Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930) is an American painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker whose work is associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art. He is well known for his depictions of the American flag and other common objects and signs, such as targets, maps, letters, and numbers. At multiple points in his career, his work has held the title of highest known price paid for an artwork by a living artist.
Johns has received many honors throughout his career, including the National Medal of Arts in 1990 and Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973 and the American Philosophical Society in 2007. In 2018, the New York Times called him the United States' "foremost living artist".
Johns is also a co-founder of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He currently lives and works in Connecticut.
Life
Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina, with his paternal grandparents after his parents divorced. He began drawing at the age of three and knew very early on that he wanted to be an artist, despite having little exposure to the arts where he grew up. His paternal grandfather’s first wife, Evalina, painted landscapes that hung in the homes of several family members. These paintings were the only artworks Johns remembers seeing in his youth. Following his grandfather's death in 1939, Johns spent a year living with his mother and stepfather in Columbia, South Carolina, and then six years living with his Aunt Gladys on Lake Murray, South Carolina. He spent summer holidays with his father, Jasper, Sr., and stepmother, Geraldine Sineath Johns, who encouraged his art by buying materials for him to draw and paint. He graduated as valedictorian of Edmunds High School (now Sumter High School) class of 1947 in Sumter, South Carolina, where he once again lived with his mother and her family.
Johns studied art for a total of three semesters at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, from 1947 to 1948. Encouraged by his professors, he then moved to New York City and enrolled briefly at the Parsons School of Design in 1949. In 1951, Johns was drafted into the army during the Korean War, serving for two years, first in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and then in Sendai, Japan.
Returning to New York in the summer of 1953, Johns worked at Marboro Books and began to meet some of the artists who would be formative in his early career. These included Sari Dienes, Rachel Rosenthal, and Robert Rauschenberg, with whom Johns began a relationship of artistic and personal significance that would last until 1961. During the same period Johns was strongly influenced by the choreographer Merce Cunningham and his partner, the composer John Cage. Working together they explored the contemporary art scene, and began sharing their ideas on art.
In March 1957, while visiting Rauschenberg's studio, the gallery owner Leo Castelli asked to see Johns's art. As Castelli recalled: “So we went down. It was just the floor below. There was a fantastic display of flags and targets. You know the target with the plastic eyes, the one with the faces. The Green Target was at the Jewish Museum, but there was a big white flag, a smaller white flag, numbers, the alphabet, anything—all those great masterpieces." Castelli immediately offered Johns an exhibition. His first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, held in early 1958, was well received; all but two of the eighteen works on view sold. Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, purchased three paintings from the show, which were the first works by Johns to enter a museum collection.
Johns has lived and worked in various homes and studios in New York City throughout his career and, from 1973 to 1987, maintained a rustic 1930s farmhouse with a glass-walled studio in Stony Point, New York. He began visiting the Caribbean island of Saint Martin in the late 1960s, buying property there in 1972, and, later, building a home and studio, for which Philip Johnson was the principal designer. Johns currently lives and works in Sharon, Connecticut.
Work
Painting
In 1954, Johns destroyed all of his previous artwork still in his possession and began the paintings for which he is best known: depictions of flags, maps, targets, letters, and numbers. His use of such symbols differentiated his paintings from the gestural abstraction of the Abstract Expressionists, whose works were often understood as expressive of the individual personality or psychology of the artist. With well-known motifs imported into his art, his paintings could be read as both representational (a flag, a target) and as abstract (stripes, circles). Some art historians and museums characterize his choice of subjects as freeing him from decisions about composition. Johns has remarked: "What’s interesting to me is the fact that it isn’t designed, but taken. It’s not mine,” or, that these motifs are "things the mind already knows."
His early encaustic painting Flag (1954–55), painted after having a dream of it, marks the beginning of this new period. The motif allowed Johns to create a painting that was not completely abstract because it depicts a symbol (the American flag), yet it draws attention to the design of the symbol itself. The work evades the personal because it depicts a national symbol, and yet, it maintains a sense of the handmade in Johns's wax brushstrokes; it is neither a literal flag, nor a purely abstract painting. The work thus raises a set of complex questions with no clear answers through its combination of symbol and medium. Indeed, Alfred H. Barr could not convince the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art to directly acquire the painting from Johns's first solo show, as they were afraid its ambiguity might lead to boycott or attack by patriotic groups during the Cold War climate of the late 1950s. Barr was, however, able to arrange for the architect Philip Johnson to buy the painting and later donate it to the museum in 1973. The flag remains one of Johns’s most enduring motifs; the art historian Roberta Bernstein recounts that “between 1954 and 2002, he employed virtually his full array of materials and techniques in twenty-seven paintings, ten individual or editioned sculptures, fifty drawings, and eighteen print editions that depict the flag as the primary image."
