Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror

Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022

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Dreams

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After a decade spent primarily exploring abstract crosshatches, during the 1980s and 1990s Jasper Johns flooded his work with a profusion of perplexing new imagery, often in surreal combinations. Unlike his earlier use of found objects and common motifs, his new images derived from disparate art histories, popular sources, and his immediate surroundings and imagination. Some featured fragmented and distorted body parts, including the eyes from a 1936 painting by Picasso of his lover, which appear in many works throughout this room. Johns also frequently employed a mysterious craggy silhouette that he dubbed the Green Angel after the 1990 painting where it first appeared. He refused to identify the source of this image, as he had in his other tracings, so that its meaning remained open to the viewer’s interpretation.

For the first time in his painting, Johns rendered images and objects in space rather than imprinting or flatly transposing them edge-to-edge on a canvas. Perspectival illusion, along with shading, creates a newfound sense of depth and three-dimensionality. As in a dream, images pile up, float, drift, and dissolve in spaces that straddle the real and the fantastical. Pale palettes and luminous materials, such as watercolor and pastel, contribute to the ethereal atmosphere. If Johns’s earlier work invited analytical puzzling, his hybrid compositions from this time conjure a realm of irrational symbolic association, heightened emotion, and reverie.

The corresponding gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art focuses on darker, nightmarish visions.

  • Collage composition of drawings and paintings pinned to a white, paint-spattered background, with a painted mannequin forearm hanging in the upper middle of the composition, with brown panels in the foreground.
    Collage composition of drawings and paintings pinned to a white, paint-spattered background, with a painted mannequin forearm hanging in the upper middle of the composition, with brown panels in the foreground.

    Jasper Johns, In the Studio, 1982. Encaustic, crayon, and collage on canvas with objects, 72 × 48 in. (182.9 × 121.9 cm). Collection of the artist; on long-term loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York, 2021

  • Central bathtub faucet offset against a light blue marbled wall, with taped up paintings on the left and right sides of the composition.
    Central bathtub faucet offset against a light blue marbled wall, with taped up paintings on the left and right sides of the composition.

    Jasper Johns, The Bath, 1988. Encaustic on canvas, 48 1/4 × 60 1/4 in. (122.6 × 153 cm). Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; acquired with a contribution from the Friends of the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Museum of Contemporary Art, G 1988.21. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York, 2021

  • Tall rectangular composition of abstracted facial features—two eyes, a nose, lips—in the interior of a pink-gray picture frame. A sketch of a sailboat and sunrise is pinned centrally in the upper half of the composition, and the letters "MONTEZ" surmount the top side of the frame.
    Tall rectangular composition of abstracted facial features—two eyes, a nose, lips—in the interior of a pink-gray picture frame. A sketch of a sailboat and sunrise is pinned centrally in the upper half of the composition, and the letters "MONTEZ" surmount the top side of the frame.

    Jasper Johns, Montez Singing, 1989. Encaustic and sand on canvas, 75 × 50 in. (190.5 × 127 cm). Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York

  • Vertical rectangular composition of rectangular segments of green and blue, with an irregular, multicolored shape in the left half of the image.
    Vertical rectangular composition of rectangular segments of green and blue, with an irregular, multicolored shape in the left half of the image.

    Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1996. Watercolor and charcoal on paper, 37 × 30 in. (94 × 76.2 cm). Collection of the artist. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois

  • Purple fabric pinned against a watery, blue-and-gray background, with stylized facial features—eyes, noses, lips—scattered throughout the composition.
    Purple fabric pinned against a watery, blue-and-gray background, with stylized facial features—eyes, noses, lips—scattered throughout the composition.

    Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1990. Watercolor and graphite pencil on paper, 31 × 22 1/2 in. (78.7 × 57.2 cm). Collection of the artist. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois

  • Horizontal bands of red, yellow, and blue, with the color names stenciled in various arrangements and sizes in each corresponding band. A black-and-white hand stretches up the center of the image from the lower left, an orange semicircle is in the upper right corner, and there is a downward-pointing purple arrow on the lower right side of the composition.
    Horizontal bands of red, yellow, and blue, with the color names stenciled in various arrangements and sizes in each corresponding band. A black-and-white hand stretches up the center of the image from the lower left, an orange semicircle is in the upper right corner, and there is a downward-pointing purple arrow on the lower right side of the composition.

    Jasper Johns, Land’s End, 1982. Black ink and colored ink on plastic, 36 1/4 × 28 1/8 in. (92.1 × 71.4 cm). Collection of the artist. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy the Menil Collection, Houston

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