By J. H. Irwin
Author | Storyteller | Capturing Life, Memory, and Meaning
Before they transformed modern music and dance, two young artists struggled to understand a love that arrived without permission, certainty, or any promise that the world would accept it.
John Cage and Merce Cunningham would eventually become one of the most influential creative partnerships of the twentieth century. Cage challenged the very definition of music, finding possibility in silence, accident, environmental sound, and chance. Cunningham liberated dance from the expectation that movement must illustrate music, allowing choreography and sound to exist independently while sharing the same time and space.
Long before the art world understood what they were creating, however, they were two men attempting to understand what was happening between them.
Their relationship began in an America where love between men could not be safely or openly lived. Cage was married when their feelings emerged, Cunningham was still finding his artistic identity, and neither man could know whether their connection would survive the emotional turmoil surrounding its beginning.
The thirty-nine letters collected in Love, Icebox: Letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham preserve that uncertain period between 1942 and 1946. They do not present Cage as the serene philosopher of chance he would later become. They reveal a man overtaken by desire, frightened by separation, confused by the changes occurring within him, and desperate to know whether the person he loved felt the same.
The Handsome Man in the Red Sweater
Cage and Cunningham first met in 1938 at the Cornish School in Seattle. Cage was twenty-six and working as a composer and accompanist for dance classes. Cunningham was nineteen, a gifted student from Centralia, Washington, beginning to discover what his body and imagination might allow him to become.
Cunningham later remembered hearing Cage described as “the handsome new man in the red sweater.” At the time, their relationship was primarily that of teacher and student. Cunningham occasionally performed with Cage’s percussion ensemble, which also included Cage’s wife, Xenia Kashevaroff Cage.
Their lives soon moved in different directions. Cunningham left Seattle in 1939 after Martha Graham invited him to join her company in New York, where he quickly distinguished himself as an extraordinary dancer. Cage continued developing his unconventional ideas about rhythm, percussion, and music while moving through San Francisco and Chicago.
They encountered one another again in Chicago in March 1942, when Cunningham arrived with the Martha Graham Dance Company. Cage was teaching at László Moholy-Nagy’s School of Design, and Cunningham performed with Graham’s company on March 14.
Something changed between them during that visit. The teacher and former student began becoming something neither man could easily name.
The letters started soon afterward.
A Love With Consequences
The beginning of their relationship carried consequences for everyone involved. Cage was still married to Xenia, an artist and musician who had participated in his work and helped build the life from which he was now emotionally departing.
That reality should not be erased in the service of creating a beautiful love story. Cage and Cunningham’s relationship caused genuine pain, and the end of Cage’s marriage was difficult. Historical love does not become more meaningful when its complications are removed.
Cage’s emerging understanding of his sexuality also brought fear and confusion. This was the early 1940s, when relationships between men were widely condemned and criminal laws could be used to punish homosexual intimacy. Public disclosure could destroy careers, fracture families, and make ordinary domestic security nearly impossible.
Cunningham faced a different uncertainty. He was seven years younger than Cage and had only recently begun establishing himself beyond Martha Graham’s company. Cage’s intensity could be exhilarating, but it could also place an enormous emotional demand upon a young man still discovering who he was.
There was professional risk as well. Cage and Cunningham were beginning to create work together, making it difficult to separate artistic dependence from romantic need. If the relationship failed, each man might lose not only a lover but also the collaborator who was helping him imagine an entirely new form of art.
When Absence Became Unbearable
The earliest surviving romantic letter in the collection was postmarked June 28, 1943. Cunningham had left New York, and Cage found himself overwhelmed by the sudden reality of his absence.
Cage began:
“Saturday night nearly went crazy … I very suddenly realized you were gone.”
The declaration is startling because it bears so little resemblance to the public image Cage would later cultivate. This is not the man calmly accepting uncertainty or welcoming whatever chance might bring. This is a man discovering that another person has become necessary to him.
Cage’s emotional distress also reveals how dangerous absence can feel at the beginning of love. When a relationship has not yet acquired the security of time, separation can seem less like distance and more like disappearance. Every unanswered question becomes a threat, and every silence invites fear to speak.
Cunningham was gone, but Cage did not yet possess the shared history that might have reassured him of Cunningham’s return. He had passion without security, devotion without recognition, and longing without any socially accepted future into which he could place it.
