20TH CENTURY ART
Title: Three Flags
Artist: Jasper Johns
Year: 1958
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Jasper Johns is one of most important and influential American
painters of the twentieth century. To understand why, let’s look at one of his
most famous paintings titled Three Flags. He painted it in 1958.
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Three Flags is basically a painting of three American flags, displayed flat
and unfolded, lying one on top of another. There’s a small one closest to you
that you see completely, a slightly larger one behind that, and the largest
flag is behind both of them. For the last two, you can only see parts of the
flags, around their edges.
The flags are in the traditional colors, thirteen horizontal stripes alternating
red and white, and a rectangle of blue in the upper left corner holding six
rows of white stars for a total of 48. Remember, Johns painted this in 1958,
before Alaska and Hawaii became states.
So Three Flags seems at first glance to be a patriotic painting celebrating
the nation’s symbol. And maybe it is. Some critics suggest that Jasper Johns
painted American flags because he was named after a military hero in the
Revolutionary War, Sergeant William Jasper. Maybe.
And maybe the painting Three Flags is about something else.
MUSIC ENDS ABRUPTLY AS NEEDLE SCRATCH ACROSS RECORD
Three Flags is an example of how Johns often used images and techniques
from popular mass culture, things like advertising, comic books, and as
Johns once said, “things the mind already knows.” Like the American flag.
His work seemed partly a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, an art
movement of the time whose paintings had no recognizable content all.
Everyone could recognize the American flags. But their meaning could be
just as elusive as an Abstract Expressionist painting. For instance, everyone
who looks at a painting of the American flag will find their own meaning,
depending on things like your age, your politics, your nationality, the times
in which you live. But maybe Johns didn’t care what meaning you give to the
flags. Maybe he wanted you to look at the painting as a painting. To make
that point clearer, here’s a bit more verbal description of the painting Three
Flags.
Johns did not work with oil paint. Instead he used encaustic, also called hot
wax painting, a technique in which an artist mixes beeswax with color
pigments. The result is a thick surface on the canvas that you can easily see.
And Johns laid it on so thick that the painting is 5 inches deep. The smallest
painting, closest to you, is sticking out 5 inches above the largest painting
beneath it. It almost seems like a sculpture, or maybe a tapestry, hanging
on the wall. Maybe Johns is asking you to consider the question, what is a
painting? His answer: it’s a visual object, something in itself. Just look at it.
Jasper Johns and his paintings
Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930,
and grew up in small towns in South Carolina. Having
shown a childhood affinity for drawing, he nurtured
interest in art and poetry during his early education, at
the University of South California. After a brief period
at art school in New York, he served in the army in
1951-53, in South Carolina, and then in Japan. On his
release from the army he moved back to New York.
There his contacts with artists, especially Robert
Rauschenberg, prompted him to a higher level of
commitment to his art - a commitment that entailed his
destruction of virtually all his previous works.
Johns' first mature painting, Flag (1954-55; The
Museum of Modern Art, New York), was painstakingly fabricated, predominantly with
newspaper collage and encaustic. Immediately following came a series of encaustic paintings of
numbers and targets (two of the latter including, in rows of boxes above the bull's eye, plaster
casts of body parts and face fragments respectively). These works were all but unknown until
Johns' first solo exhibition, at the Leo Castelli Gallery, in January 1958. With that show and its
attendant critical attention, Johns was immediately pegged as one of the most important figures
in a new wave of American art that was to eclipse the dominance of Abstract Expressionist
painting.
Fortified by his close friendships with Rauschenberg and with musician John Cage and the
dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham, and strongly drawn to the subversive legacy of
Marcel Duchamp, Johns became universally recognized as a key progenitor of both the Pop and
the Minimal art of the 1960s. His appropriation of bold flat imagery such as the American flag,
and his strategies of working by systematic repetition, catalyzed whole schools of new painting,
sculpture, and Conceptual art. However, as was already clear in his first retrospective exhibition,
at The Jewish Museum, New York, 19 1964, his own work resisted any clear stylistic label or
group affiliation, as it blended attached objects, inscribed words and a complex richness of
surface elaboration, within an alternation between concrete literalness and painterly abstraction.
A mood of private, enigmatic thoughtfulness, often ironic, melancholic, or gravely repressed in
its overtones, linked together his concern with language, the sinuosity of his work's surfaces, and
his recurrent imagery of the body in parts. In the early 1960s he also produced a small but
influential body of actual-size sculptures of commonplace objects such as beer cans, light bulbs,
and flashlights, and by the end of that decade he had gained a reputation as a master printmaker.
For ten years beginning in 1972, Johns' paintings were virtually exclusively abstract, conceived
in allover "cross-hatch" patterns of clusters of parallel lines. Toward the end of that decade,
following a major retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in 1977, his
art began to evoke, in titles and in motifs, and eclectic new set of references to other art,
including that of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, as well as Tantric Buddhist devotional
imagery. In 1982 the look of Johns' paintings once again changed dramatically, as he began a
series of representational works that assembled traced and copied imagery both from his own
past art and from diverse sources in art history, ranging from Barnett Newman's graphic work
and to Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece. The mid-1980s saw the emergence of overtly
autobiographical paintings, their centerpiece being a group of four Seasons canvases allegorizing
a cycle of youth and old age with symbols related to the epochs of the artist's work and to his
various residences. Near the same time, he developed a new motif, a rectangular "face" with
widely dislocated features, that related to Picasso paintings.
