Jasper Johns
1930– · American painter, sculptor and printmaker of postwar art
Jasper Johns (born Augusta, Georgia, 1930) is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, and one of the central figures of American postwar art. His work has been associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada and pop art, although it fits none of them entirely. He matters because he changed how painting thinks about representation, using familiar symbols such as the flag and the target as subjects.
He was born in Augusta but was raised in Allendale, South Carolina, largely by his paternal grandparents after his parents divorced. He studied art for three semesters at the University of South Carolina, from 1947 to 1948, before moving to New York to enrol at the Parsons School of Design. His education was interrupted by military service during the Korean War, which took him to Fort Jackson and then to Sendai, Japan. Back in New York in 1953, he worked at Marboro Books and built relationships with Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage.
In 1954 he destroyed much of his earlier work and began painting flags, targets, maps, letters and numbers. His first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, in 1958, was well received, and only two of the eighteen works on view failed to sell. His best-known works include the encaustic American flags of the 1950s, such as Three Flags (1958). Around 1960 he began incorporating real objects such as coat hangers, forks and spoons into his paintings, and he produced many grey paintings that started with colour and ended with the canvas covered in grey. He reinvented his painterly style in the 1980s.
His paintings play with the gap between sign and what it denotes, as in False Start I (1962), where he deliberately mismatches colour words and the colours they name. His work is held by major collections, including the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, Tate and the Centre Pompidou. He received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. He lives and works in Connecticut.
Works (1)
Where to see the work
- Whitney Museum of American Art New York City · 1
Curiosities
A flag worth $110 million
In 2010, his 1958 painting Flag was sold in a private transaction for a reported $110 million. It became the most expensive artwork ever sold by a living artist. The figure comes from reports of the sale rather than an official statement from the parties involved.
A commission nearly sold off
In 1963 the architect Philip Johnson commissioned Johns to make a work for what is now the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. Numbers, a grid of numerals measuring about nine by seven feet, hung in the lobby for 35 years. When the centre planned to sell it in 1979, widespread criticism led the board to drop the plan. It was Johns's first and only public commission.
Discovered one floor down
Gallerist Leo Castelli recalled that in March 1957 he visited Rauschenberg's studio and asked to see Johns's work. They went down to the floor below, where Castelli found flags, targets, numbers and the alphabet. He offered Johns an exhibition on the spot, and the resulting 1958 show at his gallery was a success.