Image Credit: Photo Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois/© 2021 Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS)/Museum of Modern Art He once explained the origins of Flag as follows: “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it. Johns often speaks about his works in terms that can be bracingly simple for art that is so complex. Yet Johns has largely avoided ascribing political resonance to the American flag in his art-even though one work featuring that very image, along with the word “MORATORIUM,” became the subject of a print Johns made for the Committee Against the War of Vietnam in 1969. Because the paint in Flag appears to ominously drip, some saw the painting as an expression of decidedly unpatriotic views about the state of the U.S. Now as then, the American flag is a fraught symbol. Poking through that paint are newspapers-a way of bringing everyday detritus, to say nothing of the news of the day, into Flag. More commonly associated with art-making before the Renaissance than with contemporary art, encaustic involves the use of beeswax to fix pigment to a surface, allowing Johns to more closely mold each of his strokes. (The painting’s title is deliberately something of a misnomer: this piece is not a flag, but an image of one.) Still, his chosen medium for making the painting, encaustic, was unusual to say the least. In a sense, Johns was relying on a ready-made image for the subject of his work, effectively meaning that he didn’t have a hand in deciding how the resulting painting would look. If Abstract Expressionism was all about originality and the myth of the artist’s genius, Flag was something entirely different. What you saw was what you got: an American flag, with its blue rectangle filled with 48 stars (Alaska and Hawaii had not yet achieved statehood) and its alternating red and white stripes. Unlike Abstract Expressionist paintings, which often alluded to lofty philosophical concepts, spiritual states of being, or natural subjects, Flag referred to nothing other than itself. Flag (1954–55) unsettled critics because it looked nothing like those works. Going gallery to gallery, one might see numerous exhibitions featuring all-over abstractions, each with a particular style that corresponded to a certain artist (drips of paint for Jackson Pollock, heavy black forms for Franz Kline, fields of saturated color for Mark Rothko, and so on). Image Credit: ©Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Museum of Modern Artĭuring the ’50s, Abstract Expressionism was still considered the paragon of art in New York. How do you decode a Johns painting? Below, a look at seven works and the layers of meaning hidden within them. Next week, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York will open a two-part, 500-work retrospective spanning the full of the 91-year-old artist’s oeuvre. As former Museum of Modern Art director Kirk Varnedoe once wrote, “The common image of this artist is that of a delphic, cerebral strategist who understands at all times exactly what he is doing and what his works mean (but usually chooses to keep it secret).” Rife with allusions to his personal life and art history, they have intrigued scholars because they appear so unforthcoming. In the years afterward, Johns would continue to make paintings and prints that are likewise hard to parse. They helped formalize a turn away from Abstract Expressionism and set the stage for the beginnings of Pop-and made Johns a bona fide star in the process.ĭespite their fame, these works resisted easy interpretation and introduced the whatsit quality that has come to define Johns’s art. Termed Neo-Dada by critics during the ’50s because of the art’s basis in the conceptually slippery sculptures of Marcel Duchamp, these works marked a seismic shift in the New York art world of their day. In the following decade, Johns went on to create the works that now define his oeuvre: his encaustic paintings of flags, targets, numbers, and maps. “There was a change in my spirit, in my thought and my work, as well as some doubt and terror,” Johns once recalled. He met artist Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he led a romantic relationship, and he was brought into the orbit of experimental composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, both of whom enhanced Johns’s understanding of the role that everyday life could play in art. Until 1954, Jasper Johns routinely destroyed his artworks, feeling them somehow inadequate.
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