Since the late 1980s Johns' art appears to have centered on issues of childhood and memory,
often employing a base of motifs recovered from earlier works, layered over with a new skein of
imagery ranging from a floor plan of his grandfather's house to a ghostly spiraling galaxy.
Since the 1980s, Johns produces paintings at four to five a year, sometimes not at all during a
year. His large scale paintings are much favored by collectors and due to their rarity, it is known
that Johns' works are extremely difficult to acquire.
Skate’s Art Market Research (Skate Press, Ltd.), a New York based advisory firm servicing
private and institutional investors in the art market, has ranked Jasper Johns as the 30th most
valuable artist.
Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.”
-Jasper Johns
http://www.jasper-johns.org
ART MASTERPIECE- THREE FLAGS by Jasper Johns
Three Flags by Jasper Johns done around 1954/55 is a pop art painting where the artist
painted 3 separate flags and attached them to each other, creating a 3 dimensional object.
Born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia and raised in South Carolina, Jasper Johns is an
American painter, sculptor, and print maker who has played a leading role in the
development of mid-20th century American Art. He is an artist known for his fascination
with commonplace and familiar symbols. In 1954 he began painting works in a manner
radically different from the abstract expressionist style that then dominated American art.
His canvases were devoted to familiar objects as targets (bulls eyes), flags, numbers, and
alphabet letters.
[Abstract expressionism is non-realistic art without recognizable images and does not
adhere to the limits of conventional form. The styles were diverse, and usually either
emphasized action or color.]
Jasper Johns painted these familiar subjects with objectivity and precision, applying paint
very thickly (called the impasto technique) so that the paintings became objects in
themselves rather than reproductions of recognizable items. This idea of art-as-object
became a potent influence on later sculpture as well as paintings. He often integrated 3dimensional objects into his paintings, attaching real objects, such as rulers and
compasses to the canvas.
Pop artists drew their imagery from advertising billboards, movies, comic strips, and
ordinary every day objects.
The pop art movement began as a reaction against the abstract expressionist style of the
1940s to 1950s which the pop artists considered overly intellectual, subjective, and totally
removed from reality. Pop artists chose to close the gap between life and art by
embracing the environment of every day life. They sought to provide a perception of
reality even more immediate than that offered by the realistic painting of the past. They
also worked to be impersonal - that is to allow the viewer to respond directly to the
object, rather than to the skill and personality of the artist. Occasionally however, an
element of social criticism can be discerned in pop art.
Jasper Johns said, "I make what it pleases me to make ... I have no ideas about what the
paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business." He just paints
paintings without a conscious reason. "I intuitively like to paint flags." However, as
Jasper Johns grew older, he made his paintings more personal and autobiographical.
Jasper Johns - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Page 1 of 5
Jasper Johns
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jasper Johns, Jr. (born May 15, 1930) is an American contemporary artist who works primarily
in painting and printmaking.
Jasper Johns
Contents
■ 1 Life
■ 2 Work
■ 2.1 Painting
■ 2.2 Sculpture
■ 2.3 Prints
■ 2.4 Commissions
■ 3 Collections
■ 4 Recognition
■ 5 Art market
■ 6 Other work
■ 7 In popular culture
■ 8 References
■ 9 External links
Three Flags, 1958, Whitney Museum of American
Art
May 15, 1930
Augusta, Georgia, U.S.
Born
Nationality American
Painting, Printmaking
Field
Movement Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada,
Pop Art
Works
Life
Flags, Numbers, Maps, Stenciled
Words
Influenced Pop Art
Awards
Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his
paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed. He then spent a year living with his
mother in Columbia, South Carolina and thereafter he spent several years living with his aunt
Gladys in Lake Murray, South Carolina, twenty-two miles from Columbia. He completed high
school in Sumter, South Carolina, where he once again lived with his mother.[1] Recounting this
period in his life, he says, "In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was
no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation
different than the one that I was in." He began drawing when he was three and has continued doing
art ever since.[2]
(1988) Awarded the Grand Prize for
Painting at the Venice Biennial Artist
of the year
(1989) Awards By MIR
(1990) National Medal of Arts
(2011) Presidential Medal of Freedom
Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948, a total of three semesters.[3] He
then moved to New York City and studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design in 1949.[3] In 1952
and 1953 he was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War.[3]
In 1954, after returning to New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg and they became long term
lovers.[4][5][6] In the same period he was strongly influenced by the gay couple Merce Cunningham (a
choreographer) and John Cage (a composer).[7][8] Working together they explored the contemporary
art scene, and began developing their ideas on art. In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered
Johns while visiting Rauschenberg's studio.[3] Castelli gave him his first solo show. It was here that
Alfred Barr, the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, purchased four works from
his exhibition.[2] In 1963, Johns and Cage founded Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts,
now known as Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York City.
