Jasper Johns
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Jasper Johns, Jr. (born May 15, 1930 in Augusta, Georgia) is a contemporary U.S. artist.
Early life
Johns grew up in Allendale, South Carolina, and recounting this period in his life, he says, "In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in."
Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948, a total of three semesters. He then moved to New York and studied briefly at Parsons School of Design in 1949. While in New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Working together they explored the contemporary art scene, and began developing their ideas on art. In 1952 and 1953 he was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War.
In 1958, the gallery owner Leo Castelli visited the studio of Robert Rauschenberg and, during this visit, discovered Johns.
Work
Detail of Flag (1954-55). Museum of Modern Art, New York City. This image illustrates Johns' early technique of painting with thick, dripping encaustic over a collage made from found materials such as newspaper. This rough construction is rarely evident in reproductions of the work as a whole.
He is best known for his painting Flag (1954-55). His work is often described as a 'Neo-Dadaist', as opposed to Pop Art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture.
Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media as Encaustic (wax-based paint), and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs.
Johns is of particular interest when viewed from a position of Peircean semiotics. In contrast to the concept of macho 'artist hero' as ascribed to Abstract Expressionist figures such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose paintings are fully indexical (that is, standing effectively as an all-over canvas signature), 'Neo-Dadaists' like Johns and Robert Rauschenberg seem preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols, painted indexically in mockery of the hallowed individuality of the Abstract Expressionists.
In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York paid over twenty million dollars for Johns' White Flag.
Major works
- White Flag (1955)
- False Start (1959)
- Study for Skin (1962)
- Seasons (1986)
Other work
Jasper Johns guest-starred on an episode of The Simpsons as himself. In the episode, Homer Simpson accidentally becomes an artist, and Johns attends one of his exhibitions. Johns is amusingly portrayed as a petty thief, stealing items of food, lightbulbs and other small items. This was self-referential to Johns's art career, as most of his artwork came from everyday household objects.
External links
Johns, Jasper, 1930–, American artist, b. Augusta, Ga. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp in the mid-1950s, Johns attempted to transform common objects into art by placing them in an art context. His flags and target images executed from 1954 to 1959 heralded the pop art movement. Acclaimed for his painterly touch, Johns based his technique on the informal brushwork and texture of abstract expressionism, sometimes attaching literal elements such as rulers and brooms to the canvas. His bronze castings, such as Beer Cans (1960), are also derived from common objects. His abstract hatch paintings of the 1970s were followed by the allusion-filled, self-referential works of the 1980s and 90s, e.g., Seasons (1987), which use recurrent motifs as symbols to pull the viewer into engagement with the works. Many of his spare paintings of the early 2000s incorporate real or painted catenaries (curves created by cords hanging from two points).Bibliography See studies by R. Bernstein (1985), M. Rosenthal (1988), and G. Boudaille (1989).
