recalls
in the book. “She was very aware that Jasper never conceded
anything but first place. That turned her on.”

But the affair fell apart in seemingly bitter fashion, when
Johns, who had taken Sontag as his date to a New Year’s Eve party,
left the event with another woman. Yet Sontag never mentioned the
incident in any of her many journals, where she often agonized over
her relationships with women.

The difference, Moser claims, is that, “because Johns was a man,
Susan could be in his thrall intellectually and artistically while
remaining emotionally insulated.”

Despite the breakup, Sontag took over the lease on Johns’s New
York apartment, a penthouse on Riverside Drive. After moving in,
according to Moser, she painted over the “elaborate preliminary
sketches” that Johns had left on the walls.

The post Famed Writer Susan Sontag Had a Brief Affair With
Jasper Johns—and It Ended When He Left Her at a New Year’s Eve
Party appeared first on artnet News.