We all recognize the flags, targets, numbers or colors, these motives Jasper Johns has used in his art since the mid 1950s. They are omnipresent signs in our everyday life. We are drawn to them instinctively as they are instantly recognizable and neatly sum up abstract concepts we may find hard to describe with words. We see the signs but are we fully awake to the concepts?
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1967, The Broad, Los Angeles
Try this with the American flag, for instance. If you think about it long enough, one ideal and many ideas are encapsulated in this flag…
Jasper Johns never meant for his Flags to be political representations. Instead he revisits the theme with different textures and values, often time in colors, sometimes in black and white.
Jasper Johns, Gray: Two Flags, 1959, The Broad, Los Angeles
What is puzzling though is his preferred medium being encaustic. As a mixture of pigments and hot beeswax, which he sometimes layers with paper and other materials, it is actually a very unforgiving technique because beeswax cools so quickly.
Detail from Jasper Johns, Flag, 1967, The Broad, Los Angeles
Yet what I find most striking is that it is also a very ancient technique, used in the Fayum mummy portraits dating from 1st-3rd century AD.
Young Woman with a Gilded Wreath, AD 120-140, The Metropolitan Museum, NYC
These were some of the earliest known portraits and what’s more, they were funerary portraits. So as I look at Jasper Johns choosing encaustic as a medium, how much of this choice is linked to what dies with an image? And how much veneration is he choosing to bring back to these concepts we take for granted ?
Perhaps, that is why Jasper Johns makes us conjure up the flag (the dead flag?) in one specific work. If you intensely look at a given green color field and then look at a grey panel, your eyes should make you see the opposite color on the color wheel, ie. a red afterimage.
Jasper Johns, Flags, 1965, The Broad, Los Angeles
My kids loved playing the game: looking at a green and orange version of the US flag, they conjured up the illusion of the “real” red and blue flag. This potentially opening the door to hours of conceptual discussions about “Something Resembling Truth”, the title of the retrospective.
With a simple graphic visual, maybe we too rarely question what it really means and in part, this is what Jasper Johns was interested in tackling with his art.
Take colors for instance: do you see blue because letters B L U E spell the word?
What if these letters are yellow but still spell blue? What color do you see then? Is the background color dictating what you think you see? And then what is color as a concept?
Jasper Johns, False Start, 1959, The Broad, Los Angeles
You can twist this one many ways and that is where you start to understand why Jasper Johns is an artist of such importance and how immensely clever his art can be.
As such, his retrospective at the Broad Museum is an unprecedented opportunity to see the breadth of his career, one theme per room at a time.
But first, maybe you are wondering where his questioning interest came from, so let’s rewind to the 1950’s to add a bit of art historical context.
Back then the horrors of WWII made figurative art almost preposterous: providing a graphic illusion of reality was just not appealing anymore for artists.
Abstract Expressionist artists imposed themselves because they found different ways to express both the current mood and their very personal emotions. Through action painting and abstraction, an almost nihilist approach was found: no figuration, just pure painterly emotions.
Their monumental canvases were literally in your face, for all to see, hear and project their own turmoil and reflect on the new state of the world. The quietly loud of Mark Rothko’s color fields, the rhythmic organized chaos of Jackson Pollock’s drips or the gestural compositions of De Kooning were all radically new immersive experiences which still resonate to this day.
Yet for young artist Jasper Johns back then, these monumental Abstract Expressionists and their giant canvases were casting a very long shadow.
Jasper Johns, no, 1961, The Broad, Los Angeles
So Jasper Johns said no and let his inquisitive mind run free, questioning what art is, much like Duchamp did back in 1917 with his Fountain and self-declaration that readymade objects were art, if he decided so.
Detail from Jasper Johns, no, 1961, The Broad, Los Angeles
With no, what are you looking at: a shadow reflection? A painted shadow? Letters? Meaning what? The beauty is how such a non-descript grey artwork can get people to pause, to think, to question and overall to look harder.
Jasper Johns, Painting With Two Balls, 1960, The Broad, Los Angeles
Another story illustrating this beautifully is how Jasper Johns and his partner in crime Robert Rauschenberg took on abstraction head on.
In the name of art, Rauschenberg asked De Kooning for one of his drawings and proceeded to erase it. Remember that De Kooning was the celebrated leading artist of Abstract Expressionism back then while Johns and Rauschenberg were aspiring artists in their twenties. Rauschenberg erasing what was art as the ultimate art of abstraction! Genius, provocative, and actually very difficult to execute as it turned out: De Kooning was not the kind of artist to have a light touch!
Jasper Johns likes playing with opposites so his approach was to negate the abstraction of Abstract Expressionism to bring back figuration of abstract concepts…I know, it is a mouth full so let’s look at some pictures.
Flags, numbers, letters, targets, all are signs so well known we’ve lost the ability to see them for truly what we should know they represent.
Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1961, The Broad, Los Angeles
Yet now that you’ve read this, can you see how Jasper Johns superimposing all the numbers from 0 to 9 make them dissolve exactly as 1 is an essential part of 3, 4 is contained into 9 etc…? This is conceptual art in full swing so let there be questioning.