Johns is also known for including three-dimensional objects in his paintings. These objects can be either found (the ruler in Painting with Ruler and “Gray,” 1960) or specifically made (the plaster reliefs in Target with Four Faces, 1955). This practice challenges the typical conception of painting as a two-dimensional realm. Johns’s early and enduring use of the medium of encaustic also presented the opportunity to experiment with texture. An ancient technique, encaustic is a process whereby melted wax mixed with pigment is applied and “burned into” a support. The method allowed Johns to preserve the discrete quality of individual brushstrokes, even when layered, creating textured yet, at times, transparent surfaces. Johns's 2020 work Slice reproduces a drawing of a knee by Jéan-Marc Togodgue, a Cameroonian emigre student basketball player who attended the Salisbury School near Johns's estate in Sharon. Johns's use of Togodgue's artwork without first notifying him led to a dispute that was settled amicably.
Sculpture
Johns made his first sculpture, Flashlight I, in 1958. Many of his earliest sculptures are single, freestanding objects modeled from a material called Sculp-metal, a pliable metallic medium that could be applied and manipulated much like paint or clay. During this period, he also employed casting techniques to make objects out of plaster and bronze. Some of these objects are painted to suggest a certain sense of verisimilitude; Painted Bronze (1960), for example, depicts a can painted with the Savarin Coffee label. Filled with cast paintbrushes, the work recalls an object one might find on an artist’s studio table.
Numbers (2007), which depicts his now classic pattern of stenciled numerals repeated in a grid, and is the largest single bronze Johns has made to date. Another sculpture from this period, a double-sided relief titled Fragment of a Letter (2009), incorporates part of a letter from Vincent van Gogh to his friend, the artist Émile Bernard. On one side of the relief, Johns pressed each letter of van Gogh's words into the wax model. On the other side, he spelled each letter in the American Sign Language alphabet using stamps he designed. Johns signed the wax model with impressions of his own hand, his name finger-spelled in two vertical rows.
Prints
Johns began experimenting with printmaking techniques in 1960, when Tatyana Grosman, the founder of Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc. (ULAE), invited him to her printmaking studio on Long Island. Beginning with lithographs that explore the common objects and motifs for which he is best known, such as Target (1960), Johns continued to work closely with ULAE, publishing over 180 editions in a variety of printmaking techniques to investigate and develop existing compositions. Initially, lithography suited Johns and enabled him to create print versions of iconic depictions of flags, maps, and targets that filled his paintings. In 1971, Johns became the first artist at ULAE to utilize the handfed offset lithographic press, resulting in Decoy — an image realized as a lithograph before it became a drawing or painting.
Johns has worked with other printmakers throughout his career, producing lithographs and lead reliefs at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles; screenprints with Hiroshi Kawanishi at Simca Prints in New York from 1973–75; and intaglios published by Petersburg Press at Atelier Crommelynck in Paris from 1975–90, including a collaboration with the author Samuel Beckett that resulted in Foirades/Fizzles (1976), a book of five text fragments by Beckett in French and English and 33 intaglios by Johns. He produced Cup 2 Picasso as an offset lithograph for the June 1973 issue of the magazine XXe siècle and, in 2000, completed an edition of 26 linocuts printed by the Grenfell Press and published by Z Press to accompany Jeff Clark's Sun on 6. For the May 2014 issue of Art in America, he created an unnumbered black-and-white off-set lithograph depicting many of his signature motifs.
In 1995, Johns hired master printmaker John Lund and began to construct his own printmaking studio on his property in Sharon, Connecticut. Low Road Studio was officially founded in 1997 as Johns’s own publishing imprint.
