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Home , Flag (painting), Jasper Johns, Jasper Johns (book), White Flag (painting)

Jasper Johns

Catherine Craft Author: Catherine Craft

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© Parkstone Press International, New York, USA © Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Art © /Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY © Edvard Munch Estate, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ BONO, Oslo © Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA Art © /Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

All right reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to etablish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-78042-997-7 Catherine Craft

Jasper Johns

Contents

Acknowledgments 7

I. Being an Artist 9

II. The Changing Focus of the Eye 49

III. Not Designed, But Taken 113

IV. Dropping the Reserve 167

V. Grace 221

Notes 250

Bibliography 252

List of Illustrations 254 6 Acknowledgments

riting this book has been both a challenge and a pleasure, and a number of individuals provided Winformation, support and encouragement to me along the way. In particular, I must thank Richard Shiff, who initially contacted me about this monograph and whose example as a scholar of Jasper Johns’s

work has been invaluable. I would also like to thank Nan Rosenthal, who kindly invited me to speak on Johns’s

work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Richard Shone, who as editor for The Burlington Magazine has

also given me the opportunity to write about Johns’s work on several occasions. Richard Field, Harry Cooper,

Joachim Pissarro, Paul Cornwall-Jones and Tamie Swett have also generously shared their thoughts on Johns’s

work with me over the years, and Johns’s curator, Sarah Taggart, has been unfailingly helpful and very attentive

to my questions. Nancy Carr was the ideal reader, taking the time not only to read my manuscript but to offer

many constructive comments, and Alfred Kren and the rest of my family have shown great love and patience

during this project. Lastly and most importantly, I wish to thank Jasper Johns for his support of this monograph

and for making a body of work with an undeniable sense of life.

7 8 Being an Artist

I wondered when I was going to stop “going to be” an artist and start being one.1

Painters are not public but rather are born in private. The public has made it their business; however, for the painter, art will never be public.2

ne evening in January 1958, Catharine Rembert, an art instructor from the University of , was on a visit to New York, waiting for a former student to join her for Odinner. Jasper Johns came late, but he made up for it by jubilantly picking her up and dancing her about the room. He was celebrating an astounding success: at twenty-seven years of age, his first solo exhibition had just opened at the Gallery, landing him on the cover of Art News magazine and prompting the Museum of to purchase three of his works – a development that had occurred just that day.

The critical and commercial success of Johns’s first show is something of a legend in the history of American art, and deservedly so. At a time when the dominant mode of painting, , emphasised expressive drama through boldly gestural brushwork and largely abstract compositions, Johns’s paintings of the American , targets, numbers and the alphabet marked a decided departure from convention. Despite being painted with obvious care, they seemed emotionally reticent, cool and quiet, far from the emotional fireworks then fashionable.

Abstract Expressionism’s first generation of artists, which included such legendary figures as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and , had begun making art during the difficult years of the Depression and World War II. In response to these circumstances, they stressed the centrality of the artist’s self in the creation of art, and the production of a painting as an act of page 4: Pyre 2, 2003. Oil on canvas with wood slat, string, and absolute personal authenticity. As a younger generation came on the scene in the 1950s, many hinge, 168.3 x 111.8 x 17.1 cm. of them adopted these attitudes, and soon what had been a position of existential significance The , New York. began, through repetition, to seem mannered and overwrought. In this climate, Johns’s debut was Fractional and promised gift of Marie-Josée both a shock and a breath of fresh air. and Henry R. Kravis. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Whereas Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman had explained that instead of “making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’” he and his peers were making them “out of ourselves, out page 6: Two Flags, 1959. Acrylic on canvas, 201.3 x 148 cm. of our own feelings,”3 and Rothko declared that he wanted viewers to weep before his canvases, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Johns in contrast remarked in one of his first interviews: Wien (Vienna), on loan from the Ludwig Collection, Aachen. It all began... with my painting a picture of an American flag. Using this design took Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets – things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on page 8: (detail, actual size), 1955. other levels. For instance, I’ve always thought of painting as a surface; painting it in Encaustic, oil, newsprint, and charcoal on canvas, 198.9 x 306.7 cm. one colour made this very clear. Then I decided that looking at a painting should not The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. require a special kind of focus like going to church. A picture ought to be looked at Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, the same way you look at a radiator.4 New York, NY

