Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror

Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022

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In contrast to the thematic diversity of the first four decades of Jasper Johns’s art, the past twenty-five years demonstrate a remarkably persistent concern: mortality and its attendants, death, loss, and sorrow. These specters had haunted his work from the beginning, but as Johns entered his late sixties, his preoccupation grew more focused, even as the modes through which he explored it widened. During the late 1990s, he abandoned the surreal fantasies and busy compositions of the previous fifteen years and began the stark and solemn Catenary series, named for the tenuous curve of string that hangs across these works’ dark, moody surfaces.

Since then, Johns has both revived earlier motifs and adopted new ones. He incorporated the outlines of the man and boy from the Seasons paintings (1985–86) in sparer compositions that signal the somber passage of time, while shrouds, crosses, and a pedestal urn evoke funereal markers. Johns also took as sources two photographs of despairing young men and an anguished woman from Picasso, and, as he neared the age of ninety, fixed on the character of a wily skeleton. Nearly all these works are weighted with elegy, and those presented here exist along a grim tonal spectrum. Rarely does a great artist make such frank work about the end of life so late in it. “Occasionally, I have thought that I was working on the last thing that I would do,” Johns remarked in 2020, “but so far I’ve been wrong.”

The corresponding gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art explores sorrow and mortality through luminous versions of recent motifs.

Jasper Johns, Catenary (I Call to the Grave), 1998. Encaustic on canvas with objects, 78 × 118 in. (198.1 × 299.7 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art; 125th Anniversary Acquisition; purchased with funds contributed by Gisela and Dennis Alter, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs, Frances and Bayard Storey, The Dietrich Foundation, Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest, Mr. and Mrs. Brook Lenfest, Marsha and Jeffrey Perelman, Jane and Leonard Korman, Mr. and Mrs. Berton E. Korman, Mr. and Mrs. William T. Vogt, Dr. and Mrs. Paul Richardson, Mr. and Mrs. George M. Ross, Ella B. Schaap, Eileen and Stephen Matchett, and other donors, 2001-91-1a–d. © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2010. Black ink and colored ink on paper, 22 × 30 7/8 in. (55.9 × 78.4 cm). Collection of the artist. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy the Menil Collection, Houston
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2012. Monotype, 42 × 28 3/4 in. (106.7 × 73 cm). Printed by John Lund; published by Low Road Studio. Kravis Collection; promised gift to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in honor of Merrill C. Berman. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2018. Oil on canvas, 50 3/4 × 34 1/8 in. (128.9 × 86.7 cm). Private collection. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2018. Oil on canvas, 39 × 30 1/8 in. (99.1 × 76.5 cm). Private collection. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York
Jasper Johns, Regrets, 2013. Oil on canvas, 67 × 96 in. (170.2 × 243.8 cm). Kravis Collection; promised gift to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson