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Jasper Johns (born 1930), Target with Four Faces, detail, 1955, Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas surmounted by four tinted-plaster faces in wood box with hinged front, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull, 1958, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY, Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

Jasper Johns, the Iconic Paintings

National Gallery of Art
4th and Constitution Avenue NW
Washington
202-737-4215
Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965
January 28-
April 29, 2007

The work of Jasper Johns (b. 1930) represents an important breakthrough in art at midcentury, a period of radical change in American art. Themes developed in the first decade of his career will be examined as a group for the first time in a comprehensive exhibition of 83 works.

Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965 presents some of Johns' most iconic paintings, drawings, and prints selected from public and private collections, including the artist's own. Departing from the format of the survey or retrospective, the show will trace the unfolding relationship of four specific motifs in Johns' works — the target, the "device," the stenciled naming of colors, and the imprint of the body — revealing the works' significance to the following generation of artists.

The Exhibition
In 1954, in an attempt to reinvent himself, Johns destroyed all the work he had made up to that point. He wanted to start over as an artist and sought a new direction away from abstract expressionism. In pairs and sequences of paintings and works on paper, Johns reduced art-making to a series of quasi-mechanical procedures. These techniques and their significance were embodied by four related motifs: the target, the "device," the stenciled naming of colors, and the imprint of the body, which appeared alone or together in various combinations and excluded almost all other images, most notably the flag and the number.

Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965 is arranged chronologically in sequences of closely related works:

Of the four earliest icons (targets, flags, numbers, and maps) that occupy his work, the target is Johns' most abstract image. Representing something anonymous and universal, the familiar target appears in Johns' work until 1961. His first two paintings of the target image, Target with Plaster Casts (1955) and Target with Four Faces (1955), incorporate a row on top of small cubicle-like boxes with hinged drop doors, each containing a plaster cast of a body part.

The target as a subject is replaced by the mechanical "device" — a wooden, compass-like instrument attached to the canvas by a pivot on one end and manipulated to scrape through the paint surface in circles and arcs. The first of these works, Device Circle (1959), is affixed with the kind of compass arm that Johns used to create his target images. From Device Circle, Johns produced two simultaneous sequences of work: those that show the artist changing his manner of applying paint (in long strokes of the brush) and introduce the stenciled color names, and those that use or depict the device.

Johns began naming colors with stenciled lettering in the paintings False Start (1959) and Jubilee (1960). In these works, he labeled and mislabeled colors using red, yellow, blue, and orange paint in the former, and black, white, and gray paint in the latter.

Jasper Johns (born 1930), White Target, 1957, Encaustic on canvas, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase, 71.211, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, Photograph © 1998: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Photo by Robert E. Mates.

Jasper Johns (born 1930), Device Circle, 1959, Encaustic and collage on canvas with object, Andrew and Denise Saul, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY, Photograph Becket Logan.

Jasper Johns (born 1930), Periscope (Hart Crane), 1963, Oil on canvas, Collection of the artist, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY, Courtesy National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Combining themes of sensuality and mortality, Johns began using his own body as an instrument and an image. In works such as Periscope (Hart Crane) (1963), he incorporated the stenciled words RED YELLOW BLUE and a device image that is attached to an imprint of his palm. In this way, the artist compared the device to his own outstretched arm. In the Skin drawings (1962), Johns covered his head and hands with baby oil and left an impression of these body parts on mechanical drafting paper. The images were revealed when he rubbed them with strokes of charcoal. In Arrive / Depart (1963-1964), the composition of red, yellow, blue, and orange paint incorporates several handprints and the imprint of a skull.

Throughout second half of the exhibition, various works represent a complex of the motifs. New themes emerge: Periscope (Hart Crane) is presumed to reference Crane's suicide by drowning through the image of the extended arm. Together with this painting, works such as Passage(1962) and Land's End (1963), which also draw their titles from Crane's poems, form a sequence of works dedicated to Crane. Others, such as the uncommonly large paintings Diver (1962) and According to What (1964), are compilations of motifs and techniques. By contrast, one large drawing, also titled Diver (1962-1963), is an expansive but diagrammatic rendering of the body as device. The monochromatic painting Voice (1964-1967) is also startlingly spare. Here the device moves through a field of gray paint, leaving behind a single curving band that brings us back to the image of the target, where we began.

Over the past 50 years, Johns has created a rich body having profound influence on art in the U.S. and Europe. Johns, born 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, was raised in South Carolina. After attending the University of South Carolina for three semesters, he moved to New York City at the age of nineteen and briefly attended a commercial art school. After service in the army, including a period in Japan, he returned to New York in 1953, where he flourished as an artist.

Along with his contemporary Robert Rauschenberg, Johns is widely acknowledged as one of the most important American painters of the postwar era and one of the greatest living American painters. He is also regarded as one of the greatest graphic artists of the 20th century, creating important bodies of drawings as well as prints in a variety of media. In 1950s New York, Johns met John Cage and Merce Cunningham, with whom he collaborated, producing sets and props for performances. Johns' work on canvas and paper from that period, often limited to a single motif against a monochromatic field, has since attained enormous historical stature. Subsequently, his work has grown increasingly complex, even quasi-autobiographical. Developments such as abstract painting and drawing in a crosshatch manner further distinguish Johns' contribution to the history of art since midcentury.

The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Johns was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988, and that same year he was awarded the Golden Lion, the grand prize at the Venice Biennale. Johns resides in New York City, Connecticut, and the French West Indies.