Jasper John

Overview

For more than thirty years Jasper Johns has been making art that teases viewers with the willful obscurity of its content, while offering rich visual pleasures with the beauty of its form, color, and surface. In 1955 he painted his first Flags, which, with the Target and Numbers that soon followed, were to become his most famous work. His transformation of such common place images into art helped to shatter the dominance of Abstract Expressionism and to make possible the later innovations of Pop art and Minimalism. Johns's acclaimed recent work, which is well represented in this book, combines his continuing fascination with ready-made images with an exciting new use of illusionistic painting.

About the Modern Masters series:

With infomative, enjoyable texts and over 100 illustrations—approximately 48 in full color—this innovative series offers a fresh look at the most creative and influential artists of the postwar era. The authors are highly respected art historians and critics chosen for their ability to think clearly and write well. Each handsomely designed volume presents a thorough survey of the artist's life and work, as well as statements by the artist, an illustrated chapter on technique, a chronology, lists of exhibitions and public collections, an annotated bibliography, and an index. Every art lover, from the casual museumgoer to the serious student, teacher,critic, or curator, will be eager to collect these Modern Masters. And with such a low price, they can afford to collect them all.

Other Details: 115 or more illustrations, approximately 48 in full color 128 pages 8 1/2 x 8 1/2" Published 1991

to load the object with different meanings so that it works on several levels as the medium and context are changed.

One of his most familiar images is the Savarin coffee can with brush handles poking out. The Painted Bronze (Savarin) of 1960 was carefully made in plaster, cast in bronze, and painted: it is a replica of a coffee can used for brushes in Johns's studio and was produced in the same year as the Painted Bronze (ale cans). (The latter was made in response to an aside by Willem de Kooning concerning Johns's dealer, Leo Castelli: "Somebody told me that Bill de Kooning said that you could give that son-of-a-bitch two beer cans and he could sell them. I thought, what a wonderful idea for a sculpture.") Johns later told Michael Crichton: "Doing the ale cans made me see other things around me, so I did the Savarin Can. I think what interested me was the coffee can used to hold turpentine for the brushes—the idea of one thing mixed with another for a purpose." He made it painstakingly well, introducing illusionistic gestures, such as the silvered bronze rim of the tin, only to deny them with a thumbprint in the oil paint of the "can" itself, and offering us a studio still life and a representational sculpture. Johns returned to the Savarin motif in 1st Etchings (1967-68) and again in the prints and paintings entitled Decoy (Decoy and Decoy II, 1971 and 1972). He called it by name in the Savarin lithograph that was also the poster for his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1977. It appears in the Monotypes of 1978-79, in a lithograph of 1979-81, in the Monotypes of 1982, and in a recent painting, Untitled (1983).

If we were to pursue a few thoughts (by no means exhaustive) about the development of this motif during his career, we might begin to uncover Johns's process of thought.

In the Painted Bronze, are we to believe that the brushes have been or are about to be used again?—i.e., are they active tools of the artist's imagination or, more darkly, are they embalmed, both impotent and dead? Does the title Painted Bronze increase our uncertainty about the object's status? It is no more than a description of the medium of the work, but it is the title of both this work and the ale cans that preceded it. Johns asks us to recognize the exactitude of the language through the (incomplete) information it conveys: these are indeed painted bronzes, but when calling the works by name rather than looking at them we need to know the brand name to tell them apart. Painted Bronze (Savarin) is not the same as Painted Bronze (ale cans) or (Ballantine).

In the Monotypes, does the motif become the artist's representation of himself, adopted almost as a self-portrait? Johns alludes specifically in this series to a self-portrait lithograph by Edvard Munch, and the Savarin can occupies the same position as the artist's face in the earlier work. Both Munch and Johns show the arm at the base; Munch draws a skeletal arm, Johns imprints his own arm and adds the initials EM.

Johns's ironic positioning of the image in the center foreground parallels the Munch and offers other, ambiguous readings. It is also as a representative of Johns that it appears as a monochrome image in his most recent work; there it takes its place in relation to other ideas. It comes to stand for Johns's public persona and, by implication, for the corpus of his work as he lays it out in these pieces. What began as a playful manipulation of a joke (the ale cans) has been transformed first into a critique of sculptural meaning and then, after a long gestation, into an important element of the artist's thought; at each stage its ambiguities have been compounded. Each time that Johns returns to it, he invests it with ideas specific to that period in his development: the "stress" that he talks about is as much here as in technical and formal preoccupations. On each occasion, too, the idea is modified by the beauty of the object.

While Johns has been accused of being a strict rationalist with a penchant for the nostalgic, I believe a clearer description of his work would be the one that T. S. Eliot applied to the wit of the seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell: "tough reasonableness beneath the lyric grace." Such wit is an alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified); it has a toughness that might be mistaken by the tender-minded for cynicism.

