John Cage valuation

John Cage (1912–1992) was born in Los Angeles. He enrolled at Pomona College in 1928 and left in 1930, and studied composition with Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg. He wrote Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, with bolts, screws and erasers set between the strings, and the silent piece 4′33″ (1952), and from the early 1950s he worked by chance operations, often using the I Ching. He was the companion and collaborator of the choreographer Merce Cunningham. In 1969 he made Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, lithographs and silkscreened plexiglas panels. In 1978 Kathan Brown invited him to Crown Point Press, where he made prints every year to 1992: more than 600 works in 27 groups, in etching, aquatint, engraving and drypoint, sometimes with fire and smoke. Series include Seven Day Diary (Not Knowing), Changes and Disappearances, Déreau and the Ryoanji prints, for which he traced around fifteen stones as many times as the I Ching directed. He painted watercolours at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia from 1988 to 1990, and the National Gallery of Art showed his prints in Rocks, Paper, Fire in 2012.

Most of his visual work is prints, chiefly etchings with aquatint, drypoint or engraving published by Crown Point Press, along with watercolours and drawings. For a print, check the edition number, signature, publisher and paper. Some sheets were burned, smoked or soaked in water during printing, so a buyer will want those marks told apart from later damage. The John Cage Trust at Bard College keeps his archive and a permanent collection of his visual art.