Until 1954, Jasper Johns routinely destroyed his artworks, feeling them somehow inadequate. Then everything changed. He met artist Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he led a romantic relationship, and he was brought into the orbit of experimental composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, both of whom enhanced Johns’s understanding of the role that everyday life could play in art. “There was a change in my spirit, in my thought and my work, as well as some doubt and terror,” Johns once recalled.
In the following decade, Johns went on to create the works that now define his oeuvre: his encaustic paintings of flags, targets, numbers, and maps. Termed Neo-Dada by critics during the ’50s because of the art’s basis in the conceptually slippery sculptures of Marcel Duchamp, these works marked a seismic shift in the New York art world of their day. They helped formalize a turn away from Abstract Expressionism and set the stage for the beginnings of Pop—and made Johns a bona fide star in the process.
Despite their fame, these works resisted easy interpretation and introduced the whatsit quality that has come to define Johns’s art. In the years afterward, Johns would continue to make paintings and prints that are likewise hard to parse. Rife with allusions to his personal life and art history, they have intrigued scholars because they appear so unforthcoming. As former Museum of Modern Art director Kirk Varnedoe once wrote, “The common image of this artist is that of a delphic, cerebral strategist who understands at all times exactly what he is doing and what his works mean (but usually chooses to keep it secret).”
Next week, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York will open a two-part, 500-work retrospective spanning the full of the 91-year-old artist’s oeuvre. How do you decode a Johns painting? Below, a look at seven works and the layers of meaning hidden within them.
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Flag, 1954–55
During the ’50s, Abstract Expressionism was still considered the paragon of art in New York. Going gallery to gallery, one might see numerous exhibitions featuring all-over abstractions, each with a particular style that corresponded to a certain artist (drips of paint for Jackson Pollock, heavy black forms for Franz Kline, fields of saturated color for Mark Rothko, and so on). Flag (1954–55) unsettled critics because it looked nothing like those works. Unlike Abstract Expressionist paintings, which often alluded to lofty philosophical concepts, spiritual states of being, or natural subjects, Flag referred to nothing other than itself. What you saw was what you got: an American flag, with its blue rectangle filled with 48 stars (Alaska and Hawaii had not yet achieved statehood) and its alternating red and white stripes.
If Abstract Expressionism was all about originality and the myth of the artist’s genius, Flag was something entirely different. In a sense, Johns was relying on a ready-made image for the subject of his work, effectively meaning that he didn’t have a hand in deciding how the resulting painting would look. (The painting’s title is deliberately something of a misnomer: this piece is not a flag, but an image of one.) Still, his chosen medium for making the painting, encaustic, was unusual to say the least. More commonly associated with art-making before the Renaissance than with contemporary art, encaustic involves the use of beeswax to fix pigment to a surface, allowing Johns to more closely mold each of his strokes. Poking through that paint are newspapers—a way of bringing everyday detritus, to say nothing of the news of the day, into Flag.
Now as then, the American flag is a fraught symbol. Because the paint in Flag appears to ominously drip, some saw the painting as an expression of decidedly unpatriotic views about the state of the U.S. at the time. Yet Johns has largely avoided ascribing political resonance to the American flag in his art—even though one work featuring that very image, along with the word “MORATORIUM,” became the subject of a print Johns made for the Committee Against the War of Vietnam in 1969. Johns often speaks about his works in terms that can be bracingly simple for art that is so complex. He once explained the origins of Flag as follows: “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it. And I did.”
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Target with Four Faces, 1955
This painting pairs a target with a sculptural element at its top: four niches, each with a hinged door that can be opened and closed, each containing an identical cast of the same model’s face, from just below the eyes down. Many of Johns’s casts of body parts are in some way cropped, causing them to appear unnaturally severed. Johns has explained this unusual choice in practical terms, citing the difficulty of casting a person’s entire body, though he has generally evaded elucidating the casts’ conceptual meaning.
Historians have supplied more complex analyses. Some have been purely formal. In the catalogue for the Whitney and Philadelphia Museum of Art retrospective, Jennifer L. Roberts writes that the casts in Target with Four Faces “tell us how to understand the paint” because they cleave open the difference between seeing and knowing. The viewer of this artwork can see, even if the cast faces appear unable to return that viewer’s gaze. In that way, Johns may be telling us that vision is not the only way of intuiting a painting. Other historians have applied sociological lenses, suggesting that paintings such as this one are emblematic of Johns’s repressed queer identity. In a groundbreaking essay, Kenneth Silver writes that Target with Plaster Casts (1955)—a related work that features, among other things, a cast of a penis—is “first a portrait of a homosexual man in the postwar period.”
Whatever the case may be, Target with Four Faces hit the mark. With a show opening in January 1958 at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery, the painting appeared on the cover of that month’s issue of ARTnews, which brought Johns critical acclaim and effectively launched him to stardom. Pretty soon, Johns’s paintings were commanding prices rarely seen at the time for a young artist. Target with Four Faces was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York through a $630 gift from collecting couple Ethel and Robert Scull.
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Map, 1961
In the early part of his career, Johns made a habit of introducing ready-made patterns and images—targets and flags, for example—into art. They were “things the mind already knows,” as Johns was fond of saying—the implication being that one need not look particularly hard in order to understand what’s being portrayed. That hasn’t necessarily stopped art historians from analyzing them, however, and one common interpretation is that they are “nonabstract forms of abstraction,” as Varnedoe, the former MoMA director, once wrote. In other words, they are abstractions found in daily life that have been ported over into the realm of art.
Such could be said of the map of the U.S., as well as portions of Mexico and Canada, that features prominently in this painting. Here, the pre-inscribed borders of states and countries loosely inform the shape of abstraction composed of loose maroon, blue, and yellow-orange strokes. The painting exemplifies a tendency glimpsed within Johns’s notebooks: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.”