Flag, Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric
mounted on plywood,1954-55
Johns currently lives in Sharon, Connecticut and the Island of Saint Martin.[9] Until 2012, he lived in
a rustic 1930s farmhouse with a glass-walled studio in Stony Point, New York for close to three
decades. He first began visiting St. Martin in the late 1960s and bought the property here in 1972. The
architect Philip Johnson is the principal designer of his home, a long, white, rectangular structure
divided into three distinct sections.[10]
Work
Painting
Johns is best known for his painting Flag (1954–55), which he painted after having a dream of the
American flag. His work is often described as a Neo-Dadaist, as opposed to pop art, even though his
subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture.[citation needed] Still, many
compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical
iconography.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jasper_Johns&printable=yes
Detail of Flag (1954-55). Museum of
Modern Art, New York City. This image
illustrates Johns' early technique of painting
with thick, dripping encaustic over a collage
made from found materials such as
newspaper. This rough method of
construction is rarely visible in photographic
reproductions of his work.
12/7/2012
Jasper Johns - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Page 2 of 5
Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers.
Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media
as encaustic and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented opposites,
contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the
Dada movement). Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs.
Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate
popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for
subject. Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, it could be argued that in the
end, they had simply changed subjects. Johns neutralized the subject, so that something like a pure
painted surface could declare itself. For twenty years after Johns painted Flag, the surface could
suffice – for example, in Andy Warhol's silkscreens, or in Robert Irwin's illuminated ambient works.
Jasper Johns, Map, 1961. Museum of
Modern Art New York City. Flags, maps,
targets, stenciled words and numbers were
themes used by Johns in the 1960s.
Abstract Expressionist figures like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning subscribed to the concept
of a macho "artist hero," and their paintings are indexical in that they stand effectively as a signature
on canvas. In contrast, Neo-Dadaists like Johns and Rauschenberg seemed preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical
qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols. Some have interpreted this as a rejection of the
hallowed individualism of the Abstract Expressionists. Their works also imply symbols existing outside of any referential context. Johns' Flag, for
instance, is primarily a visual object, divorced from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in-itself.
Sculpture
Johns makes his sculptures in wax first, working the surfaces in a complex pattern of textures, often layering collaged elements such as impressions
of newsprint, or of a key, a cast of his friend Merce Cunningham’s foot, or one of his own hand. He then casts the waxes in bronze, and, finally,
works over the surface again, applying the patina.[11] Flashlight is one of his Johns' earliest pedestal-based sculptures.[12] One sculpture, a doublesided relief titled Fragment of a Letter (2009), incorporates part of a letter from Vincent van Gogh to his friend, the artist Émile Bernard. Using
blocks of type, Johns pressed the letters of van Gogh’s words into the wax. On the other side he spelled out the letter in the American Sign
Language alphabet with stamps he made himself. Finally, he signed his name in the wax with his hands in sign language.[13] Numbers (2007) is the
largest single bronze Johns has made and depicts his now classic pattern of stenciled numerals repeated in a grid.[14]
Prints
Since 1960 Johns has worked closely with Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc (ULAE) in a variety of printmaking techniques to investigate and
develop existing compositions.[15] Initially, lithography suited Johns and enabled him to create print versions of iconic depiction of flags, maps, and
targets that filled his paintings. In 1971, Johns became the first artist at ULAE to use the handfed offset lithographic press, resulting in Decoy - an
image realized in printmaking before it was made in drawing or painting. However, apart from the Lead Reliefs series of 1969, he has concentrated
his efforts on lithography at Gemini G.E.L.[16] In 1976, Johns partnered with writer Samuel Beckett to create Foirades/Fizzles; the book includes
33 etchings, which revisit an earlier work by Johns and five text fragments by Beckett. He has also worked with Atelier Crommelynck in Paris, in
association with Petersburg Press of London and New York; and Simca Print Artists in New York.[17]
Commissions
In 1964, architect Philip Johnson, a friend, commissioned Johns to make a piece for what is now the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.[18]
After presiding over the theatre’s lobby for 35 years, Numbers (1964), an enormous 9-foot-by-7-foot grid of numerals, was supposed to be sold by
the center for a reported $15m. Art historians consider Numbers a historically important work in part because it is the largest of the artist's numbers
motifs and the only one where each unit is on a separate stretcher, fashioned from a material called Sculpmetal, which was chosen by the artist for
its durability.[19] Responding to widespread criticism, the board of Lincoln Center had to drop its selling plans.[20]
Collections
In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought Johns' White Flag. While the Met would not disclose how much was paid, "experts
estimate [the painting's] value at more than $20 million."[21] The National Gallery of Art acquired about 1,700 of Johns' proofs in 2007. This made
the Gallery home to the largest number of Johns' works held by a single institution. The exhibition showed works from many points in Johns'
career, including recent proofs of his prints. [22] The Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina, has several of his pieces in
their permanent collection.