The letter is not only a declaration of love. It is evidence of how frightened Cage was by the power that love had acquired over him.
A Body Beyond Reach
As their relationship deepened, the letters became more confident in their physical tenderness. In a letter postmarked August 17, 1944, Cage offered Cunningham an instruction both playful and deeply intimate:
“Please kiss whatever part of you you can reach for me.”
The line is whimsical, but its humor protects something more vulnerable. Cage could not touch Cunningham, so he asked Cunningham to let his own body temporarily stand in for the absent lover.
There is an almost childlike sweetness in the request. Cage did not describe an elaborate fantasy or transform desire into grand poetry. He simply wanted Cunningham to feel a kiss somewhere, anywhere, and to understand that it had been sent by him.
The words also speak to the particular loneliness of hidden love. Public rituals of affection were largely unavailable to them, and their desire had to travel through private correspondence. A sentence carried what the body could not safely or physically express.
The distance between them became an act of imagination. Cage reached Cunningham through words, and Cunningham was asked to complete the gesture.
Love, Icebox
The title Love, Icebox comes from the ordinary language of shared life. It suggests a note left at home, perhaps attached to the refrigerator, combining affection with the practical details that gradually turn romance into domestic partnership.
That mixture is central to the letters. Cage writes about desire, jealousy, art, money, work, friends, discoveries, errands, and household concerns. The elevated and the mundane occupy the same page because real love rarely separates them.
The letters show Cage addressing Cunningham as “Merce,” “Lover,” “Prince,” and “Prince des Montagnes.” These private names allowed him to create an emotional world in which their relationship could be cherished rather than condemned.
Yet the correspondence does not depict a love free from insecurity. Cage repeatedly worried that Cunningham might not need him with the same intensity. He feared other lovers, emotional withdrawal, and the possibility that Cunningham’s growing independence might carry him away.
By 1946, Cage was no longer simply asking whether he loved Cunningham. He knew that he did. The more painful question was whether Cunningham wanted to be loved in the possessive, consuming way Cage sometimes desired.
In one of the collection’s most revealing letters, Cage wrote:
“The thought of your body near me is heaven.”
The sentence is physically intimate, but its deepest meaning is emotional. Heaven is not described as ecstasy or conquest. It is proximity.
Cage wanted Cunningham near him. After years of emotional upheaval, the body of the beloved had become associated with safety, home, and relief from uncertainty.
The letter also reveals a tension that would remain important in their life together. Cage longed for possession, but Cunningham needed independence. Their relationship could endure only if love learned to coexist with freedom.
Two Lives, Neither in the Background
Cage’s marriage to Xenia ended in the mid-1940s, while his relationship with Cunningham became the central partnership of his life. Yet Cunningham did not simply step into the conventional role of spouse, nor did the two men build their future by imitating the marriages surrounding them.
They created something that belonged to them.
Cunningham left the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1945 and continued developing his own choreographic language. Cage became his closest collaborator, composing music, accompanying performances, organizing tours, raising money, and helping sustain a company that existed for years on little more than determination.
In 1953, Cunningham formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at Black Mountain College. Cage became its musical director and remained central to the company until his death.
Their most revolutionary artistic principle mirrored something essential in their relationship. Music and dance did not need to dominate or illustrate one another. Each could remain independent, possessing its own structure and identity, while meeting the other in what they called “common time.”
The idea was radical onstage, but it also offers a revealing way to understand their love. Cage and Cunningham did not endure because one man disappeared into the other. They endured because each was permitted to become more fully himself.
Cunningham’s dance did not serve as decoration for Cage’s music, and Cage’s music did not dictate Cunningham’s movement. Their creations could begin separately, develop according to different methods, and meet only in performance.
Their shared life followed a similar rhythm. They worked together constantly, but each retained an artistic identity powerful enough to change his field. Love became not the surrender of independence, but the space in which independence could flourish.
The Merce Cunningham Trust identifies Cage as Cunningham’s closest collaborator and life partner. Their artistic collaboration introduced the separation of music and dance, the use of chance operations, and new approaches to film and technology that influenced generations of artists.
The Long Work of Remaining
The passion recorded in the early letters did not remain suspended in youth. It changed into a partnership that lasted for approximately fifty years.
They built a life among some of the most important artists of postwar America, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp, David Tudor, and many others. They toured the world, lived through periods of serious financial difficulty, endured hostile reviews, and continued creating work that many audiences initially found bewildering.
