The long partnership between John Cage (1912-1992) and Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) generated a rich body of work and relationships through endless experimentation, paradox, and chance encounters like Cage’s 1942 meeting with Marcel Duchamp. Cage, reportedly, was crying, having had a fight with Peggy Guggenheim. Duchamp was smoking his omnipresent cigar.

The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art is now holding a retrospective of Cage and Cunningham’s artistic milieu and legacy, bridging both time and space from the Surrealist scene and the pop era and including rarely seen work from Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and other disciples of the readymade aesthetic. (Through May 9, 2010.)