Jasper Johns has been a central figure in contemporary art since the late 1950s, when he first exhibited his paintings of targets, numerals, and the US flag. Since then, Johns has continued to use commonplace and appropriated imagery in paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints that explore the nature of perception, art-making, and memory. His early works have become icons of American art that provide the bridge from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art, while his layered, complex works of the 2000s have been celebrated as meditations on ambiguity and mortality.
Early career, Flag Painting
Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina. He moved to New York City in 1948 and had his first solo exhibition in 1958 at the Leo Castelli Gallery. His paintings of targets, numerals, and the American flag emerged at a time when Abstract Expressionism was the dominant style. Johns’ work had the gestural brushwork typical of that style, but its playfully mundane imagery ushered in a new sensibility that would come to be called Pop Art.
Motifs and Process
From the beginning of his career, Johns’s working method has been based on theme and variation. His motifs range from what he calls “things the mind already knows”—flags, numerals, the alphabet—to fragmented body parts, the color spectrum, common objects, and preexisting images such as an abstract hatch-mark pattern he saw on a passing car, paintings by Holbein and Picasso, and the visual puzzle known as Rubin’s vase. Once he adopts a motif, Johns reworks it in as many ways as he can conceive in order to find out how changing one aspect of a thing alters how we experience it.
Printmaking
Given these preoccupations, it is not surprising that Johns was attracted to printmaking, a medium that lends itself to extensive reworking and variation. He made his first print in 1960, a scribbly lithographic rendering of a target; he has since made more than 400 editions using dozens of techniques, from etching, screenprint, and lithography to carborundum, open-bite, and drypoint. The Walker’s collection includes a complete (and still growing) archive of Johns’ prints, the only one in a public institution.
Merce Cunningham’s Walkaround Time
In the mid-1950s, Johns formed a friendship with choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009), and during the following 20 years the two collaborated on several projects, including the dance Walkaround Time, for which Johns created décor and costumes. He based his set design on Marcel Duchamp’s iconic painting The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–1923), painting each of the work’s seven motifs on transparent plastic boxes, which the dancers moved around onstage during the performance. Thus, the set was created anew each time it was used—a perfect analog for the way Johns recombines elements in his two-dimensional work. The décor is part of the Walker’s Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection, a comprehensive collection of some 4,600 objects, including costumes, décor, photographs, posters, and ephemera, related to Cunningham’s choreographic work from 1944 to 2011.
Recognition
Johns has been the subject of dozens of solo exhibitions in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery, Washington, DC; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Walker Art Center. Among the artist’s many awards are the National Medal of Arts (1990) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2011), the highest honor given to civilians.
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