9 Jasper Johns

Unlike most artists’ statements in New York during the 1950s, Johns’s remarks contained none of the familiar talk of doubt and angst, and his selection of subject matter appeared deliberate, thoughtful, and far removed from emotional attachments and desires. To younger artists his art seemed not so much cold and unfeeling as clear-eyed and honest after the excesses of Abstract Expressionism; after all, as artist Mel Bochner later put it, “Where is your true self at age 23?”5 Furthermore, in selecting recognisable subjects, Johns seemed to reject prevailing abstract modes page 10: Untitled, 1954. of painting, yet his subjects themselves – flags, targets, numbers – each possessed a vital Oil on paper mounted on fabric, characteristic of classic abstraction, namely, a flatness rendering them all but indistinguishable 22.9 x 22.9 cm. from the picture plane itself. His work made the polarity between abstraction and representation The , Houston. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, that had dominated debates about modern art for decades seem suddenly obsolete, opening up New York, NY other ways of thinking about art’s relation to the world.

page 11: Star, 1954. Oil, beeswax, and house paint on Artists began to respond to Johns’s example almost immediately. One measure of his art’s newspaper, canvas, and wood with tinted considerable impact is the fact that it affected so many different types of artists. The restrained glass, nails, and fabric tape, and intellectual qualities of his paintings and his insistence on their identities as physical objects 57.2 x 49.5 x 4.8 cm. made a strong impression on such artists as , , Robert Morris, and John The Menil Collection, Houston. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, Baldessari, and would contribute to the development of Minimal and . At the same New York, NY time, Johns’s careful attention to everyday images and objects – “things the mind already knows”

10 Being an Artist Jasper Johns Being an Artist

– would also inspire and the work of other artists, such as Chuck Close, who felt restricted by abstraction. In the years that followed, new generations of artists as diverse as , David Salle, Robert Gober, Kiki Smith and would each find something of their own in Johns’s work.

Despite the rush of attention that followed his debut at the Leo Castelli Gallery, Johns refused to relax into a comfortable signature style that might have satisfied the expectations of others. Instead, whenever something seemed settled and familiar in his practice, he questioned it, even at the risk of failure. In the five decades that have followed, Johns has remained remarkably focused considering the intense scrutiny to which he and his work have been subjected by scholars, critics, curators, dealers, collectors and other artists. A strong sense of identity has been instrumental to Johns’s ability to continue challenging himself as an artist despite what could have become overwhelming distractions. In fact, it might be said that this identity was one of Johns’s first creations as an artist.

The Birth of an Artist

When he was forty years old, Johns attempted to explain why he had become an artist:

It had been my intention to be an artist since I was a child. But in South Carolina, where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I didn’t really know what that meant. I thought it meant that I would be able to be in a situation other than the one I was in. I think that was the primary fantasy. The society there seemed to accommodate every other thing I knew about, but not that. In part I think the idea of being an artist was, not a fantasy, but being out of this: since there is none of this here, if you’re going to be it, you’ll have to be somewhere else. I liked that, plus I liked to do things with my hands.6

Johns’s childhood desire to be somewhere else is not surprising given his upbringing, which, in his own words, “wasn’t specially cheerful.”7 Shortly after his birth in May 1930, Johns’s mother divorced his alcoholic father, and Johns was left to be raised by a shifting cast of relatives in and around Allendale, South Carolina. The successive displacements were surely not helped by the fact that although Johns liked to do things with his hands, they were not often the things associated at that time and place with the exploits of boys. He loved to draw, but he was also apparently interested in cooking, and he had little interest in hunting, fishing or other outdoor activities.

In wanting to be an artist, Johns ended up focused on a conjunction of activity and identity. Being an artist was what one did, but the first artistic act was to make oneself an artist. The dual processes of creation – artwork and self – were no simple matter. Johns had very little Untitled, 1954. Construction of painted wood, painted contact with art in his childhood, and as much as this inaccessibility probably contributed to plaster cast, photomechanical its appeal, it also presented a number of obstacles: Johns’s early encounters with art were less reproductions on canvas, glass, and nails, revelations than near-misses. In his paternal grandfather’s house, where he lived until the age 66.6 x 22.5 x 11.1 cm. Hirshhorn Museum and Garden, of seven, there were a handful of paintings by his grandmother that aroused his curiosity; but Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. she had died before his birth, and he knew very little about her. When an itinerant painter Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, passed through town, Johns took some of his materials and attempted to paint with them, not New York, NY Jasper Johns

knowing that the oil-based pigments would not mix with water. Johns’s grandfather arranged to have them returned to the painter, with whom the boy had no further contact.

Johns’s world slowly began to expand as he reached adulthood. After three semesters of studying art with Rembert and others at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, he went at their urging to New York in 1948 and studied for a few months at the . When he ran short of money, the school’s director offered him a scholarship based on a recommendation from one of his teachers at the University of South Carolina, but added that he didn’t really deserve it. Johns thereupon refused her offer, left school, and worked at various odd jobs, from messenger boy to shipping clerk, in order to stay in New York. It was an exciting time to be there. The Abstract page 14: Untitled, 1954. Expressionists were just beginning to show the ambitious and monumental paintings for which they Graphite pencil on oil-stained (?) paper, would become best known, and Johns saw numerous works at this time, including Pollock’s dripped 21 x 16.7 cm. Collection of the Robert Rauschenberg and poured paintings and Newman’s expansive fields of saturated colour. Foundation. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, Although such experiences were stimulating, Johns’s early existence in New York was New York, NY nonetheless quite isolated, and he struggled with poverty. His situation changed somewhat page 15: Construction with Toy Piano, 1954. when he was drafted into the army in 1951. While stationed at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Graphite and collage with toy piano, Johns developed an art exhibition program for soldiers before he was sent to for six 29.4 x 23.2 x 5.6 cm. months. Although the was underway, Johns saw no combat; instead, he worked , Basel. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, in Special Services, designing posters for military films and educational campaigns and New York, NY working on decorations for a chapel.

14 Being an Artist

15 Jasper Johns

16 Being an Artist

Discharged in 1953, Johns returned to New York, briefly attending Hunter College. He continued looking at art and telling the few people he knew that he was going to be an artist, yet it was difficult for him to assimilate his impressions of the art he was seeing. At times the idea of making something of his own out of these impressions was so overwhelming as to seem almost impossible. Art “seemed... to exist on a different plane” from the one that Johns occupied.8 His disorientation was profound and was in part rooted in the physical identity of art objects themselves:

I remember the first Picasso I ever saw, the first real Picasso... I could not believe it was a Picasso, I thought it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. I’d been used to the light coming through color slides; I didn’t realise I would have to revise my notions of what painting was.9

Against this decisive experience of painting’s materiality was Johns’s less than certain sense of himself. “I had no focus,” he later recalled, “I was vague and rootless.”10 Exacerbating this impression was the Abstract Expressionist emphasis on the role of the self in the creation of art and a corresponding insistence upon the work of art as a direct expression of that self. As Johns later put it, “Abstract Expressionism was so lively – personal identity and painting were more or less the same, and I tried to operate the same way. But I found I couldn’t do anything that would be identical with my feelings.”11

Instead, Johns was caught up in a desire as intense as it was bewildering: “This image of wanting to be an artist – that I would in some way become an artist – was very strong... But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn’t know how to do it.”12 In South Carolina, becoming an artist meant being in another place. In New York, Johns was in the right place to make art, but now he found himself deferring this change in his life to an indefinite time in the future, just beyond his reach.

