Jasper Johns Click to Listen Mp3 Year: 1958
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20TH CENTURY ART Title: Three Flags Hear the Art Artist: Jasper Johns Click to Listen mp3 Year: 1958 In the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art Read Text of the Audio Listen to an audio introduction and a verbal description For Educators Text of the Audio • Jasper Johns is one of most important and influential American painters of the twentieth century. To understand why, let’s look at one of his most famous paintings titled Three Flags. He painted it in 1958. STAR SPANGLED BANNER BEGINS.... Three Flags is basically a painting of three American flags, displayed flat and unfolded, lying one on top of another. There’s a small one closest to you that you see completely, a slightly larger one behind that, and the largest flag is behind both of them. For the last two, you can only see parts of the flags, around their edges. The flags are in the traditional colors, thirteen horizontal stripes alternating red and white, and a rectangle of blue in the upper left corner holding six rows of white stars for a total of 48. Remember, Johns painted this in 1958, before Alaska and Hawaii became states. So Three Flags seems at first glance to be a patriotic painting celebrating the nation’s symbol. And maybe it is. Some critics suggest that Jasper Johns painted American flags because he was named after a military hero in the Revolutionary War, Sergeant William Jasper. Maybe. And maybe the painting Three Flags is about something else. MUSIC ENDS ABRUPTLY AS NEEDLE SCRATCH ACROSS RECORD Three Flags is an example of how Johns often used images and techniques from popular mass culture, things like advertising, comic books, and as Johns once said, “things the mind already knows.” Like the American flag. His work seemed partly a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, an art movement of the time whose paintings had no recognizable content all. Everyone could recognize the American flags. But their meaning could be just as elusive as an Abstract Expressionist painting. For instance, everyone who looks at a painting of the American flag will find their own meaning, depending on things like your age, your politics, your nationality, the times in which you live. But maybe Johns didn’t care what meaning you give to the flags. Maybe he wanted you to look at the painting as a painting. To make that point clearer, here’s a bit more verbal description of the painting Three Flags. Johns did not work with oil paint. Instead he used encaustic, also called hot wax painting, a technique in which an artist mixes beeswax with color pigments. The result is a thick surface on the canvas that you can easily see. And Johns laid it on so thick that the painting is 5 inches deep. The smallest painting, closest to you, is sticking out 5 inches above the largest painting beneath it. It almost seems like a sculpture, or maybe a tapestry, hanging on the wall. Maybe Johns is asking you to consider the question, what is a painting? His answer: it’s a visual object, something in itself. Just look at it. Jasper Johns and his paintings Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930, and grew up in small towns in South Carolina. Having shown a childhood affinity for drawing, he nurtured interest in art and poetry during his early education, at the University of South California. After a brief period at art school in New York, he served in the army in 1951-53, in South Carolina, and then in Japan. On his release from the army he moved back to New York. There his contacts with artists, especially Robert Rauschenberg, prompted him to a higher level of commitment to his art - a commitment that entailed his destruction of virtually all his previous works. Johns' first mature painting, Flag (1954-55; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), was painstakingly fabricated, predominantly with newspaper collage and encaustic. Immediately following came a series of encaustic paintings of numbers and targets (two of the latter including, in rows of boxes above the bull's eye, plaster casts of body parts and face fragments respectively). These works were all but unknown until Johns' first solo exhibition, at the Leo Castelli Gallery, in January 1958. With that show and its attendant critical attention, Johns was immediately pegged as one of the most important figures in a new wave of American art that was to eclipse the dominance of Abstract Expressionist painting. Fortified by his close friendships with Rauschenberg and with musician John Cage and the dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham, and strongly drawn to the subversive legacy of Marcel Duchamp, Johns became universally recognized as a key progenitor of both the Pop and the Minimal art of the 1960s. His appropriation of bold flat imagery such as the American flag, and his strategies of working by systematic repetition, catalyzed whole schools of new painting, sculpture, and Conceptual art. However, as was already clear in his first retrospective exhibition, at The Jewish Museum, New York, 19 1964, his own work resisted any clear stylistic label or group affiliation, as it blended attached objects, inscribed words and a complex richness of surface elaboration, within an alternation between concrete literalness and painterly abstraction. A mood of private, enigmatic thoughtfulness, often ironic, melancholic, or gravely repressed in its overtones, linked together his concern with language, the sinuosity of his work's surfaces, and his recurrent imagery of the body in parts. In the early 1960s he also produced a small but influential body of actual-size sculptures of commonplace objects such as beer cans, light bulbs, and flashlights, and by the end of that decade he had gained a reputation as a master printmaker. For ten years beginning in 1972, Johns' paintings were virtually exclusively abstract, conceived in allover "cross-hatch" patterns of clusters of parallel lines. Toward the end of that decade, following a major retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in 1977, his art began to evoke, in titles and in motifs, and eclectic new set of references to other art, including that of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, as well as Tantric Buddhist devotional imagery. In 1982 the look of Johns' paintings once again changed dramatically, as he began a series of representational works that assembled traced and copied imagery both from his own past art and from diverse sources in art history, ranging from Barnett Newman's graphic work and to Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece. The mid-1980s saw the emergence of overtly autobiographical paintings, their centerpiece being a group of four Seasons canvases allegorizing a cycle of youth and old age with symbols related to the epochs of the artist's work and to his various residences. Near the same time, he developed a new motif, a rectangular "face" with widely dislocated features, that related to Picasso paintings. Since the late 1980s Johns' art appears to have centered on issues of childhood and memory, often employing a base of motifs recovered from earlier works, layered over with a new skein of imagery ranging from a floor plan of his grandfather's house to a ghostly spiraling galaxy. Since the 1980s, Johns produces paintings at four to five a year, sometimes not at all during a year. His large scale paintings are much favored by collectors and due to their rarity, it is known that Johns' works are extremely difficult to acquire. Skate’s Art Market Research (Skate Press, Ltd.), a New York based advisory firm servicing private and institutional investors in the art market, has ranked Jasper Johns as the 30th most valuable artist. Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.” -Jasper Johns http://www.jasper-johns.org ART MASTERPIECE- THREE FLAGS by Jasper Johns Three Flags by Jasper Johns done around 1954/55 is a pop art painting where the artist painted 3 separate flags and attached them to each other, creating a 3 dimensional object. Born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia and raised in South Carolina, Jasper Johns is an American painter, sculptor, and print maker who has played a leading role in the development of mid-20th century American Art. He is an artist known for his fascination with commonplace and familiar symbols. In 1954 he began painting works in a manner radically different from the abstract expressionist style that then dominated American art. His canvases were devoted to familiar objects as targets (bulls eyes), flags, numbers, and alphabet letters. [Abstract expressionism is non-realistic art without recognizable images and does not adhere to the limits of conventional form. The styles were diverse, and usually either emphasized action or color.] Jasper Johns painted these familiar subjects with objectivity and precision, applying paint very thickly (called the impasto technique) so that the paintings became objects in themselves rather than reproductions of recognizable items. This idea of art-as-object became a potent influence on later sculpture as well as paintings. He often integrated 3- dimensional objects into his paintings, attaching real objects, such as rulers and compasses to the canvas. Pop artists drew their imagery from advertising billboards, movies, comic strips, and ordinary every day objects. The pop art movement began as a reaction against the abstract expressionist style of the 1940s to 1950s which the pop artists considered overly intellectual, subjective, and totally removed from reality. Pop artists chose to close the gap between life and art by embracing the environment of every day life. They sought to provide a perception of reality even more immediate than that offered by the realistic painting of the past.