Recognition
Johns was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984.[23] In 1990, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. On
February 15, 2011 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, becoming the first painter or sculptor to receive a
Presidential Medal of Freedom since Alexander Calder in 1977.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jasper_Johns&printable=yes
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Jasper Johns - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Art market
Since the 1980s, Johns produces paintings at four to five a year, sometimes not at all during a year. His large scale paintings are much favored by
collectors and because of their rarity, it is known that Johns' works are extremely difficult to acquire. His works from the mid to late 1950s,
typically viewed as his period of rebellion against Abstract Expressionism, remain his most sought after.[24] Skate’s Art Market Research (Skate
Press, Ltd.), a New York based advisory firm servicing private and institutional investors in the art market, has ranked Jasper Johns as the 30th
most valuable artist.[25] The firm’s index of the 1,000 most valuable works of art sold at auction – Skate’s Top 1000 – contains 7 works by Johns.
Already in 1980 the Whitney Museum of American Art spent $1 million for Three Flags (1958), then the highest price ever paid for the work of a
living artist.[10] In 2006, private collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin (founder of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel LLC) bought Johns' False
Start (1959) from David Geffen[24] for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist.[10]
Between 1957 and 1999, Johns had sold his work through Leo Castelli.[26] Since 2000, he has been represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in
New York City, and in the spring 2008, a ten-year retrospective of Johns' drawings was mounted there.
Other work
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
Flag (1954–55)
White Flag (1955)[27]
Target with Plaster Casts (1955)
Target with Four Faces" (1955)
Numbers in Color (1958–59)
False Start (1959)
Three Flags (1958)
Coathanger (1960)
Painting With Two Balls (1960)
Painted Bronze (1960)
Study for Skin (1962)
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
Device (1962-3)
Periscope (Hart Crane) (1963)
Figure Five (1963–64)
The Critic Sees (1964)
Voice (1967)
Skull (1973)
Titanic (1976–78)
Tantric Detail (1980)
Perilous Night (1982)
Seasons (1986)
In popular culture
■ In “Mom and Pop Art”, a 1999 episode of the animated television series The Simpsons, Johns guest stars as himself.
■ In the Undergrads episode “Drunks”, Gimpy complains that the students he creates fake ids for do not appreciate his art. One of his
“customers” rebuffs him, calling him Jasper Johns and stating that he only cares about getting a drink.
References
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
^ Georgian Encyclopedia.org (http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-3436) , New Georgia Encyclopedia 16 January 2009.
^ a b Finkel, Jori. Artist Dossier: Jasper Johns (http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/31232/jasper-johns/) . May 2009, Art+Auction.
^ a b c d Jasper Johns (born 1930) (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/john/hd_john.htm) ; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
^ Horne, Peter; Lewis, Reina (1996). Outlooks: lesbian and gay sexualities and visual cultures. Routledge. p. 43. ISBN 978-0-415-12468-3. "Rauschenberg,
who was better known in 1963 than Warhol was, and Jasper Johns were both prototypical Pop artists as well as gay men; they also were lovers."
^ Gay Artist Robert Rauschenberg Dead at 82 (http://www.advocate.com/article.aspx?id=42690) . The Advocate. 14 May 2008.
http://www.advocate.com/article.aspx?id=42690. "He met Jasper Johns in 1954. He and the younger artist, both destined to become world-famous, became
lovers and influenced each other's work. According to the book Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists, Rauschenberg told biographer Calvin Tomkins that
'Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, 'I've got a terrific idea for you,' and then I'd have to find one for him.'"
^ Zongker, Brett (1 November 2010). "Smithsonian explores impact of gays on art history". The Associated Press. "When artist Jasper Johns was mourning
the end of his relationship with Robert Rauschenberg, he took one of his famous flag paintings, made it black, and dangled a fork and spoon together from
the top. Hidden symbols in Johns' "In Memory of My Feelings," tell part of story, curators said. Color from the relationship is gone. A fork and spoon
elsewhere in the painting are separated. Here we have a coded glimpse into a six-year relationship that was rarely acknowledged even in Rauschenberg's
2008 obituary. The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery is decoding such history from abstract paintings and portraits in the first major museum exhibit
to show how sexual orientation and gender identity have shaped American art."
^ Vaughan, David (27 July 2009). "Obituary: Merce Cunningham" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jul/27/obituary-merce-cunningham) . The
Observer. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jul/27/obituary-merce-cunningham.
^ Lanchner, Carolyn; Johns, Jasper (2010). Jasper Johns. The Museum of Modern Art. p. 45. ISBN 978-0-87070-768-1
^ Betti-Sue Hertz. “Jasper Johns' Green Angel: The Making of A Print” (http://www.tfaoi.org/aa/7aa/7aa81.htm) Resource Library (San Diego Museum of
Art) January 29, 2007.
^ a b c Vogel, Carol (February 3, 2008). "The Gray Areas of Jasper Johns" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/arts/design/03voge.html?ref=arts) . New
York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/arts/design/03voge.html?ref=arts. Retrieved 2008-02-03.
