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Jasper johns artwork8/9/2023 ![]() Regarding early work, New York gets most of the Flags and Philadelphia most of the Numbers. His styles are legion-well organized in this show by the curators Scott Rothkopf, in New York, and Carlos Basualdo, in Philadelphia, with contrasts and echoes that forestall a possibility of feeling overwhelmed. Now, amid his art’s abounding glories, I declare unconditional surrender. I guess I wanted him, great as he is, to be greater still. In past writing, I’ve complained about those frailties in the face of pious praise of everything from his hand. Johns has faults: at times, he can be a mite precious, though winningly so, or given to complexities that dilute his powers. ![]() He heroizes for me a remark of the most vatic of the Abstract Expressionists, Barnett Newman-“The history of modern painting, to label it with a phrase, has been the struggle against the catalogue”-even as catalogues swarm him. Johns’s famous silence about his art’s meanings must be our guide. Arbitrary blocks of red, yellow, and blue assure you that this is a game local to painting, but it resonates boundlessly. You are roped in at a glance, blessed with heightened intelligence and fraught with nameless anxiety. There’s a sense of some engulfing emergency, no less urgent for being entirely obscure. Or “Watchman” (1964), a mostly gray painting with the attached rugged sculpture of a leg and butt cast in wax in an upside-down upholstered wood chair. The almost incidentally beautiful result is a delirium of significations-and it’s thrilling. A blue may be labelled “blue,” but so may an orange. Take “False Start” (1959), in Philadelphia, a burlesque of Abstract Expressionism with energetic splotches of mostly primary hues bearing stencilled color names that do or don’t match. The content is smack on the surface, demanding careful description rather than analytical fuss of a sort that is evident in this show’s heady title, “Mind / Mirror.” Shut up and look. Politically, the flag painting was an icon of the Cold War, symbolizing both liberty and coercion. It put art into the world, and vice versa. It torpedoed the macho existentialism of many Abstract Expressionist stars then on the scene and anticipated Pop art’s demotic sources and Minimalism’s self-evidence. The abrupt gesture-sign painting, essentially, of profound sophistication-ended modern art. Having had a dream in 1954 of painting the American flag, he did so, employing a technique that was unusual at the time: brushstrokes in pigmented, lumpy encaustic wax that sensitize the deadpan image, such that there is an aura of feeling, though particular to no one. The twenty-five-year-old Johns, a South Carolinian survivor of a broken home whose upbringing was largely farmed out to relatives, had studied at the University of South Carolina and done a stint in the Army. ![]() It all began in 1955, in a ramshackle building on Pearl Street, in lower Manhattan, that Johns shared with his lover, Robert Rauschenberg. Johns’s extraordinary virtuosity with line, texture, and color is an adequate hook for any of his works. Johns has often been burdened with overinterpretation despite his stated commitment, early on, to dealing with “things the mind already knows,” starting with flags, targets, numbers, and maps, before proceeding to trickier motifs that are nonetheless equally matter-of-fact. (The piece is not in the show.) The image suggests exasperation from a great artist-America’s greatest, post- Willem de Kooning, in terms of a capacity to reset formal and semiotic ideals for subsequent striving artists. ![]() In sixty-six years of multifarious art works by Jasper Johns, the subject of a huge retrospective that is split between the Whitney Museum, in New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I can think of only one work that expresses an opinion: “The Critic Sees” (1961), a sculpted relief of eyeglasses with blabbing mouths in place of lenses.
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