In conjunction with the exhibition International Pop we’re presenting a regular feature that will highlight events in Pop art history. Look forward to curated posts featuring archival images, exhibition installation views, excerpts from catalogs, artist ephemera, and behind-the-scenes stories.
In May of 1964, Jasper Johns was invited to visit Tokyo under the auspices of the Minami Gallery for a two-month artist’s residency, facilitated by Tōno Yoshiaki. Tōno took Johns to the Tsubaki Kindai Gallery to see a number of Kojima Nobuaki’s Standing Figure (1964) works, which, like many of Johns’s own works, used the American flag. Johns returned to the gallery the following month to view the Off Museum exhibition. There he met Shinohara Ushio and saw the latter’s imitation of Johns’s Three Flags (1958), which replicated the painting’s composition but substituted its colors with their opposites on the spectrum. This in turn influenced Johns to borrow from Shinohara’s palette for a painting he would show in the 1965 Whitney Annual Exhibition in New York.
Also:
• While in Japan Johns corresponded with his gallerist, Leo Castelli, about various business matters, including an exhibition with Robert Rauschenberg. The Smithsonian Archives of American Art have digitized one of the letters he sent while traveling and made it available in their online collection.
• On May 1, 1928, Oswald de Andrade published the Manifesto Antropófago or Cannibalist Manifesto. It would become a foundational text for Brazilian modernism and introduced the concept of “cultural cannibalism” that would influence intellectuals and artists for decades.