Sometime during the first winter after he got out of the army, Johns met someone who would give him a crucial jolt out of this frustrating situation: Robert Rauschenberg, who would become the most important person in his life for the seven years. Also a Southerner, the Texas-born Rauschenberg was almost five years older than Johns and had already had one-man exhibitions in two of New York’s most important galleries. At the time they met, Rauschenberg was regarded by many in the art world as a sort of enfant terrible for the experimental and provocative works he was making.

Rauschenberg had first gained notoriety with a series of all-white paintings that registered passing shadows and changes in light. He had also made all-black paintings of collaged newspaper covered with dark pigment that many viewers associated with nihilism and destructiveness, although Rauschenberg insisted he had intended no such thing. He had made paintings out of dirt in which grass sprouted and grew (he regularly visited the gallery where one was displayed to water it), but most infamously, he had obtained a drawing from de Kooning – perhaps the most important painter at that moment among younger artists – with the sole purpose of erasing it, simply because he wanted to “know whether a drawing can be made out of erasing.”13 At the Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), time he and Johns met, Rauschenberg had just begun making a series of all-red paintings that Monogram, 1955-59. , 106.7 x 160.7 x 163.8 cm. incorporated an array of collage materials, including pieces of fabric and newspaper clippings Moderna Museet, Stockholm. – objects from everyday life that were in his view just as important in the creation of art as the Art © Robert Rauschenberg/Licensed by intensely private feelings favoured by the Abstract Expressionists. VAGA, New York, NY

17 Jasper Johns

Despite his reputation for controversy, Rauschenberg was, as far as Johns was concerned, a seasoned professional. He knew where to get inexpensive studio space, and he was adept at finding ways to work only when he needed money so that he could give more time to his art. Most importantly, Rauschenberg had somehow managed to effect the transformation for which Johns yearned: he was the first “real artist” Johns had ever known, and “everything was arranged to accommodate that fact.”14 Soon after they met, Rauschenberg talked Johns into leaving his job at a bookstore to join him in freelance work designing window displays for such upscale shops as Bonwit Teller and Tiffany’s. With the help of a mutual friend, Johns soon found page 18: Flag above White with Collage, 1955. Encaustic and collage on canvas, 57 x 49 cm. a loft around the corner from Rauschenberg’s studio on Fulton Street in lower , which Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel. Gift of the at that time was home to a number of rundown buildings that had formerly housed manufacturing artist in memory of Christian Geelhaar. firms and warehouses. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Living in such spaces was technically illegal – Johns’s building had actually been condemned page 19: Two Flags, 1962. by the city – but it was cheap and provided ample space for living and working, far more than Oil on canvas (two panels), 248.9 x 182.8 cm. had been possible in the tiny apartment in the East Village that Johns had previously occupied. Collection of Norman and Irma Braman. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, Moreover, at this time few artists were living as far downtown as Rauschenberg and Johns, and New York, NY the distance provided a sense of privacy from the ongoing networking and gossip of the art

18 Being an Artist

19 Jasper Johns

page 20: Book, 1957. Encaustic on book and wood, 25.4 x 33 cm. The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

page 21: Target with Plaster Casts, 1955. Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects, 129.5 x 111.8 x 8.8 cm. Collection of , Los Angeles. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

20 21 Jasper Johns

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world. This was important professionally as well as personally, as both Johns and Rauschenberg had determined to find their own way as artists, without simply following what their elders had done.

Very few works by Johns survive from the period before he became acquainted with Rauschenberg. A handful of drawings from the early 1950s are known; Johns prefers that they not be reproduced, although their titles are suggestive: Tattooed Torso, Idiot, Spanked Child. In contrast to these drawings, the modestly scaled and intimate works that Johns made during the first months of his acquaintance with Rauschenberg were poised between abstraction and representation, mingling painting, drawing, sculpture and collage.