Collaborations
For decades Johns worked with others to raise both funds and attention for Merce Cunningham's Dance Company. He assisted Robert Rauschenberg in some of his 1950s designs for Cunningham's sets and costumes. In spring 1963, Johns and John Cage cofounded the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (now the Foundation for Contemporary Arts), to raise funds in the performance field. Johns continued his support of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and served as an artistic adviser from 1967 to 1980. In 1968 Cunningham made a Duchamp-inspired theater piece, Walkaround Time, for which Johns's set design replicates elements of Duchamp's work The Large Glass (1915–23). Earlier, Johns also wrote Neo-dada lyrics for The Druds, a short-lived avant-garde noise music art band that featured prominent members of the New York proto-conceptual art and minimal art community. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, owns Chuck Close's large-scale portrait of Johns.
Commissions
In 1963, the architect Philip Johnson commissioned Johns to make a work for what is now the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. Numbers (1964), a 9-by-7-foot grid of numerals, debuted in 1964 and, after presiding over the theater's lobby for 35 years, was supposed to be sold by the center for a reported $15 million in 1979. Numbers is historically important because it is the largest work of the artist's Numbers motif, and each of its Sculp-metal and collage units is on a separate canvas. Responding to widespread criticism, the board of Lincoln Center decided to drop its plans to sell the work, which was Johns's first and only public commission.
Style
Johns's work is sometimes grouped with Neo-Dada and pop art: he uses symbols in the Dada tradition of the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, but unlike many pop artists such as Andy Warhol, he does not engage with celebrity culture. Other scholars and museums position Johns and Rauschenberg as predecessors of pop art.
Valuation and Awards
In 1980 the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, paid $1 million for Three Flags (1958), then the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist. In 1988, Johns's False Start (1959) was sold at auction at Sotheby's to Samuel I. Newhouse Jr. for $17.05 million, setting a record at the time as the highest price paid for a work by a living artist at auction, and the second highest price paid for an artwork at auction in the U.S. In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bought Johns's White Flag (1955), the first painting by the artist to enter the Met's collection. While the museum would not disclose how much was paid, the New York Times reported that "experts estimate [the painting's] value at more than $20 million." In 2006, Johns's False Start (1959) again made history. Private collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin (founder of the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel LLC) purchased the work from David Geffen for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by a living artist. In 2010, Flag (1958), was sold privately to hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen for a reported $110 million (then £73 million; €81.7 million). The seller was Jean-Christophe Castelli, son of Leo Castelli, Johns's dealer, who had died in 1999. While the price was not disclosed by the parties, the New York Times reported that Cohen paid about $110 million. On November 11, 2014, a 1983 version of Flag was auctioned at Sotheby's in New York for $36 million, establishing a new auction record for Johns.
Johns has received many awards throughout his career. The sole honorary degree he has accepted is Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, which the University of South Carolina conferred upon him in 1969. In 1984, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston. In 1988, he received the highest honor at the 43rd Venice Biennale—the Golden Lion—for his exhibition in the United States pavilion. In 1990, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. That year he was also elected an associate national academician of the National Academy of Design (now the National Academy Museum and School), rising to national academician in 1994. In 1993, he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting, a lifetime achievement award from the Japan Art Association. In 1994 he was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973 and the American Philosophical Society in 2007. 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.
In 2007, the National Gallery of Art acquired about 1,700 of Johns's prints. This made the gallery home to the largest number of Johns's works held by a single institution.
Selected work
Flag (1954–55) view
White Flag (1955) view
Target with Plaster Casts (1955) view
Tango (1955)
Target with Four Faces (1955) view
Three Flags (1958) view
Numbers in Color (1958–59) view
Device Circle (1959) view
False Start (1959) view
Coat Hanger (1960) view
Painting with Two Balls (1960) view
Painted Bronze (1960) view
Painting with Ruler and 'Gray''' (1960)
Painting Bitten by a Man (1961) view
The Critic Sees (1961) view
Target (1961) view
Map (1961) view
Device (1961–62) view
Study for Skin I (1962) view
Diver (1962–63) view
Periscope (Hart Crane) (1963) view
Voice (1964/67) view
Untitled (Skull) (1973) view
Tantric Detail I, II, III (1980) view
Usuyuki (1981) view
Perilous Night (1982) view
The Seasons (1987) view
Green Angel (1990) view
After Hans Holbein (1993) view
Bridge (1997) view
Regrets (2013) view
Slice (2020) view
In popular culture
In "Mom and Pop Art," a 1999 episode of the animated television series The Simpsons, Johns guest stars as himself. He is depicted as a thief who steals everyday objects such as lightbulbs.
