Jasper Johns
At a time when the dominant mode of painting, Abstract Expressionism, emphasised expressive drama through bold brushwork and largely abstract compositions, Johns’ paintings of the American flag, targets, numbers and the alphabet demonstrated a decided departure from convention. Despite being painted with
obvious care, they seemed emotionally reticent, cool and quiet, far from the emotional fireworks then fashionable. “It all began… with my painting a picture of an American flag. Using this design took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets – things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I’ve always thought of painting as a surface; painting it in one color made this very clear. Then I decided that looking at a painting should not require a special kind of focus like going to church. A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.” Unlike most artists’ statements in New York during the 1950s, Johns’ remarks contained none of the familiar talk of doubt and angst, and his selection of subject matter appeared deliberate, thoughtful, and far removed from emotional attachments and desires. To younger artists, his art seemed not so much cold and unfeeling as clear-eyed and honest after the excesses of Abstract Expressionism. Furthermore, in selecting recognisable subjects, Johns seemed to reject prevailing abstract modes of painting, yet his subjects themselves – flags, targets, numbers – each possessed a vital characteristic of classic abstraction, namely, a flatness rendering them all but indistinguishable from the picture plane itself. This book underlines how Johns’s work made the polarity between abstraction and representation that had dominated debates about modern art for decades seem suddenly obsolete, opening up other ways of thinking about art’s relation to the world. It also tries to understand why, since his first exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery at the age of twenty-seven, he has remained one of the major artists of the contemporary artistic scene.
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© Parkstone Press International, New York, USA
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© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp
Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
© Edvard Munch Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ BONO, Oslo
© Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA
Art © Robert Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Pyre 2, 2003. Oil on canvas with wood slat, string, and hinge, 168.3 × 111.8 × 17.1 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fractional and promised gift of Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Acknowledgments
Two Flags, 1959. Acrylic on canvas, 201.3 × 148 cm. Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (Vienna), on loan from the Ludwig Collection, Aachen. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Writing this book has been both a challenge and a pleasure, and a number of individuals provided information, support and encouragement to me along the way. In particular, I must thank Richard Shiff, who initially contacted me about this monograph and whose example as a scholar of Jasper Johns’s work has been invaluable. I would also like to thank Nan Rosenthal, who kindly invited me to speak on Johns’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Richard Shone, who as editor for The Burlington Magazine has also given me the opportunity to write about Johns’s work on several occasions. Richard Field, Harry Cooper, Joachim Pissarro, Paul Cornwall-Jones and Tamie Swett have also generously shared their thoughts on Johns’s work with me over the years, and Johns’s curator, Sarah Taggart, has been unfailingly helpful and very attentive to my questions. Nancy Carr was the ideal reader, taking the time not only to read my manuscript but to offer many constructive comments, and Alfred Kren and the rest of my family have shown great love and patience during this project. Lastly and most importantly, I wish to thank Jasper Johns for his support of this monograph and for making a body of work with an undeniable sense of life.
Being an Artist
I wondered when I was going to stop “going to be” an artist and start being one.[1][2]
Painters are not public but rather are born in private. The public has made it their business; however, for the painter, art will never be public.[3]
White Flag (detail, actual size), 1955. Encaustic, oil, newsprint, and charcoal on canvas, 198.9 × 306.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
One evening in January 1958, Catharine Rembert, an art instructor from the University of South Carolina, was on a visit to New York, waiting for a former student to join her for dinner. Jasper Johns came late, but he made up for it by jubilantly picking her up and dancing her about the room. He was celebrating an astounding success: at twenty-seven years of age, his first solo exhibition had just opened at the Leo Castelli Gallery, landing him on the cover of Art News magazine and prompting the Museum of Modern Art to purchase three of his works – a development that had occurred just that day.
The critical and commercial success of Johns’s first show is something of a legend in the history of American art, and deservedly so. At a time when the dominant mode of painting, Abstract Expressionism, emphasised expressive drama through boldly gestural brushwork and largely abstract compositions, Johns’s paintings of the American flag, targets, numbers and the alphabet marked a decided departure from convention. Despite being painted with obvious care, they seemed emotionally reticent, cool and quiet, far from the emotional fireworks then fashionable.
Abstract Expressionism’s first generation of artists, which included such legendary figures as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, had begun making art during the difficult years of the Depression and World War II. In response to these circumstances, they stressed the centrality of the artist’s self in the creation of art, and the production of a painting as an act of absolute personal authenticity. As a younger generation came on the scene in the 1950s, many of them adopted these attitudes, and soon what had been a position of existential significance began, through repetition, to seem mannered and overwrought. In this climate, Johns’s debut was both a shock and a breath of fresh air.
Whereas Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman had explained that instead of “making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’” he and his peers were making them “out of ourselves, out of our own feelings,”[4] and Rothko declared that he wanted viewers to weep before his canvases, Johns in contrast remarked in one of his first interviews:
It all began… with my painting a picture of an American flag. Using this design took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets – things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I’ve always thought of painting as a surface; painting it in one colour made this very clear. Then I decided that looking at a painting should not require a special kind of focus like going to church. A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.