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Usuyuki, 1982
Starting in the ’70s, Johns began making use of two mystifying patterns that had highly specific reference points. One, featuring an array of interlocking forms with slight points in places, alluded to flagstones he had spotted on a wall while passing through Harlem in a car. The other, known as his crosshatches, contains slash marks situated on a diagonal that allude to sights also glimpsed from a car, this time on the Long Island Expressway.
Johns’s began his most ambitious crosshatch series, “Usuyuki,” in 1977. Its title alludes to an 18th-century Kabuki play whose plot centers loosely around a love story; Johns has said it is about “the fleeting quality of beauty in the world.” While a princess in that play is named Usuyuki, it’s worth remembering the word translates from Japanese as “light snow.”
Looked at that way, this painting becomes yet another way of testing how we see. Consciously or not, viewers are forced to choose whether to focus on the crosshatching or the abstraction behind it. To further complicate matters, Johns has painted geometric forms on top of the crosshatching. Much in the way that a landscape is only partially visible during a snowfall, this painting’s shapes appear to recede and emerge depending on which part of it one chooses to consider. In the catalogue for the new retrospective, art historian Michio Hayashi relies on something Johns once said about another crosshatched piece to contextualize this one: “I thought there would be something that couldn’t be identified but would be sensed in a certain way.”
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Savarin, 1982
In major retrospective exhibitions, works on paper tend take a backseat to paintings and sculptures. Not so with Johns. Because of the sheer number of prints he has produced (more than 2,400 proofs, to be exact), it has become impossible to ignore that segment of his oeuvre. According to Whitney chief curator Scott Rothkopf the volume of prints made by the artist “vastly exceeds Johns’s output in every other medium combined.” Duplication, reproduction, and serialization have always been integral to Johns’s practice, and printmaking has allowed him the ability to repeat an image, in the process tweaking it and seeing what changes arise in the printing process.
Johns based his “Savarin” prints on his own 1960 bronze sculpture featuring paintbrushes set inside a Savarin coffee can; they exemplify the way in which he cleverly reformats and reworks his past artworks over time and across different mediums. These prints are monotypes, meaning that they are unique. In this one, he has incorporated another element from his oeuvre, his crosshatching, which becomes a series of intersecting handprints, his fingers mimicking diagonal marks.
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Racing Thoughts, 1983
Racing Thoughts is an example of what Varnedoe once called a “recollection system”—a semi-figurative painting that allowed Johns to trace some of his inspirations and his development as an artist. At first glance, this collaged painting appears to be an assembly of unlike objects: a print portraying Johns’s dealer, Leo Castelli, in the form of a jigsaw puzzle; an image of the Mona Lisa, its colors slightly distorted so that we know it’s a reproduction; a wall nearly covered with Johns’s crosshatching pattern; an abstraction; two vases; a desk; a skull and bones; and various pieces of furniture that are harder to identify in passing. Yet this painting rewards close looking, and upon further study, its cryptic visual language unwinds to reveal elaborate puns and sneaky allusions.
Just barely glimpsable in the lower righthand corner is the lip of a bathtub, as well as its faucet and handles. Is Johns lying supine in the tub, mulling various people and things in his life? Read that way, it can hardly be a surprise that he began to sort through various pieces of art history that inspired him. After all, as historian Roberta Bernstein, one of the most prolific writers on Johns, once said, “Johns’s dialogue with art history is part of his ongoing inquiry into how images carry meaning, and how meanings shift in changing contexts.”
First, the obvious: that Mona Lisa poster. According to Bernstein, Johns has named Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Cézanne, and Marcel Duchamp as his primary inspirations, and so that image could be seen as a stand-in for Johns’s larger art-historical interests. The black abstraction with a white line down the middle is likewise a reference to someone else’s art—in this case that of Barnett Newman, whose work Johns has said he greatly admires.
The painting is also laced with less obvious art-historical in-jokes. Some have argued that a bizarre beige shape at the painting’s center may be a direct allusion to the flayed flesh seen in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement. Meanwhile, on another part of the wall, the head of a nail juts out, casting a long shadow. This can be seen as an overdetermined way of asserting that Racing Thoughts is, in fact, two-dimensional—Johns has merely created the illusion of depth, rather than bringing the painting into the third dimension, as his colleague and former lover, Robert Rauschenberg, might have done. It’s also a sly way of mocking the obsession with flatness that pervades criticism by Abstract Expressionism’s proponents, most notably Clement Greenberg.
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5 Postcards, 2011
In the past two decades, as Johns lived through his 70s and 80s, his output has only deepened in its complexity: he’s layered on obscure references and added even more visual ideas to a private mythology legible only to those who know how to read it. This painting, for example, repurposes a recurring vase motif that can also be seen in Racing Thoughts. Known as a Rubin vase, this object resembles a vessel or two faces, depending on how one looks at it.
The leftmost painting in 5 Postcards appears to lay out a group of elements that are recombined across the four adjacent pictures: the outline of two figures, two Rubin vases, a ladder with a cloth pinned to it, and a palette akin to color bars placed within photographs of artworks to ensure fidelity to their hues. Moving across the four panels, the initial composition is disturbed, with one of the vases appearing to clone itself and then tipping off a tabletop. By the fourth panel, color has drained away, and one of the figures appears to have receded into the wall against which he was initially set.
Some have viewed Johns’s late-career paintings as meditations on his own mortality. One memorable recent series involved a skeleton with a top hat; another, titled “Regrets” and made in the early 2010s, takes as its inspiration a beat-up photograph of the painter Lucian Freud, who died in 2011. In 5 Postcards, figures and objects appear to disappear, possibly suggesting loss.