The impression a
reader gets from some surveys of art history, unfortunately, is that one
artistic movement ends and another picks up in a totally different direction.
We know this is not true when we see, for example, how classicist realism
persisted in painting long after Impressionism hit the scene in the 1870s. The
same is true with “movements” in modernism. The more I learn about some artists
the more I question the convenient categories into which they are often
pigeon-holed. Many of the artists who pioneered abstraction in the early 1900s
began their careers painting in either an Impressionist or Post-Impressionist
style, because by that time, Impressionism had become almost institutionalized.
The same goes for Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s in America. By the mid-
to late 1950s it was practically academic in its dominance over modernism.
Artists who eventually explored other forms of modernism in reaction to Abstract
Expressionism were unavoidably influenced by it when they were developing their
mature styles.
Jasper Johns is perhaps most famous for his paintings and
prints that feature images of the American flag or target, both obviously
potent symbols of American culture (next to the dollar sign, I guess). This
connects him to Pop Art’s explorations of representational imagery that emerged
in the very late 1950s and early 1960s. But, I have just recently found it
unfortunate that Johns’s name is so frequently only associated with Pop Art.
Like many artists, Johns’s body of work is incredibly varied and complex, and I
find it a bit irritating to merely link him to Pop Art because he used aspects
of mundane American culture as subject matter.
Johns was born in Georgia and raised in South Carolina. He
studied art at the University of South Carolina and Parsons School in New York
in 1948. After service during the Korean War (1950–1953), Johns returned to New
York, where he met another seminal artist of Pop Art: Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008).
He and Rauschenberg, who was already using gestural painting as part of his
work, formed a close association, inspiring and influencing one another’s art
until 1961.
Rauschenberg ushered Johns into the art scene in New York, at
the time dominated by Abstract Expressionism. The two artists worked together
closely until the early 1960s, both acquiring from Abstract Expressionism the
brush work of action painting, but little else. Little by little their work
moved away from Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. Of major impact on both
their bodies of work was a viewing of the Surrealist and Dada works,
particularly the found object works ("readymades") of Marcel Duchamp
(1887–1968) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1958. Johns's work expanded as
he incorporated the painting technique of Abstract Expressionism and the
incorporation of banal everyday objects into it.
These paintings from Johns’s early mature work show how he
combined Abstract Expressionism’s painterly surface with something that was anathema
to the Abstract Expressionists: reference to everyday objects or symbols.
Ironically, Johns’s titles—“Flag,” “Numbers,” “Target,” and the like—do not
leave the impression of any literary, symbolic, or romantic intent, even more anathema
to Abstract Expressionists. They are merely convenient vehicles to contrast
with the beautiful painterly surface. What I like the most about these early
works is that, unlike the American flag, the reference to American culture does
not hit the viewer over the head, it is so subtle. I am, no doubt, not the
first art historian to consider Johns’s importance to lie in his being a bridge
from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Interesting fact, make of it what you
will: Johns once stated that he conceived of the American flag subject after
dreaming about painting it.
Other “bridge” works:
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Tango, 1955. Oil
and encaustic on canvas, 42 7/8" x 55 1/8" (109 x 140 cm). Private
Collection. © 2015 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York. (8S-27041jovg)
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Painting with Two Balls, 1960. Mixed-media, 64 15/16" x 53 15/16" (165
x 137 cm). Collection of the Artist. © 2015 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA,
New York. (8S-27050jovg)
|
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False Start,
1962. Lithograph on paper, 18" x 13 3/4" (45.7 x 34.9 cm).
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. © 2015 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA,
New York. (AK-2200jovg)
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I personally love Johns’s lithographs, because I remember
from school the joy of working with a litho stone and the textural
possibilities involved. Lithography was a favorite medium of Willem de Kooning
(1904–1997), one of the “action painters” of Abstract Expressionism. Look at
how fluid de Kooning’s lithograph is! I’ve seen one of his lithographs in which
he used a floor mop as a “brush!”
Correlations to Davis
programs: Explorations in Art 4
6.35, 6.35-36 studio; Explorations in Art 6 5.25; A Community Connection 6.2,
8.4; Experience Painting 7; Experience Printmaking 6; Exploring Painting 12;
Exploring Visual Design 6, 8, 10; The Visual Experience 9.3, 9.4, 16.7;
Discovering Art History 17.1, 17.2
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