![]() ![]() “His archiving these proofs show how important they actually are, and that they too are important works of art as well. “For Johns, however, that was very much not the case as he saved, and signed them,” notes Voglelman. Another part of the Johns’ Japanese gallery revolves around his latter-day recollections of his time there, “from a geographical distance,” entitled Usuyuki, which includes a handful of prints and drawings not viewed in the United States since 1983.Īnother singular space within the Johns’ exhibition revolved around trial and working proofs rarely seen by the public as they’re not often looked upon as part of the artist’s work. Along with personal lent from Johns’ own collection from his time in Japan are a handful of paintings and objets from Japanese artists and friends whose work also glean influence from Duchamp. ![]() These rarely-viewed paintings and drawings in the Johns/Japan gallery has a biographical portion surveying the painter’s earliest relationship with Japan during his time in the Army, as well as his return (a three-month residency through the Minami Gallery) once his stardom was established in 1964. “While the Whitney is focused strictly on American art, we are an encyclopedic institution from the past to the present day, globally, and, for this exhibition, we have a gallery focused on Johns’ relationship to Japan.” 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society, New York With that, the autonomous, yet unified twin exhibitions at Philadelphia’s Museum of Art and the Whitney is defined by its context in relation to each academy’s definition. Originally intended to debut during Johns’ 90th birthday in 2020 (slowed by COVID’s restrictions), “Mind/Mirror’s” multi-room setting just happens to coincide with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new look and expansion. “Mind/Mirror’ helps portray their narrative thread and how Johns was an inheritor of Duchamp’s legacy,” states Vogelman, pointing toward Jasper’s 1960 bronze and glass Flashlight for proof. Vogelman and I discuss the “intimate connection” of Johns to Duchamp, and how the latter’s longtime permanent collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art led to a friendship between the Dada elder and the young painter after Johns and Robert Rauschenberg visited the Philly Duchamp exhibition in 1958. “Johns is responsible for the shock waves that went through the art world at that time. Key to its effect is Johns’ use of encaustic: A mix of pigment and wax, which he applied in short strokes over skeins of collaged newspapers tantalizingly visible under translucent daubs of color, they’re impossible to read.“Jasper changed the landscape of American art in 1954 when he made Flag,” says Sarah Vogelman, the PMoA’s Exhibition Assistant for this retrospective, regarding Johns’ launching of Pop Art, Conceptualism, and Minimalism. But is it an image of a thing or the thing itself? Both and neither: A mute presence, yet also an ironic commentary on America’s superpower status by a gay Southerner obliged to deal with the macho pretentiousness around him. Obvious on its face, it is a rendering of Old Glory on a canvas conforming to its shape. ![]() Johns’ breakthrough Flag from 1954 (which came to him in a dream), was a particularly provocative riposte to AbEx. He countered their performative sturm und drang with subjects that obdurately concealed as much as they revealed. By reviving Marcel Duchamp’s readymade aesthetic through painting (a medium Duchamp himself disparaged), Johns coolly dissected the broad, gestural psychodrama of artists such as Pollock and De Kooning. NYC’s art scene was still dominated by Abstract Expressionism, the movement that had brought American artists to the dance of art-historical relevance. His work became a sensation, eventually pointing the way to the rise of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism in the following decade. Castelli gave Johns his first show in 1958, which nearly sold out. Within five years, he’d risen to art stardom, thanks, in part, to Johns’s lover at the time, Robert Rauschenberg, who introduced him to the legendary gallerist Leo Castelli. Raised in South Carolina, Johns moved to New York City in 1953, when he was twenty-three. From the start, he’s stirred up cloudy enigmas around the simplest of images (flags, targets, numbers, maps) and objects (silverware, beer cans, lightbulbs), and continued to muddy his work’s meaning even as it grew more autobiographical. Halfway through the sixth decade of his career, Johns’s output has been prodigious enough to demand a retrospective hosted by not one, but two institutions: The Whitney and The Philadelphia Museum of Art.Ī titanic figure in art history, Johns’s achievements are all the more remarkable given his preference for turbidity over clarity. ![]() At ninety-one, Jasper Johns has been around for so long that it’s easy to forget that he is-well, still around. ![]()
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