^ Jasper Johns: Numbers, 0-9, and 5 Postcards, November 2, 2012 - January 5, 2013 (http://www.matthewmarks.com/los-angeles/exhibitions/2012-1102_jasper-johns/) Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles.
^ Jasper Johns, Flashlight (1960/1988) (http://collections.walkerart.org/item/object/8484) Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jasper_Johns&printable=yes
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Jasper Johns - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Page 4 of 5
13. ^ Jasper Johns: New Sculpture and Works on Paper, May 7 - July 1, 2011 (http://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/exhibitions/2011-05-07_jasper-johns/)
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
14. ^ Jasper Johns: Numbers, 0-9, and 5 Postcards, November 2, 2012 - January 5, 2013 (http://www.matthewmarks.com/los-angeles/exhibitions/2012-1102_jasper-johns/) Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles.
15. ^ Jasper Johns: Prints 1987 - 2001, April 24 - June 7, 2003 (http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/april-24-2003--jasper-johns) Gagosian Gallery, London.
16. ^ Gemini G.E.L.: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1966–2005 | Jasper Johns (http://www.nga.gov/gemini/essay6.htm) National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
17. ^ Johns: The Prints, February 2 – April 13, 2008 (http://mmoca.org/exhibitions/exhibitdetails/jasperjohns/index.phpJasper) Madison Museum of
Contemporary Art.
18. ^ Julie Belcove (April 29, 2011), Meaning in the making (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f35b2c44-711f-11e0-acf5-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1vnLAX3vz)
Financial Times.
19. ^ Frank DiGiacomo (January 18, 1999), Art in the Gilded Age: Lincoln Center Czars Hang Up Jasper Johns (http://observer.com/1999/01/art-in-the-gildedage-lincoln-center-czars-hang-up-jasper-johns/) New York Observer.
20. ^ Carol Vogel (January 26, 1999), Lincoln Center Drops Plan to Sell Its Jasper Johns Painting (http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/26/nyregion/lincoln-center
-drops-plan-to-sell-its-jasper-johns-painting.html) New York Times.
21. ^ Vogel, Carol (October 29, 1998). "Met Buys Its First Painting by Jasper Johns" (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?
res=9E07E6D6113CF93AA15753C1A96E958260) . New York Times (New York Times). http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?
res=9E07E6D6113CF93AA15753C1A96E958260. Retrieved 2008-02-28.
22. ^ Brett Zongker (March 6, 2007). National Gallery to Get Jasper Johns Prints (http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/24455/national-gallery-to-get-jasperjohns-prints/) . The Associated Press. http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/24455/national-gallery-to-get-jasper-johns-prints/. Retrieved 2008-04-16
23. ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter J" (http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterJ.pdf) . American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterJ.pdf. Retrieved June 2, 2011.
24. ^ a b Jori Finkel (May 14, 2009), Jasper Johns (http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/31232/jasper-johns/) ARTINFO.
25. ^ SkatePress.com (http://www.skatepress.com/index.php?cat=28)
26. ^ Eric Konigsberg (May 21, 2005), Marks Nabs Johns (http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/art/11892/) New York Magazine.
27. ^ Works of Art: Modern Art (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1998.329) Metropolitan Museum of Art, online June 15, 2007
Bibliography
■ Busch, Julia M., A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960s (http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/ow/4ed0b0bd878eaf2a.html)
(The Art Alliance Press: Philadelphia; Associated University Presses (http://www.aupresses.com/) : London, 1974) ISBN 0-87982-007-1
Further reading
■ Bernstein, Roberta. Jasper Johns' Paintings and Sculptures, 1954–1974: "The Changing Focus of the Eye.". Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1985.
■ Bernstein, Roberta; Tone, Lilian; Johns, Jasper and Varnedoe, Kirk. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, The Museum of Modern Art, 2006.
■ Castleman, Riva. Japser Johns: A Print Retrospetive. The Museum of Modern Art 1986.
■ Crichton, Michael. Jasper Johns, Whitney/Abrams, 1977 (out of print).
■ Johns, Jasper; Varnedoe, Kirk; Hollevoet, Christel; and Frank, Robert. Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0810961660) , The Museum of Modern Art, 2002 (out of print).
■ Kozloff, Max. Jasper Johns, Abrams, 1972. (out of print)
■ Krauss, Rosalind E. and Knight, Christopher. "Split decisions: Jasper Johns in retrospect" Artforum, September 1996. Findarticles.com
(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n1_v35/ai_18749506/?tag=content;col1)
■ Orton, Fred. Figuring Jasper Johns, Reaktion Books, 1994.
■ Pearlman, Debra. Where Is Jasper Johns? (Adventures in Art), Prestel Publishing, 2006.
■ Rosenberg, Harold. "Jasper Johns: Things the Mind Already Knows". Vogue, 1964.
■ Shapiro, David. Jasper Johns Drawings 1954-1984. Abrams 1984 (out of print).
■ Steinberg, Leo. Jasper Johns. New York: George Wittenborn, 1963.
■ Tomkins, Calvin. Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Artworld of our time. Doubleday. 1980.