Among these, Rauschenberg especially admired Johns’s richly worked pencil drawings of dried page 22: White Flag, 1955. oranges (p. 14), their murky forms barely emerging from the darkness of the page. Collage was Encaustic, oil, newsprint, and charcoal on the dominant process in a small work that Johns had made while still working at the bookstore, canvas, 198.9 x 306.7 cm. one night folding and tearing an order form and painting over the resulting grid pattern in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. flickering shades of green (p. 10). Other pieces suggested the impact of the time he spent at Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Rauschenberg’s studio. Just as Rauschenberg was constructing from scavenged crates paintings that verged on the sculptural in their inclusion of ledges, shelves, partitions and niches, so too page 23: Figure 5, 1955. did Johns make several constructed works, including Star (p. 11) and a shallow box containing Encaustic and collage on canvas, 44.5 x 35.6 cm. the plaster cast of a friend’s face (p. 12). Painted white, they evoked the quiet poetry of Joseph Collection the artist. Cornell, an artist whose assembled boxes he and Rauschenberg greatly admired. In the work Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, with the plaster cast, Johns covered the upper panel with collaged papers ranging from receipts New York, NY

23 Jasper Johns

to images of an ear, a man’s torso, and a house. Similarly, in Construction with Toy Piano (p. 15), Johns used a miniature musical instrument as a surface for pasted papers heavily worked with graphite; the composition was topped by the numbered keys of the toy piano, which sounded notes when struck.

A closer look at Construction with Toy Piano reveals the complexities of Johns’s growing relationship with Rauschenberg. Its connections between making art and making music echo Music Box, a 1953 sculpture by Rauschenberg. Music Box was owned by , a mutual friend of Rauschenberg and Johns who had helped Johns find his loft; a small, roughly hewn wooden box, it was studded with nails and contained a few pebbles.15 When the box was picked up and shaken, the pebbles would strike the nails and inner walls of the box, giving off sounds – like Johns’s toy piano, Rauschenberg’s work encouraged viewers to “play” it.

Furthermore, at the right side of Construction with Toy Piano is a small sticker reading “Hotel Bilbao.” Rauschenberg had incorporated such stickers in one of several collages he made while travelling in Europe and North Africa between 1952 and 1953. Johns could have easily picked up the Bilbao sticker from the materials commonly strewn about Rauschenberg’s loft, but other circumstances suggest that his was a more intimate act. Very few people in New York even knew of the existence of the works Rauschenberg brought back with him from this trip, and showing them to Johns – who became the owner of several of them – was a great gesture of trust. Construction with Toy Piano seems to be a response to Rauschenberg’s collages, most of which were meant to be handled: the entire composition of his collage with the Bilbao stickers, for example, is visible only when the collage is opened up like a greeting card. Johns’s work similarly solicited the viewer’s participation in its invitation to press the toy piano’s keys.

Johns’s use of collage in these early works also forms a tentative response to what was beginning to happen in Rauschenberg’s own practice. With Johns looking on, Rauschenberg was intensifying the physicality of his paintings by incorporating a growing range of materials and objects into his art; verging on a fusion of painting and sculpture, the resulting works would eventually be named “combines.” Some of the objects that Rauschenberg had begun including in the red paintings and the early combines, such as mirrors and light bulbs, addressed the work’s relation to its surroundings and to the viewer by encouraging participation and making the viewer, through his or her reflection in the mirrors, become a part of the work.

Rauschenberg used a straightforward, grid-based compositional structure to integrate the increasing heterogeneity of his materials – which now encompassed socks, umbrellas and, most conspicuously, the stuffed birds that he had discovered at a taxidermist’s shop in his neighborhood – and he used large swaths of dripping paint, signs of expressivity in Abstract Expressionist

Green Target, 1955. painting, to unite these disparate objects. In the early combines made in 1954, as his relationship Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over with Johns intensified, personal materials – letters from his family, photographs of them, newspaper canvas, 152.4 x 152.4 cm. clippings about them, even drawings by artist friends – were dominant, raising the question of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. their status: was a letter from the artist’s mother, pasted into the early combine Charlene, more Richard S. Zeisler Fund. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, revealing of the artist’s “true self” than the drips and smears of paint many artists were using to New York, NY signify this elusive entity?

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