Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror

Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022

All

4 / 13

Previous Next

South Carolina

4

Jasper Johns has lived and worked in a variety of places that have indelibly shaped his thought and art, including New York, Tokyo, and the Caribbean island of St. Martin. This gallery explores aspects of his relationship to South Carolina, where he spent his childhood and army service before settling in New York in 1953. He returned in 1961, when he purchased a retreat at Edisto Beach, following his wrenching breakup with Robert Rauschenberg. The seaside locale was known for its natural beauty and the vibrant Black cultural legacy of the Gullah Geechee people, but it was also still under the sway of violent and oppressive Jim Crow laws.

Many of the works in this gallery were made on Edisto Island or reference the seaside and nearby locations in their atmosphere, imagery, and inscriptions. The beach became for Johns a site and symbol of transience, loss, memory, and longing—particularly as evident in a group of works that evoke his friendship with Frank O’Hara, a curator and poet who wrote stirringly about everyday life and queer desire.

These pieces from the 1960s accompany more recent works, made beginning in the 1990s, in which Johns mines recollections of his family and childhood. Related series of paintings, prints, and drawings feature images from his youth, including the floor plan of his grandfather’s house, where he was raised; gourd piggy banks; a Halloween costume; and a family portrait. Many of these motifs recur in combinative compositions, like fragments of memory flickering across the mind’s eye.

The corresponding gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art focuses on the artist’s relationship to Japan.

  • Overlapping rectangles of color: gray, white, blue, yellow, red.
    Overlapping rectangles of color: gray, white, blue, yellow, red.

    Jasper Johns, Studio, 1964. Oil on canvas with objects (two panels) 88 × 145 3/4 in. (223.5 × 370.2 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with partial funding from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art 66.1a-c. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  • Rectangular composition of gray, sketchy brushstrokes, bisected in half vertically by a thin black line and two hinges; the left half of the composition is bisected horizontally, with the top half painted in a warmer gray, and with a fork and spoon hung by a string pinned to the top of the left side of the painting.
    Rectangular composition of gray, sketchy brushstrokes, bisected in half vertically by a thin black line and two hinges; the left half of the composition is bisected horizontally, with the top half painted in a warmer gray, and with a fork and spoon hung by a string pinned to the top of the left side of the painting.

    Jasper Johns, In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O’Hara, 1961. Oil on canvas with objects (two panels), 40 × 59 in. (101.6 × 151.8 cm) overall. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; partial gift of Apollo Plastics Corporation, courtesy of Stefan T. Edlis and H. Gael Neeson, 1995.114.a–d. © 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

  • Sketch of an upside-down shoe sole, suspended by a vertical line on the left-hand side of the rectangular composition, and surrounded by shadowy charcoal smudges and squiggles, with arrows arcing out to the left and right of the show, indicating motion.
    Sketch of an upside-down shoe sole, suspended by a vertical line on the left-hand side of the rectangular composition, and surrounded by shadowy charcoal smudges and squiggles, with arrows arcing out to the left and right of the show, indicating motion.

    Jasper Johns, Edisto, 1962. Charcoal and graphite pencil on paper, 22 × 29 7/8 in. (55.9 × 75.9 cm). Collection of the artist. © 2021 Jasper Johns / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson

  • Layered rectangular composition of shapes, colors, and words, including floorplans, sketched figures, a cross, and a ladder.
    Layered rectangular composition of shapes, colors, and words, including floorplans, sketched figures, a cross, and a ladder.

    Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1992–94. Encaustic on canvas, 78 × 118 3/8 in. (198.1 × 300.7 cm). The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York

  • Smudgy gray impression of hand and foot prints, with a band of red, yellow, and blue in the upper right corner, through which forms of everyday objects emerge.
    Smudgy gray impression of hand and foot prints, with a band of red, yellow, and blue in the upper right corner, through which forms of everyday objects emerge.

    Jasper Johns, Pinion, 1966. Lithograph: two stones, one aluminum plate, 40 × 28 in. (101.6 × 71.1 cm). Printed by Zigmunds Priede; published by Universal Limited Art Editions. Edition no. 27/36. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Mrs. Volney F. Righter, 66.110. © 2021 Jasper Johns and ULAE / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  • Tall, rectangular composition of argyle pattern and stylized drawing of a beast.
    Tall, rectangular composition of argyle pattern and stylized drawing of a beast.

    Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1998. Encaustic on canvas with objects, 44 1/8 × 22 1/2 in. (112.1 × 57.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; promised gift of Emily Fisher Landau P.2010.118. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

View 101 works

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whathappensontheship.space/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.