Johns, Jasper
(1930- ), painter and sculptor. A celebrated member of the generation succeeding the artists who established the abstract expressionist New York school, Johns, together with Robert Rauschenberg, injected a note of defiant irony concerning the nature of painting. After a stint in the U.S. Army, Johns settled in New York in 1952 where he soon met Rauschenberg. Shortly after, Johns began producing blunt encaustic paintings simulating flags, targets, numbers, and letter types with the express intention of challenging the assumptions of the older and more romantic abstract expressionists. He declared that such objects as flags, targets, and maps were things the mind already knows and as such, gave him room to work on other levels. By 1958, when he had his first one-man exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, Johns had elaborated his emphasis on the conundrums presented by real things known to the mind when they are presented in the unreal contexts of painting, and he had begun to make three-dimensional effigies of such objects as light bulbs and flashlights. Johns's views were undoubtedly influenced by the iconoclasm of the earlier dada movement and particularly by his idol, Marcel Duchamp, whom he sought out in 1960. After their initial meeting, Johns made a gesture worthy of Duchamp when he cast two beer cans in bronze and then painted them to look precisely like ordinary beer cans. This triple entendre clearly indicated how deeply Johns was engaged in the criticism of orthodox aesthetics, particularly the aesthetics of gestural painting, which he often parodied. His close friendship with Rauschenberg and his work with the composer John Cage and the dancer Merce Cunningham stimulated his desire to challenge the lofty views of the abstract expressionists. He deliberately raised questions concerning the meaning of painting by basing his own on direct experiences with the vernacular vocabulary of daily life (using objects such as cups, spoons, rulers, and maps as subjects) and the most banal encounters with literature and news. His viewers were meant to be galvanized into questioning the very nature of painting itself. A hint of his purpose occurs in his admiring assessment of Duchamp who, he said, had moved art past retinal boundaries "into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another." In Johns's paintings, sculptures, and prints of recent years, there are tantalizing allusions in fragments of words, in mysterious titles, and in a kind of subtext of literal images inserted in abstract fields. His use of the cross-hatch, for instance, with its venerable history as the draftsman's means of indicating shadow and depth, is basically ironic, yet another thrust at convention, undermining its real purpose. Johns's interest in paradox, endless ambiguity, and subversion of tradition has been expressed in both small works and vast, mural-like paintings, which, in their perplexing deviations from the established modes of identifying painting and its subjects, have brought him the attention and admiration of connoisseurs throughout the world. The "other levels" on which he professes to work are still shrouded in mystery, piquing curiosity and commentary, as once Duchamp's work had done. Bibliography: Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns (1977); Irving Sandler, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (1978).
Artist: Jasper Johns (1930 - )
Nationality: American
Movement: Pop Art
Media: Painting, Printmaking
Influences:
Biography:
Born in Georgia, Jasper Johns studied at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. He met Robert Rauschenberg upon his arrival in New York City in 1952. The two shared similar views on contemporary culture and expressed their ideas in their artwork, thus developing the Pop Art movement. Johns reformed everyday symbols such as number, letters, and even the American flag, by showing them in a different context. He examines his subjects in many medias including oils, encaustic, print, plaster, and mixed media.
The best Jasper Johns Gallery web site. ... auerbach | francis bacon | lucian
freud | david hockney. jasper johns © Jasper Johns Corpse and Mirror, 1976 ...
Jasper Johns - Perilous Night 1982 encaustic on canvas National Gallery of Art
American ... National Gallery of Art: Jasper Johns: Prints from Four Decades ...
Born
in 1930, Jasper Johns spent his childhood in
small South Carolina towns. At age twenty-four,
he moved to New York. From the mid–1950s, Johns's
work combined cool logic and private compulsion.
His breakthrough 1954–55 painting Flag instigated
a series of paintings of the American flag and
of targets that stunned the art world. As his
paintings became more complex, Johns placed
alphabetical and numerical sequences in grids,
and inserted words and actual objects into his
art.
Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is one of the most significant figures in the history of postwar art. His work from 1955 to 1965 was pivotal, exercising an enormous impact on the subsequent development of pop, minimalism, and conceptual art in the United States and Europe. This is the first publication to approach Johns’s work of this ten-year period through a thematic framework. It examines the artist's interest in the condition of painting as a medium, a practice, and an instrument of encoded meaning through several interrelated motifs: the target, the “device,” the naming of colors, and the imprint of the body.
JOHNS, Jasper Target with Four Faces 1955 Encaustic and collage on canvas with
plaster casts 29 3/4 x 26 x 3 3/4 in. (75.5 x 71 x 9.7 cm.) ...
Metropolitan Museum of Art Biography and Analysis
Artist Profile: Jasper Johns
Because
Johns can offer seemingly little else by way of aesthetic consolation, this
sort of epistemological tease can sometimes constitute the main interest in his
work. And however spiritually removed
he is from the aesthetic that followed in his trail, Johns was undoubtedgly a
prototype for the minimalists and conceptualists. Donald Judd's dictum that art has only to be interesting is
implicit in much appreciation of Johns.
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