Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns: Things the Mind Already Knows

In 1954, in a lower Manhattan loft, a twenty-four-year-old from South Carolina destroyed nearly everything he had ever made and began again. What he began with had arrived in a dream: the American flag. He painted it in encaustic — pigment suspended in hot wax, laid over strips of newspaper — so that the stars and stripes came out not as a banner but as an object with a skin, every brushstroke fixed where it cooled. "What's interesting to me is the fact that it isn't designed, but taken," Johns said. "It's not mine." American painting has been arguing with that sentence ever since.

An Allendale Childhood

Jasper Johns Jr. was born on May 15, 1930, in Augusta, Georgia, and began drawing at the age of three. After his parents divorced he was handed from household to household: his paternal grandparents in Allendale, South Carolina; after his grandfather's death in 1939, his mother and stepfather in Columbia; six years with his Aunt Gladys on Lake Murray; then his father and stepmother Geraldine, who bought him art materials. Rural South Carolina supplied almost no art. The only paintings he saw growing up were landscapes by Evalina, his grandfather's first wife, hanging in family houses — which is to say that the great painter of the American vernacular learned what a picture was from a dead relative's amateur work.

He graduated valedictorian of Edmunds High School in Sumter in 1947, studied art for three semesters at the University of South Carolina, and, pushed by his professors, moved to New York and briefly attended Parsons School of Design in 1949. In 1951 the Army drafted him for the Korean War; he served two years, at Fort Jackson and then in Sendai, Japan.

The Loft Years

Back in New York in the summer of 1953, shelving books at Marboro Books, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg. The relationship that followed — romantic and artistic, lasting until 1961 — was the hinge of both their careers, each man functioning as the other's permission slip. Around them gathered John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and through that circle the long shadow of Marcel Duchamp, whose readymades gave Johns a precedent for treating an existing thing as a finished subject.

Castelli's Discovery

In March 1957 the dealer Leo Castelli came to see Rauschenberg and found Johns instead. He remembered "a fantastic display of flags and targets... a big white flag, a smaller white flag, numbers, the alphabet, anything — all those great masterpieces." He offered a show on the spot. Johns's first solo exhibition at the Castelli Gallery in early 1958 sold all but two of its eighteen works. Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA's founding director, bought three — the first Johns works to enter any museum.

Barr could not, however, persuade MoMA's trustees to buy *Flag* itself. In the Cold War temperature of the late 1950s they feared its ambiguity might invite boycott or attack from patriotic groups. Philip Johnson bought the painting instead and donated it to the museum in 1973. The most canonical American painting of its decade entered the canon through a side door, because the institution was frightened of it.

Targets, Numbers, Maps

Through the late fifties and sixties Johns built a repertory out of flat, pre-existing sign systems. *Green Target* (1955), *Target with Plaster Casts* (1955) and *Target with Four Faces* (1955) set three-dimensional objects — plaster casts, plastic eyes — above a painted bullseye, breaking painting's flatness from the inside. *Numbers in Color* (1958–59) set stenciled numerals in a grid; *Map* (1961) did the same for the United States. *Painted Bronze* (1960) cast a Savarin coffee can stuffed with used brushes — the litter of a studio table, made permanent in metal. His first sculpture, *Flashlight I* (1958), used Sculp-metal, a pliable compound applied like paint.

The point was never nostalgia for these images. It was subtraction. Choosing subjects everyone already knows freed Johns from having to invent a composition, which left him free to work on everything else: surface, ambiguity, the gap between a thing and its name. In *False Start I* (1962) he deliberately mismatched color words to the colors they sat on. The curator Robert Storr has traced this to Ludwig Wittgenstein — Johns's playful worrying at "the identity of things" and at conventional signs and meanings. Unlike the Pop artists who followed him through the door he opened, Johns never touched celebrity.

The Print Shop

In 1960 Tatyana Grosman invited him to Universal Limited Art Editions on Long Island, beginning a printmaking career that would run to more than 180 editions. In 1971 he became the first ULAE artist to work the handfed offset lithographic press, producing *Decoy* — an image that existed as a print before it existed as a drawing or a painting, an inversion of the usual order. He made lithographs and lead reliefs at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, screenprints with Hiroshi Kawanishi at Simca Prints, and intaglios at Atelier Crommelynck in Paris between 1975 and 1990. In 1976 he and Samuel Beckett made *Foirades/Fizzles*, thirty-three intaglios set against Beckett's fragments. In 1995 he hired the master printer John Lund and set up Low Road Studio on his Connecticut property.

Stages and Commissions

In 1963 Johns and Cage founded the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts to raise money for artists through performance. He was artistic adviser to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1967 to 1980, and for Cunningham's *Walkaround Time* (1968) built sets replicating Duchamp's *The Large Glass*. His one public commission, *Numbers* (1964) — a nine-by-seven-foot grid of numerals ordered by Philip Johnson — presided over the Lincoln Center theater lobby for thirty-five years. In 1979 Lincoln Center planned to sell it for a reported $15 million and backed down under criticism.

Why Jasper Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Johns for a reason that is unusually easy to state, which is rare. His invention was procedural: by taking subjects "the mind already knows," he removed composition from the painter's list of decisions and redirected all his attention to the surface and to meaning's slippage. That is not mysticism; it is closer to an engineering move, and every appropriation artist since has worked inside its consequences. The formal honors have been correspondingly heavy: the Golden Lion at the 1988 Venice Biennale, the National Medal of Arts in 1990, Japan's Praemium Imperiale in 1993, and in 2011 the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama — the first painter or sculptor to receive it since Alexander Calder in 1977. Castelli, on first sight, reached straight for "masterpieces."

The counter-case is real and worth stating. Johns's reputation is inseparable from an extraordinary price machine — $17.05 million for *False Start* at Sotheby's in 1988, $80 million when the Griffins bought it from David Geffen in 2006, a reported $110 million for a 1958 *Flag* sold privately to Steven A. Cohen in 2010. Prices that large do their own persuading, and they are not evidence of anything but demand. There is also the awkward test case of *Slice* (2020), in which Johns reproduced a drawing of a knee by Jéan-Marc Togodgue, a Cameroonian student at a school near his home, without telling him; the dispute was settled amicably, but it made the ethics of "taking" concrete rather than theoretical. And one can argue that the great subtraction was a single idea, discovered at twenty-four, and rerun for seventy years.

Legacy

Since 2007 the National Gallery of Art has held roughly 1,700 of his prints, the largest institutional holding of his work. The Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted the two-city retrospective *Mind/Mirror* in 2021; the Guggenheim Bilbao's *Night Driver* followed in 2026. Johns still lives and works in Sharon, Connecticut; after his death the 170-acre property is to become a residency for eighteen to twenty-four artists, poets, musicians and dancers. A fitting end for a painter whose whole method was to hand people something they already owned and make them look at it again.

Achievements

• Praemium Imperiale — 1993
• National Medal of Arts
• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 2011
• Notable work: Target with Four Faces
• Notable work: Three Flags
• Notable work: Map
• Movement: Neo-Dada