Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror

Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022

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Savarin Monotypes

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Printmaking can be a means for faithfully reproducing an image multiple times, but Jasper Johns often uses the medium to make experimental works. This gallery presents a series of seventeen monotypes, unique prints that are made by applying ink directly on a plate. The central motif in each of these works from 1982 is the uncanny 1960 sculpture Painted Bronze, cast from a Savarin coffee can filled with brushes, which Johns painted to look exactly like the real thing. Over time, he returned repeatedly to this motif, and the tools of his trade came to be seen as a stand-in for the artist himself.

Most of the monotypes on view here were printed over proofs of a lithograph that Johns made the previous year and rejected due to an inconsistency in the paper. To make them, he applied ink to plexiglass plates positioned on top of the lithographs so that he could see how his new marks would be superimposed. The resulting works present a sequence of free-flowing pictorial ideas and interrelationships, executed with a spontaneity rare for Johns. In some, he daubed the plate with his fingertips or layered colorful handprints atop his signature crosshatches. In others, drops of emulsifier dissolved the ink into starry speckles. Johns made the final works of the cycle on blank sheets, the last printed from the previous one, so that the ghostly image is reversed and almost unrecognizable. Taken together, they reveal Johns’s obsessive creative logic of repetition and difference: each sheet is at once a fragment of a process and a whole.

The corresponding gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art focuses on trial and working proofs.

  • Sculpture of a red can of Savarin coffee filled with paintbrushes, their handles all sticking up and spattered with paint.
    Sculpture of a red can of Savarin coffee filled with paintbrushes, their handles all sticking up and spattered with paint.

    Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze, 1960. Bronze and oil paint, 13 1/2 × 8 in. (34.3 × 20.3 cm). Kravis Collection; promised gift to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in honor of David Rockefeller. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, New York

  • Coffee can with paintbrushes in it, against a colorful, striped background of yellow, red, and blue patches.
    Coffee can with paintbrushes in it, against a colorful, striped background of yellow, red, and blue patches.

    Jasper Johns, Savarin, 1982. Monotype, 50 × 38 in. (127 × 96.5 cm). Printed by Bill Goldston, James V. Smith, Thomas Cox; published by Universal Limited Art Editions. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President 2002.223. © 2021 Jasper Johns and ULAE / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  • Coffee can with paintbrushes in it, against a background of green, orange, and purple striped patches.
    Coffee can with paintbrushes in it, against a background of green, orange, and purple striped patches.

    Jasper Johns, Savarin, 1982. Monotype, 50 × 38 in. (127 × 96.5 cm). Printed by Bill Goldston, James V. Smith, Thomas Cox; published by Universal Limited Art Editions. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President, 2002.228. © 2021 Jasper Johns and ULAE / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  • Coffee can with paintbrushes in it, against a dark background.
    Coffee can with paintbrushes in it, against a dark background.

    Jasper Johns, Savarin, 1982. Monotype, 50 × 38 in. (127 × 96.5 cm). Printed by Bill Goldston, James V. Smith, Thomas Cox; published by Universal Limited Art Editions. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President, 2002.230. © 2021 Jasper Johns and ULAE / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  • Red coffee can with yellow paintbrush handles sticking out of it, against a dark blue background.
    Red coffee can with yellow paintbrush handles sticking out of it, against a dark blue background.

    Jasper Johns, Savarin, 1982. Monotype, 50 × 38 in. (127 × 96.5 cm). Printed by Bill Goldston, James V. Smith, Thomas Cox; published by Universal Limited Art Editions. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President 2002.235. © 2021 Jasper Johns and ULAE / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  • Coffee can with paintbrushes in it, against a seafoam-green background.
    Coffee can with paintbrushes in it, against a seafoam-green background.

    Jasper Johns, Savarin, 1982. Monotype, 50 × 38 in. (127 × 96.5 cm). Printed by Bill Goldston, Thomas Cox; published by Universal Limited Art Editions. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President, 2002.238. © 2021 Jasper Johns and ULAE / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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