Jasper Johns was born on May 15, in Augusta, Georgia. He studied at the University of South Carolina and went on to a commercial art school in New York in He then served in the army. In the late s, he was discovered by New York gallery owner Leo Castelli, who became a legendary art dealer by promoting Johns and other avant-garde artists.
It was Jasper Johns was 24, living in New York, and had decided to go for a fresh start as an artist by destroying all of his previous works of art. Inspired by a vivid dream of the US flag, Johns went on to create Flag , the first painting in a series that would become icons of art history and turn him into a pioneer of pop art.
His parents separated early, and as a child he was passed around in the family, living with his grandparents or an aunt between brief periods with his mother. He always felt like a guest. In the early s, Johns fled to New York. I had a kind of informal existence where I always wanted to be an artist, but I didn't have much education. I had no contact with people who were artists.
That all changed in New York. He met composer John Cage , choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Robert Rauschenberg, the latter who became a close friend. Through Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns also became acquainted with the legendary gallery owner Leo Castelli, who facilitated his first solo exhibition and became his art dealer. At the time, Johns made ends meet by working in a bookstore or decorating window displays at Tiffany's.
To create Flag , Johns dissolved pigments in wax and painted them onto newsprint collages. According to the artist, his depictions of flags were never intended as a patriotic statement; it was purely practical, he said, as he didn't have to come up with his own motif. Yet Flag confronts the viewer with the symbolism of the flag itself, and whether it is possible to detach the depiction from its meaning and simply see a painting of stars and stripes.
Primarily associated with abstract expressionism and pop art, Jasper Johns is also renowned for his humor. When fellow artist Willem de Kooning criticized his art dealer by saying: "That son-of-a-bitch, you could give him two beer cans and he could sell them," Johns reacted by creating a sculpture of two cans of beer. And of course, art dealer Leo Castelli sold the bronze.
Or disparate access to resources that, now more than ever, become a matter of life or death. Skip to main content. Jasper Johns, Flags , —, lithograph on paper. Collection Walker Art Center. Get Tickets. Become a Member. Log In. Walker Art Center Close Search. Yet it is the two other versions that do most to bring Flag itself, the catalyst of the series, more clearly into view.
First is Flag Above White with Collage. Here encaustic again transforms snippets of newsprint into stars and stripes. Now, though, two elements are added: the white field or ground that supports the flag, and the found strip of ID photographs of an unknown white man visible within the stripes along the right edge.
We might even take the unknown man in the photo strip as a figure of the citizen, its quasi-ideal. What makes this version different? Its pervasive whiteness alone is enough to define it. In other words, being white is its most salient fact, one that occludes the layer of newsprint, which has been plastered flat. But scale matters too: For the flag to be white is to see it writ large. And to be white likewise involves a certain freeing-up of the handling of the surface.
Or would it be better to claim that the surface leaks, or bleeds, or weeps? Where a national whiteness is concerned, not least for a state in the throes of an endlessly belated racial integration, all these terms might seem able to assert their claims.
Both these images lead directly back to Flag. What no one has so far noticed about this much-studied painting is the origin or purpose of the ten raised white letters that curve along the lower right arm of the bottom left star.
What matters even more is how they were made, and what the blue wax surrounding them conceals. They are raised letters on an embossed government seal lying just beneath the surface, and that seal sits, so it seems, on a passport page of an unknown white male, who, we learn, is married and weighs pounds. So is his place within the fabric of the painting—precisely where, in this national image, we would expect him to be.
Of course, Johns did not—could not—stop painting the flag. In Three Flags , , the flag appears in triplicate, with the reiteration being built up in three dimensions, until it takes on the force of an expansive hallucination, an image replicating or echoing itself. Haacke responded with an installation dubbed Sanitation , built of course around the assertive presence of the flag. But to speak of the visionary leads us directly to another flag in the sequence.
Like the others in the series, it too is encaustic and collage. The resemblance, however, stops there. For not only is it a vertical image, it is one that sees the flag, however improbably, from the wrong side. This means that were it turned horizontally, the familiar canton would appear, against centuries-old custom, on the right.
To ask the question this way breathes new life into the old flag-versus-painting debate. Here are the rudiments of an answer to both. Hegemony, remember, is a dualism: It requires both force and consent. Force and consent: These two words were chosen by Perry Anderson, then editor of New Left Review , as the title of his essay examining current US policy in light of international objectives in place since World War II.
Which is to grasp how American hegemony works, the peculiar, shifting, often toxic balance between the particular and the general, between ideological invitation and brutal bringing-into-line. In fact I think Flag might best be described as a realist work.
I have already, I hope, suggested why. What Flag quite pragmatically thus imports into the sphere of our discussions is the need ourselves to attend to dualities of meaning with more political realism. What is most instructive about Flag —what in the end makes it a realist work—is its terrifying, inevitable ambivalence in the face of the kinds of commitment demanded by the United States.
It still provides the scrim through which its supporters, and maybe even its detractors, continue to see the world. The long-ago themes of The Americans do not go away. Their relevance will remain, moreover, not only for the years still left to the Bush administration, but on beyond. What this will mean, both globally and locally, has yet to come fully into view. But one thing is certain: Both the flag and the national mind-set will continue to find their figurations at the hands of artists who, like Johns, recognize the fatal power and persuasiveness of Americanism as a mode of representation and perception—as a form of political speech.
With this in mind, consider one final flag image: a work by Hans Haacke made public in time for the presidential election of November Titled Star Gazing , the photograph portrays, in a conventional portrait format, a T-shirted young man—an ordinary citizen—whose head is shrouded in, and erased by, the flag.
We are not used to thinking of Johns as an activist artist.
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