A few years later Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol pushed banality further with their borrowings from cartoons and comics, and, along with Rauschenberg, Johns was soon slotted in as a transitional figure between Abstract Expressionism and Pop, an art-historical positioning that always irked him, as though his work could be reduced to a formula of modernist painting cut with its Dadaist opposite, the pigment of Cézanne (or, more proximately, Willem de Kooning) mixed in the wax of Duchamp.įor some critics, turning serial things into singular paintings was a conservative operation, a win for high culture over low. In effect Johns reintroduced banality into modernist art, in the double sense of the common and the denigrated. The 1958 show had the force of a great blague: do what modernist painting aimed to do – be at once complete as a composition and flat as an object – and do it with almost idiot ease, with everyday motifs ready to hand. They are associable with sufferance rather than action.
They tend to be non-hierarchic, permitting Johns to maintain a pictorial field of levelled equality, without points of stress or privilege.Ĩ. They tend to prescribe the picture’s shape and dimensions.ħ. They are either whole entities or complete systems.ĥ. All possess a ritual or conventional shape, not to be altered.Ĥ. All are commonplaces of our environment.ģ. Whether objects or signs, they are man-made things.Ģ. ‘The subjects which Jasper Johns chose to paint up to 1958,’ Steinberg wrote in ‘Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art’ (1962), still the most influential essay on the artist, ‘have these points in common’:ġ. Then 27, he had sized up the New York art world precisely, dominated as it then was by the formalist model of ‘modernist painting’ used by Clement Greenberg to champion Abstract Expressionism, and deftly deflected its discourse towards what Leo Steinberg would term ‘other criteria’. Johns made an exceptional entrance in early 1958: his first show at the new Leo Castelli Gallery nearly sold out, with three paintings immediately purchased by MoMA, and one piece appearing on the cover of ARTnews. Delayed for a year by the pandemic, the retrospective arrives when Johns has turned 91 – an essential figure in the eyes of almost everyone who cares about postwar art. The curators at the two institutions, Scott Rothkopf and Carlos Basualdo respectively, decided that the shows should mirror each other across several themes in ten galleries each.
Given this New York-Philadelphia axis, it makes sense that the current Johns retrospective, which comprises five hundred works produced over seven decades, is split between the Whitney Museum and the PMA, despite all the inconvenience this entails. Told that their art was ‘neo-Dada’, Johns and Rauschenberg travelled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art some time in 1957 to see its great holdings of Marcel Duchamp, who soon became an avuncular touchstone for both artists that the museum also has superb Cézannes wasn’t lost on Johns. Johns soon added alphabets to this repertoire of everyday motifs, and, a little later, maps. In this heady atmosphere, Johns chose, in autumn 1954, to destroy all his prior work, and to begin the paintings that made his name when they were shown four years later: flags, targets and numbers crafted in encaustic (pigment mixed in hot wax) with collage (often mere newspaper) on canvas. Their artistic and romantic partnership would last until 1961 the company they kept included John Cage and Merce Cunningham. There, a few months later, he met Robert Rauschenberg. The summer of 1953, after a stint in the army, Jasper Johns, aged 23, moved back to New York City.
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