Jasper Johns, Target, 1961, The Broad, Los Angeles
And keep going: you see a target but is it an objective to reach, an aim for a dart, a store logo, an eye looking back at you?
As a great admirer of Duchamp’s conceptual art and use of readymades, Johns uses well known symbols as his own “readymades” that he then texturizes with layers of the understanding and focus he hopes the viewers can re-discover through the process of looking at his art.
His art is an opportunity to look deeply at what we take for granted, to rediscover intellectual concepts and abstractions and re-appreciate them as visual expressions, “interplays between illusion and reality” (p.51, Naumann, F.M., According to What).
“ My work is in part concerned …with thought rather than with secure things”.
Jasper Johns
“His work always seems to oscillate between the thing and the representation of the thing. By doing this, he engages the most significant questions about art as a human activity”. Michael Crishton
Jasper Johns, Dancers on a Plane, 1980-81, on loan from the Tate, London shown at The Broad, Los Angeles
Something Resembling Truth is showing at The Broad in Los Angeles until May 13, 2018.
© 2018 Ingrid Westlake
All pictures by Ingrid Westlake, unless otherwise stated.
Ingrid dear, Thanks for sharing Jasper Johns exceptional work !
You are so welcome, Becky! Jasper Johns bears such significance in the art world we know today. From perpetuating what Duchamp started to bringing his own questioning and painterly response to what art is. He deserves all the praise and such a magnificent retrospective. 🙏🏼
A great post, Ingrid! We got a private tour of Johns’ online museum thanks to you. Since I’m no fan of Duchamp, I think the secret to pull this off is to truly understand color and to be experimental with one’s technique.
Thank you, Gabriela! Indeed Jasper Johns’ art requires to be prepared to spend a bit of time pondering beyond the immediate recognition of what it represents. To that effect, you are absolutely right that the painterly quality of his works provides a great entry point. I will share something I subsequently read on the Broad website, as I think you will appreciate it. Artist Ed Ruscha apparently declared Jasper Johns as being “the atomic bomb of my education in art”. Jasper Johns, in his typical understated manner, said: “People looking at my painting might be too busy knowing that it was a flag”… I can’t help but think that this being valid in 1954 is even more valid in our day and age.
As ever, thanks for reading.
Great post. A really well written insight in to some truly brilliant work.
Thank you 🙏🏼
Feeling truly blessed that you found my post helpful. Jasper Johns is indeed monumental in many different ways and truly deserves a closer and longer look, with the reflections going with it 😉
Famous for paint entire series of flags, figures or targets on canvas Jasper John’s style is recognisable “.False start” is his best success and sold very expensive.Very interesting to learn about American Pop Art .
Glad you enjoyed discovering Jasper Johns. I loved False Start and the tricks it plays on eyes and mind. $80m is a big price tag though. Lucky to have seen it in the museum.
Ingrid, thank you for your wonderful Blog. I’ve been passionate about 20th century Art all my life. I completed a Master’s in Fine Art at SDSU, and spent my life painting, and going on every Art Museum trip I could find. I have soaked up this era in Art, and am so happy to find a woman right in my own neighborhood who seemingly loves Fine Art as I do. I’ve been “underground” for many years, as Art suddenly seemed to be about Money, and novelty, and that is not what I revere. Can we meet? Carole Laventhol; http://www.LaventholFineArt.com; I’m attending the lecture, at the Athenaeum, this evening on Duchamp. He is one of my heroes. He revoluntionized the Art World, with his conceptual creations. Please call me, and I’ll invite you to my 20th C. house, fill with art.
Dear Carole, how thrilled I am to find your message. You are making my day today!
Yes, we shall meet and, tonight is the night as I am going to the Athenaeum lecture, of course!
Will message you privately once I have looked at your site.
Best, Ingrid
Ah ! what a beautiful post !! thank you Ingrid for these beautiful paintings and your explanations.
I like this process called “encaustic”, which gives a certain transparency to the painted surface.
I remember having seen representations of a painting “Three flags” and….. only today I make the connection between the work and the artist !! (It’s never too late is not it !!)
3 weeks ago, I visited a Caesar exhibition in Beaubourg, during a period he used the polystyrene material mixed with accessories of the life of every day, it was his period Pop’Art !!!!
Your children must feast on all their discoveries … and you too of course …
You are so very welcome, Marie-Annick! I am so glad you enjoyed the post on Jasper Johns. I saw pictures of the Cesar exhibition but the scale of some of his sculptures must have been quite amazing to experience in person. Lucky you! I really like when artists make us see beauty in objects we tend to take for granted. Sometimes, it’s re-use for sculptural works, some other time like with Johns is recreating a version with different materials. The Johns exhibition had an old paint box with brushes, the sort of things he would have in the studio, except he had sculpted it all and it was made of bronze. The kids enjoyed that too! Like an illusion!
[…] you’ve missed my latest blog post, you can check it out here. Thank […]
[…] Rauschenberg “wanted to reach out to the whole world and welcome it into his world¹”: his outwardness fully counterbalancing Jasper Johns’ more cerebral approach popped the art world bubble so far dominated by Abstract Expressionism (more on this in my blog post Jasper Johns – Something Resembling Truth ). […]