References
Notes
Further reading
Basualdo, Carlos, and Scott Rothkopf. Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art; Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021.
Bernstein, Roberta. Jasper Johns' Paintings and Sculptures, 1954–1974: "The Changing Focus of the Eye." Studies in the Fine Arts: The Avant-Garde 46. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985.
Bernstein, Roberta. Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture. 5 Volumes. New York: Wildenstein Plattner Institute, 2016.
Bernstein, Roberta. Jasper Johns: Redo an Eye. New York: Wildenstein Plattner Institute, 2017.
Bernstein, Roberta, Edith Devaney, et al. Jasper Johns. London: Royal Academy of Arts; Los Angeles, Broad, 2017.
Busch, Julia M. A Decade of Sculpture: The New Media in the 1960s. Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1974.
Castleman, Riva. Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art 1986.
Crichton, Michael. Jasper Johns. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Revised and expanded edition of the 1977 Whitney Museum exhibition catalogue.
Dacherman, Susan, and Jennifer L. Roberts.Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Monotypes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.
Field, Richard. The Prints of Jasper Johns: 1960–1993; A Catalogue Raisonné. West Islip, NY: Universal Limited Art Editions, 1994.
Hess, Barbara. Jasper Johns. The Business of the Eye. Translated by John William Gabriel. Basic Art Series. Cologne: Taschen, 2007.
Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing. 6 Volumes. Houston: Menil Collection, 2018.
Kozloff, Max. Jasper Johns. Meridian Modern Artists Series. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972. (out of print)
Krauss, Rosalind E. '"Split Decisions: Jasper Johns in Retrospect; Whole in Two." Artforum, 35, no. 1 (September 1996): 78–85, 125. Findarticles.com
Kuspit, Donald. "Jasper Johns: The Graying of Modernism." In Psychodrama: Modern Art as Group Therapy, 417–25. London: Ziggurat, 2010.
Orton, Fred. Figuring Jasper Johns. Essays in Art and Culture. London: Reaktion Books, 1994.
Rondeau, James, and Douglas Druick. Jasper Johns: Gray. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Rosenberg, Harold. "Jasper Johns: 'Things the Mind Already Knows'". Vogue, February 1964, 174–77, 201, 203.
Shapiro, David. Jasper Johns Drawings, 1954–1984. Edited by Christopher Sweet. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984 (out of print).
Steinberg, Leo. Jasper Johns. New York: George Wittenborn, 1963. Revised and expanded as "Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art." In Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, 17–54. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Tomkins, Calvin. Off the Wall: Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg. New York: Picador, 2005.
Varnedoe, Kirk, ed. Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews. Compiled by Christel Hollevoet. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996.
Varnedoe, Kirk, Roberta Bernstein, and Lilian Tone. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996.
Weiss, Jeffrey. Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Yau, John. A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns''. New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2008.
External links
Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965, an exhibition at the US National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
States and Variations: Prints by Jasper Johns, an exhibition at the US National Gallery of Art
Jasper Johns (born 1930) Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jasper Johns bio at artchive.com
PBS Jasper Johns 2008
Powers Art Center - A Showcase of Jasper Johns's Works on Paper
Jasper Johns's Three Flags at Art Beyond Sight (Art Education for the Blind)
Review of the Whitney and the Philadelphia museums' 2021 shows at Artnet News, October 12, 2021
The Formulaic Juxtapositions of Jasper Johns's 'Mind/Mirror', at Frieze, November 12, 2021
1930 births
Living people
People from Augusta, Georgia
People from Allendale, South Carolina
20th-century American painters
American male painters
21st-century American painters
21st-century American male artists
American pop artists
Artists from New York (state)
Artists from South Carolina
University of South Carolina alumni
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American gay artists
American LGBT painters
Gay painters
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
National Academy of Design members
Parsons School of Design alumni
Postmodern artists
Recipients of the Praemium Imperiale
United States National Medal of Arts recipients
Wolf Prize in Arts laureates
People from Stony Point, New York
20th-century American printmakers
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Honorary Members of the Royal Academy
Painters from Georgia (U.S. state)
20th-century American male artists
Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts
20th-century American LGBT people
21st-century American LGBT people