■ Weiss, Jeffrey. Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965, Yale University Press, 2007.
■ Yau, John. A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_04/3013) , D.A.P./Distributed Art
Publishers, 2008.
External links
■ Jasper Johns in the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler collection (http://nga.gov.au/internationalprints/tyler/Default.cfm?
MnuID=3&ArtistIRN=17689&List=True&CREIRN=17689&ORDER_SELECT=13&VIEW_SELECT=5&GrpNam=12&TNOTES=TRUE)
■ Jasper Johns artwork at Brooke Alexander Gallery (http://www.baeditions.com/jasper-johns-artwork.htm)
■ Jasper Johns at the Matthew Marks Gallery (http://www.matthewmarks.com/index.php?n=1&a=147&im=1)
■ "The work of Jasper Johns at the National Gallery" (http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/8473) Curator Jeffery Weiss discusses the
Johns exhibition at the National Gallery. Charlie Rose show April 2007.
■ VAGA – To clear rights to reproduce works by Johns (http://www.vaga.org)
■ Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
(http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2007/johns/index.shtm)
■ States and Variations: Prints by Jasper Johns at the National Gallery of Art (http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2007/jasper/index.shtm)
■ Jasper Johns (born 1930) (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/john/hd_john.htm) Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of
Art
■ Jasper Johns (http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=2923) at the Museum of Modern Art
■ Jasper Johns bio at artchive.com (http://www.artchive.com/artchive/J/johnsbio.html)
■ Flag at the Museum of Modern Art (http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/1996/johns/pages/johns.flag.html)
■ White Flag at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/viewone.asp?
dep=21&viewmode=0&item=1998.329)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jasper_Johns&printable=yes
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Jasper Johns - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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■ Lifetime Honors – National Medal of Arts (http://www.nea.gov/honors/medals/medalists_year.html#90)
■ PBS Jasper Johns 2008 (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/jasper-johns/about-the-painter/54/)
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Page 1 of 6
Synopsis
Jasper Johns, a major post-war, American artist still creating new, inventive work, was a key
force shaping the artistic movements following Abstract Expressionism. Best known for his
paintings and lithographs of flags, maps and numbers, Johns also integrated sculptural elements,
displaying everyday objects in new artistic light. This aesthetic of utilizing, but subverting,
recognizable images laid the foundation for later movements such as Pop art.
Key Ideas / Information
• Jasper Johns' early work drew on Abstract Expressionism's ideas and techniques, but he took
the art world in a new direction by endowing everyday objects with artistic importance,
paving the way for Pop art and Minimalism.
• His integration of collage, sculptural elements and thickly applied wax and paint in his works
created an important challenge to traditional definitions of both paintings and objects.
Childhood
Born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, Johns grew up throughout rural South Carolina, living with
various relatives after his parents divorced before he was three years old. While living with his
grandfather until the age of nine, the paintings of his grandmother, who had died before he was
born, provided his only knowledge of art. Still, Johns began drawing at a very young age, with a
vague intention of wanting to become an artist. Yet, he has said, "I don't think I knew what it
meant.. I knew I couldn't be an artist where I was, so it meant I would get to be somewhere else."
For much of his early childhood, which was marked by isolation and frequent moves, his aunt
taught him and two other students in a one-room schoolhouse; he had no formal art training until
later in life.
Early Training
After several brief stints studying art - first at the University of South
Carolina in 1947, and then at the Parsons School of Design in New
York in 1948 -- Johns was drafted into the Army; he spent 19511953 in service in both South Carolina and Japan. Upon returning to
New York, he met Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he had an
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intense relationship, both personal and artistic, from 1954 to 1961.
Johns has noted that he "learned what an artist was from watching
[Rauschenberg]." Living in the same building, and "the main audience for each other's work," the
two deeply influenced each other's artwork, exchanging ideas and techniques that broke from
Abstract Expressionism. The pair's close friendships with composer John Cage and choreographer
Merce Cunningham, and their subsequent collaborations for Cunningham's modern dance
company, also shaped Johns' painting during this period. Additionally, the Abstract
Expressionists' work heavily influenced Johns, as did that of other artists such as Picasso and
Cézanne, but Johns synthesized these ideas into a new artistic aesthetic that favored concrete
images over abstractions, a significant change within the art world.
Mature Period
Johns' relationship with Rauschenberg led him to his first art show in 1958 at just 28 years
old after Rauschenberg introduced Johns to gallery owner Leo Castelli. The show featured
Johns' first major painting Flag, as well as other variations on the American flag theme - an idea
that first came to him in a dream. This series of works, along with his paintings of targets, letters
and numbers, catapulted Johns into the public eye and established him as a contradiction to the
non-figurative Abstract Expressionism. Marking his instant recognition within the New York art
scene, the Museum of Modern Art bought three pieces from that first show, a purchase highly
uncommon for work by a young, unknown artist.