Their relationship was seldom presented publicly in the direct language available to heterosexual couples. They were described as collaborators, associates, friends, and creative partners. Those descriptions were accurate, but they were incomplete.
The omission mattered because it allowed the art world to admire the results of their intimacy while avoiding the truth of it. Their partnership was not incidental to the work. It created the trust, friction, freedom, and sustained exchange from which much of that work emerged.
Cage and Cunningham were not conventional romantics. Their later public language about each other could be restrained, and their philosophical commitment to nonattachment did not resemble the possessiveness of Cage’s earliest letters.
That evolution did not mean the passion had disappeared. It meant their love had learned how to survive itself.
The young Cage who feared Cunningham would leave had wanted reassurance through closeness and possession. The older Cage had spent decades beside a man whose very artistry depended upon autonomy. Endurance required him to love Cunningham not only as someone who returned, but as someone who remained free.
The Silence After John
On August 11, 1992, Cunningham returned home from rehearsal and found Cage on the kitchen floor after he had suffered a severe stroke. Cage was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he died the following day, less than a month before his eightieth birthday.
Their partnership had lasted from the early 1940s until Cage’s death. The young men who had once struggled to understand what was happening between them had grown old together.
Cunningham was seventy-three when Cage died. He continued working for another seventeen years, carrying forward ideas they had developed together while remaining unmistakably his own artist.
Cage’s absence did not end Cunningham’s creativity. It changed the emotional landscape in which that creativity continued.
Cunningham choreographed some of his most technologically adventurous works after Cage’s death, including BIPED, which combined live dancers with motion-capture projections. He continued embracing uncertainty, experimentation, and the possibility that art could lead somewhere its creator had not planned.
He also continued using Cage’s music. The man was gone, but the sound remained available to meet the dance in common time.
Cunningham premiered his final work, Nearly Ninety, on his ninetieth birthday in April 2009. He died in New York on July 26 of that year.
Their love story therefore ended in two stages. Cage died first, bringing their shared domestic life to its conclusion. Cunningham continued moving for seventeen more years, preserving their discoveries not by standing still in grief, but by continuing the work they had taught each other how to make.
Still In Love
John Cage and Merce Cunningham began with none of the assurances we like to place around enduring love. Their relationship emerged from emotional upheaval, the ending of a marriage, social danger, professional uncertainty, and the fear that one man’s devotion might be greater than the other’s.
The letters do not conceal those complications. They preserve Cage’s confusion alongside his tenderness, his possessiveness alongside his vulnerability, and his fear alongside the love that would eventually outlast it.
Their story reminds us that the beginning of a lasting relationship rarely looks as orderly as its conclusion. We encounter Cage and Cunningham now as two names joined permanently in the history of modern art, but the letters show that their future once felt anything but certain.
Before the museums, retrospectives, honors, archives, and scholarly studies, there was a man nearly driven mad by the sudden absence of someone he loved. There was a kiss sent across distance, entrusted to the beloved’s own body. There was the simple belief that being near him would be heaven.
What followed was not a perfect love, but a transformative one. Each man gave the other freedom without disappearing, companionship without artistic submission, and a shared life spacious enough to hold two revolutionary imaginations.
Their music and dance were created independently, yet they met in the same space and time. So did John and Merce.
They did not merely fall in love. They learned how to remain there.
Source and correspondence credit
The excerpts featured in this article were written by John Cage to Merce Cunningham. The first comes from Cage’s earliest surviving romantic letter to Cunningham, postmarked June 28, 1943. The second comes from a letter postmarked August 17, 1944. The final excerpt appears in a letter written in 1946.
The correspondence is published in Love, Icebox: Letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham, a collection of thirty-nine letters spanning 1942 through 1946. The volume was edited and curated by Laura Kuhn, director of the John Cage Trust, with photography by Emily Martin, and published by the John Cage Trust on September 5, 2019, in recognition of the Merce Cunningham Centennial.
The featured letters are preserved among the holdings of the John Cage Trust at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Additional Cage correspondence and related materials are held in the John Cage Collection at Northwestern University Libraries, while the principal Merce Cunningham archival collections are held by the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Readers can view the authorized publication information through the John Cage Trust, purchase the authorized edition through Printed Matter, explore the John Cage Collection at Northwestern University, or learn more about the couple’s work and archival legacy through the Merce Cunningham Trust.
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