When Leo Steinberg wrote his monograph on Johns in 1962, he generously offered grounds for criticizing it. Acknowledging that his book was subjective, that he had said nothing about the paintings as such or that he had reduced them inconclusively to ideas or concepts, he concluded, "He treats Jasper Johns in complete isolation, as if nobody else were painting at all!" All of the above is also true of this book, and it is extraordinary that, more than twenty years after Steinberg, the impulse is still to write about the work in isolation. The work appears to demand an exclusive attention and so is set apart from other works of a similar date. But if the works themselves are exclusive, their effects have been multifarious. It is commonplace now to regard Johns as having had enormous influence over the last thirty years, and it may be worth pausing to consider some of the consequences of this.

Johns's peers are those artists born in the 1920s and '30s who have also changed the history of American art: Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol. Collectively (except Kelly, who was heavily imbued with European experience), they were labeled "Pop artists," a term invented by critics to provide a useful catchall for superficially similar work in both the United States and England. Pop was a helpful invention, but its concentration on the nonart content of the works was detrimental to a real understanding of the motives of the artists. It may be easier to reconcile this view with the British artists, whose discussions included cultural historians, designers, and architects, but the Americans themselves seem isolated. It is true that they met and talked, but I suspect without the same proselytizing intentions.

Johns and his contemporaries were concerned with tackling the problems set out for them by the preceding generation, the Abstract Expressionists. Pollock had died in 1956, and we have only to recall that when Johns was looking for a gallery the following year he was anxious to find a neutral space, that is, one not infected by the second Abstract Expressionist generation. The weight of this generation would have fallen particularly heavily on the younger artists at a time when the Abstract Expressionists were being promoted extensively, at home and abroad, as the "true" American artists. Additionally, Abstract Expressionism had accrued a critical vocabulary and eminent apologists, such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, who regarded it as the true heir of modern art proper and the flagbearer for modernism. Abstract Expressionism and modernism became synonymous.

Johns's entry into this arena with his Flag and Target paintings signaled, for some, the end of the Abstract Expressionist stranglehold. He has put it another way. When talking to Peter Fuller in 1978, he denied that Abstract Expressionism had been looking tired and said: "Any ism will expire. By having an ism you are separating it from other things. Your attention has to deal with the entire field. Things displace one another in one's interest." The relative neutrality of the Flags and Targets, their acknowledgment of sources outside art was iconoclastic. They caused a rupture in critical thinking, and Greenberg even wrote: "Everything that used to serve representation and illusion is left to serve nothing but itself, that is abstraction; while everything that usually connotes the abstract or decorative—flatness, bare outlines, all over or symmetrical design is put to the service of representation."

What Johns and Rauschenberg had done was to make possible the use in art of materials and objects from outside the art world—sometimes from popular culture, sometimes from a general culture—and mediated them in such a way that art became implicit in them. They were not representing the world nor creating visual equivalents of their own emotions but rather offering a complex and messy restatement of particular aesthetic problems. They also acknowledged fully the psychological and rational processes that art could deal with alongside the emotional and the formal. This complexity was allied to images that, in Johns's case, triggered a specifically American response.

All the things that Johns made were objects—they have the quality of a thing when you see them, not necessarily an art object but closer usually to something in the world around us and offering a robust answer to our questions about its nature. These things repose on the gallery wall with a substantial ability to transform the materials they are made from. This mute, real quality, so different from the objecthood sought by post-painterly abstractionists, was the generator for substantial areas of art that followed. What became known as the "art of the real," a title used in a Museum of Modern Art touring exhibition, took up the simply divided forms and the straightforward sculptural shapes that Johns and the others had produced.

Artists of an equivalent age—such as Carl Andre (b. 1935) and Sol LeWitt (b. 1928)—pursued another aspect, that of the conceptual propositions suggested by Johns's work. Their analyses produced simple, multipart works with a strongly serial or formal basis. These inventions relied heavily on the gallery space as the framing element of the work and often brought objects or elements previously disregarded—e.g., metal plates or fire bricks—into the art space, or used the wall of the gallery as the support for drawings of a highly organized formal structure. This segment of Johns's work has, arguably, been the most influential, and even so, it has taken several years to absorb its implications.

Johns's more recent work is regarded as outside the current "new painting" canon; yet the artists he has looked at recently are those that have been of interest to the "new" artists (George Baselitz, like Johns, has taken Munch's Between the Clock and the Bed as a subject for one of his own works), and his work contains as many references to psychological traumas as theirs. Moreover, it does so with a strong control of the means at its disposal, a reticence and an avoidance of bravura display for its own sake.