While certainly drawing on the abstract brushstrokes and textures of the Abstract Expressionists,
Johns' work also marked a new artistic direction by depicting ordinary and recognizable objects,
or "things the mind already knows," as he has said. Yet, at the same time, he portrayed these
everyday objects in a very non-representational manner, endowing them with new, often
ambiguous meanings; in this sense, his work simultaneously expanded and rejected Abstract
Expressionism. His efforts at transforming paintings into objects, and objects into paintings,
would ultimately help lead the way to Pop art.
With the Pop art movement growing around him in the 60s, Johns left behind the colorful
abstractions he had created after the Castelli show (including the images of maps) and turned to a
darker palette. He also started creating prints, some of which echoed his previous subjects.
Sculpture, particularly using found objects, as inspired by Duchamp's "readymades," had always
been an important part of Johns' work, and he began to further integrate physical, sculptural
elements into his paintings.
Late Period
In the 1970s, Johns started utilizing the style of crosshatching,
or line clusters, to fill his canvases; this style appeared in many
of his well-known images of paintbrushes in a Savarin coffee
can, which were based on his earlier sculpture of the same
object. Johns' focus changed once again in the 80s and 90s, and
his paintings illustrated a more autobiographical, introspective
edge, although, Johns has pointed out, "There is a period in
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which I began to use images from my life, but everything you
use is from your life." Some of Johns' more recent paintings employ the idea of the catenary (or
curve), created with hanging pieces of string attached to the canvas at two points. He has also
been working again with the flagstone imagery he had used earlier in his career. Johns continues
to create new work at his homes in Connecticut and St. Martin, and is currently represented by
Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.
Legacy
Often considered part of a Neo-Dadaist movement, Johns bridged the gap between
Abstract Expressionism and Pop art during his early career, but is still expanding
his subjects, materials and styles through his current work. He remains a major
figure in contemporary American Art; his 1959 work False Start sold for $17
million at auction in 1988 (then the highest price paid for a living artist's work),
and was sold privately for $80 million in 2006, making it the most expensive
painting by a living artist. Johns' paintings, sculptures, lithographs and etchings
can be found in nearly every major American art museum, including the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles Museum of
Contemporary Art, as well as in numerous other collections worldwide.
ARTISTIC INFLUENCES
Below are Jasper Johns' major influences, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.
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ARTISTS
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FRIENDS
MOVEMENTS
Marcel
Duchamp
Pablo
Picasso
Paul Cézanne
Robert
Rauschenberg
Willem De
Kooning
John Cage
Abstract
Expressionism
Arshile
Gorky
Merce
Cunningham
Dada
Jasper Johns
Years Worked: 1954 - present
ARTISTS
FRIENDS
MOVEMENTS
Robert
Rauschenberg
John Cage
Pop Art
Andy Warhol
Merce
Cunningham
Minimalism
Claes
Oldenburg
Conceptual
Art
Frank Stella
Roy
Lichtenstein
Quotes
"I tend to like things that already exist."
"Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that."
"I feel that works of art are an opportunity for people to construct meaning, so I don't usually tell
what they mean. It conveys to people that they have to participate."
"Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack
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that idea from different directions."
ARTWORKS:
Title: Flag
Year: 1954-55
Materials: Encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted on plywood
Description: Flag, Johns' first major work, broke from the gestural style of the Abstract
Expressionists by portraying a recognizable, everyday object. Yet, the painting is also abstract in
its many textures, layers and materials, including strips of newspaper painted over with encaustic,
and the rough brush strokes that create a painterly, expressive surface. Through technique, Johns
turns a real flag, a three-dimensional object, into a two-dimensional painting.
Collection: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Title: Target with Four Faces
Year: 1955
Materials: Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas surmounted by four tinted-plaster faces
in wood box with hinged front
Description: Johns uses the target in several works to create an image that is simultaneously
familiar and ambiguous. In this painting, he creates depth and tactility by thickly applying waxbased paint and integrating sculptural elements, both common features in his work. By attaching a
hinged wooden lid that can cover or reveal the four mounted plaster face casts, Johns adds
interactivity and complexity to the painting.
Collection: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Title: False Start
Year: 1959
Materials: Oil on canvas
Description: Stenciled letters, here spelling out names of colors, is a frequent technique in Johns'
paintings of this period. Here, mismatching the colors and color names transforms the words
themselves into a type of object. False Start also depicts what Johns calls "brushmarking."
Although he carefully plans the composition of his paintings, he often used this gestural technique
of applying small sections of paint according to arbitrary arm movements. Purchased privately for
$80 million, this artwork is currently the most highly valued by a living artist.
Collection: Private collection, New York
Title: SAVARIN
Year: 1977
Materials: Lithograph
Description: Johns repeatedly used the Savarin coffee can filled with paintbrushes in his work,
first as a life-sized bronze sculpture in 1960, and subsequently as a subject for paintings and
prints. In this lithograph, Johns depicts his subject outlined by the technique of crosshatching, or
applying color in line clusters, a style he used in many lithographs and paintings during this
period.
