Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror

Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022

All

2 / 13

Previous Next

Jasper Johns moved to New York in the summer of 1953, following his discharge from the army in his native South Carolina. An aspiring twenty-three-year-old artist, he arrived on a scene then dominated by the supposed heroism and soul-baring of Abstract Expressionism. But Johns soon fell in with a group of peers charting their own course, including the artist Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he began a romantic and creative relationship; the composer John Cage; and Cage’s partner, the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. These connections exposed Johns to new ideas of chance and inspired an openness to everyday materials and actions. In the fall of 1954, as his friend Rachel Rosenthal remembered: “One day he destroyed everything, all the old work. It seemed as if his whole new conception was created in his mind.” For Johns, this was a declaration of independence from his own artistic past and from the leading styles of the day: “I decided to do only what I meant to do, and not what other people did.”

Johns shifted his work away from the then prevalent emphasis on an artist’s interior life and expression toward a cooler, more impersonal mode of painting. He embraced the deadpan depiction of common signs and objects, including flags, targets, and numbers, and explored gestures such as covering and hiding, often in pale grays or dense blacks. These acts of disappearance and negation can lend Johns’s art a somber and chilly air, full of loss, sadness, and even heartbreak.

The corresponding gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art focuses on the relationship between painting and everyday objects.

Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955. Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects, 29 3/4 × 26 in. (75.6 × 66 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull 8.1958. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York
Jasper Johns, Alley Oop, 1958. Oil and collage on cardboard mounted on fiberboard, 23 1/4 × 18 in. (59.1 × 45.7 cm). The Newhouse Collection. © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York, 2021
Jasper Johns, Diver, 1962–63. Charcoal, pastel, and paint on two sheets of paper mounted on two adjoined canvas supports, 86 1/8 × 71 1/4 in. (218.8 × 181 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; partial gift of Kate Ganz and Tony Ganz in memory of their parents, Victor and Sally Ganz, and in memory of Kirk Varnedoe; Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest Fund; gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., gift of Philip L. Goodwin, bequest of Richard S. Zeisler, and anonymous gift (all by exchange). Acquired by the Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art in memory of Kirk Varnedoe 377.2003.a-b. © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois
Jasper Johns, Good Time Charley, 1961. Encaustic on canvas with objects, 38 × 24 in. (96.5 × 61 cm). Private collection. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The Art Institute of Chicago: photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois
Jasper Johns, Painting Bitten by a Man, 1961. Encaustic on canvas, 9 1/2 × 6 7/8 in. (24.1 × 17.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Jasper Johns in memory of Kirk Varnedoe, Chief Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, 1989–2001, 211.2007. © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The Art Institute of Chicago: photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois
Jasper Johns, Disappearance II, 1961. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 40 × 40 in. (101.6 × 101.6 cm). Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design, Japan. © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Taku Saiki, Tokyo