Johns recently bought from the Library of Congress a copy of a Walker Evans photograph showing a brick wall covered with posters of the Silas Green show from New Orleans, a Negro cabaret group that performed in the South during the 1930s. Johns has colored the print in faded reds and greens, the colors he recalls when he saw the posters as a child. He says that the dance troupe is the only exciting and glamorous thing that he remembers from his childhood.

Jasper Johns was born on May 15, 1930, in Augusta, Georgia, and his parents separated soon after he was born. John Cage gives this poignant

"His earliest memories concern living with his grandparents in Allendale, South Carolina. Later, in the same town, he lived with an aunt and an uncle who had twins, a brother and a sister. Then he went back to live with his grandparents. After the third grade at school he went to Columbia, which seemed like a big city, to live with his mother and stepfather. A year later, school finished, he went to a community on a lake called The Corner to stay with his Aunt Gladys. . . . He stayed there for six years studying with his aunt who taught all the grades in one room, a school called Climax. The following year he finished high school living in Sumter with his mother and stepfather, two half sisters and his half brother. He went to college for a year and a half in Columbia where he lived alone. He made two visits during that period, one to his father, one to his mother. Leaving college he came to New York. . . ."

This period in Johns's life was and remains of crucial importance to him. Peter Fuller asked him in 1978 why he disliked talking about his early life, and he replied, "It wasn't specially cheerful." Fuller continued: "Henry Moore once said that art was invariably an attempt to regain the intensity of earliest experience. Do you think that?" To this Johns replied: "I certainly believe that everything I do is attached to my childhood, but I would not make the statement that you just said he had made."

Johns spent six months in Japan on military service (1951) and this has had a profound influence upon him. He has returned to Japanese subject matter regularly and is an avid reader of Japanese literature (in translation) and history. In 1953, a year after his move to New York, Johns resolved to stop "becoming an artist and to be an artist" and marked the occasion by destroying most of his earlier work. He lived for a period in the same building as Robert Rauschenberg. They shared many ideas: Rauschenberg was older, more extrovert, and the first "devoted painter" that Johns had met. Rauschenberg has said that this mutual encouragement was crucial in a period when their work went unnoticed and they supported themselves with odd jobs such as dressing windows for Tiffany and other New York stores.

Johns has always remained an intensely private person who has sought solitude to work in a series of houses in and out of New York City. Currently he lives in a small converted farmhouse and barn in wooded seclusion about an hour from Manhattan and has a house on a Caribbean island. Johns's closest friends are not his peers; often they are not artists, but writers, musicians, and dancers. One of his longest friendships is with John Cage and, via Cage, with the dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham. Cage has had a particular influence on Johns's ways of thinking; some of Cage's attitudes and some of his methods of deflecting attention have been adopted by Johns. The use of the world outside art as part of art and the repetition of motifs in musical notation have interested them both. For several years, Johns had a close collaboration with Merce Cunningham as artistic advisor to Cunningham's Dance Company. This offered him not only the opportunity to design costumes and sets for relatively abstract dance, but also something that is of importance to him: the need to think in terms of three dimensions and time. (He talks, for instance, of the recent painting Dancers on a Plane, 1980, which is "about" Cunningham and the resolution of this problem.)

Johns uses jokes as a way of diverting attention from himself or his opinions. He has originated a style of conversation that deflects the questioner precisely and with great charm, a conversation that deals with philosophical questions in terms of the everyday. Here, for example, he is talking about Dancers on a Plane and answering a question about the reintroduction of defined subject matter into his recent works. After a twenty-second pause he replies:

"Often one draws from things that one knows in working . . . and one works—I don't know what it's called—you see something but do something else, but, in your head, what you're doing has a relationship to something you're seeing. It's not . . . you can say it's very important or it's not important at all. Often, it's not something you want to point to—to say. You don't want to say I get here by examining that, by drawing conclusions from that, because then it suggests that you're making a picture of that, you can make a better picture of that, copying it a little more carefully or something. Still the mind often works that way using something and making something unlike it and occasionally one wants to say what one is doing. . . ."

"Q: You want to say, not see."

"Say. I don't, one does not want to be misleading, unless that's what one wants to do. . . . But one does not always want to be misleading and occasionally one wants to recognize that one is tied to certain procedures, certain ways of thinking, or not, forms of inspiration (that sounds too grand) but one often draws conclusions from one's experiences, and makes something. And I think that that kind of pointing in that way is simply an attempt to include that—just to recognize it, really."

"Q: That pointing is something specific and cultural and it happens in the work for only a relatively short time."

"Well, if you did it all the time you would only be pointing backwards and you don't want to do that because really your work doesn't work, at its best, does not have a direction I don't think. It's just there."

Praise for the Modern Masters series:

"Each author has thoroughly done his or her homework, knows the historical, critical and personal contexts intimately, and writes extraordinarily well." —Artnews