Collection: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Title: The Seasons (Summer)
Year: 1987
Materials: Etching with aquatint
Description: Along with four large paintings entitled The Seasons, which evoke man's four
seasons of life, Johns created many accompanying prints and etchings, all of which marked a
move toward more autobiographical themes. In ummer, Johns references his past works and
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techniques, as well as specific artistic influences, such as Picasso, da Vinci and Duchamp. He also
fills the entire left side of the print with a silhouette traced from his own shadow. Such imagery of
shadows and duplicates are recurring themes in Johns' other works, as well.
Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Title: Catenary (Jacob's Ladder)
Year: 1999
Materials: Encaustic on canvas and wood with objects
Description: In the works from Johns' largely monochromatic series focusing on the idea of a
catenary, or curve, cords hang loosely between two fixed points on the canvas. Many of the works
in this series also include collage and personal references. Even in these recent paintings,
Rauschenberg's influence on Johns' work is still evident, with the merging of wood, string, collage
and paint echoing Rauschenberg's combines.
Collection: Collection of the artist
Content written by:
Rachel Gershman
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Jasper Johns (born 1930) | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metr... Page 1 of 2
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Jasper Johns (born 1930)
Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina. He began drawing as a young
child, and from the age of five knew he wanted to be an artist. For three semesters he attended the University of
South Carolina at Columbia, where his art teachers urged him to move to New York, which he did in late 1948.
There he saw numerous exhibitions and attended the Parsons School of Design for a semester. After serving two
years in the army during the Korean War, stationed in South Carolina and Sendai, Japan, he returned to New
York in 1953. He soon became friends with the artist Robert Rauschenberg (born 1925), also a Southerner, and
with the composer John Cage and the choreographer Merce Cunningham.
Together with Rauschenberg and several Abstract Expressionist painters of the previous generation, Jackson
Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman, Johns is one of most significant and influential American
painters of the twentieth century. He also ranks with Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, Munch, and Picasso as one of the
greatest printmakers of any era. In addition, he makes many drawings—unique works on paper, usually based on
a painting he has previously painted—and he has created an unusual body of sculptural objects.
Johns' early mature work, of the mid- to late 1950s, invented a new style that helped to engender a number of
subsequent art movements, among them Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual art. The new style has usually been
understood to be coolly antithetical to the expressionistic gestural abstraction of the previous generation. This is
partly because, while Johns' painting extended the allover compositional techniques of Abstract Expressionism,
his use of these techniques stresses conscious control rather than spontaneity.
Johns' early style is perfectly exemplified by the lush reticence of the large monochrome White Flag of 1955
(1998.329). This painting was preceded by a red, white, and blue version, Flag (1954–55; Museum of Modern Art,
New York), and followed by numerous drawings and prints of flags in various mediums, including the elegant oil
on paper Flag (1957; 1999.425). In 1958, Johns painted Three Flags (Whitney Museum of Art, New York), in
which three canvases are superimposed on one another in what appears to be reverse perspective, projecting
toward the viewer.
The American flag subject is typical of Johns' use of quotidian imagery in the mid- to late 1950s. As he explained,
the imagery derives from "things the mind already knows," utterly familiar icons such as flags, targets, stenciled
numbers, ale cans, and, slightly later, maps of the U.S.
It has been suggested that the American flag in Johns' work is an autobiographical reference, because a military
hero after whom he was named, Sergeant William Jasper, raised the flag in a brave action during the
Revolutionary War. Because a flag is a flat object, it may signify flatness or the relative lack of depth in much
modernist painting. The flag may of course function as an emblem of the United States and may in turn connote
American art, Senator Joseph McCarthy, or the Vietnam War, depending on the date of Johns' use of the image,
the date of the viewer's experience of it, or the nationality of the viewer. Or the flag may connote none of these
things. Used in Johns' recent work, for example, The Seasons (Summer), an intaglio print of 1987 (1999.407b), it
seems inescapably to refer to his own art. In other words, the meaning of the flag in Johns' art suggests the extent
to which the "meaning" of this subject matter may be fluid and open to continual reinterpretation.
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As Johns became well known—and perhaps as he realized his audience could be relied upon to study his new
work—his subjects with a demonstrable prior existence expanded. In addition to popular icons, Johns chose
images that he identified in interviews as things he had seen—for example, a pattern of flagstones he glimpsed on
a wall while driving. Still later, the "things the mind already knows" became details from famous works of art, such
as the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (1475/80–1528), which Johns began to trace onto his work in
1981. Throughout his career, Johns has included in most of his art certain marks and shapes that clearly display
their derivation from factual, unimagined things in the world, including handprints and footprints, casts of parts of
the body, or stamps made from objects found in his studio, such as the rim of a tin can.
Nan Rosenthal
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Citation
Rosenthal, Nan. "Jasper Johns (born 1930)". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/john/hd_john.htm (October 2004)
Further Reading
Bernstein, Roberta. Jasper Johns' Paintings and Sculptures, 1954–1974: "The Changing Focus of the Eye.". Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985.
Crichton, Michael. Jasper Johns. New York: Abrams, 1994.
Rosenthal, Nan, and Ruth E. Fine. The Drawings of Jasper Johns. Exhibition catalogue. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990.
Varnedoe, Kirk. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996.
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