Jasper Johns - NYT

Jasper Johns outside his Connecticut studio.

(Photo: John Lund)


At left, "Tennyson" (1958) - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns

"Flag," 1958 - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns

"Target," 1958 - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns

"Two Flags," 1959 - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns


"Gray Alphabets" (1960) - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns

"0 through 9" (1961) - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns

"No" (1961) - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns

"Liar" (1961) - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns

"Map" (1962) - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns in 1966 with one of his flag paintings, and other works by him. - Photo: The New York Times

"Fool's House" (1962) - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns

Left, an untitled drawing (2001) next to the painting “Near the Lagoon” (2002), based on the untitled drawing. - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns

"False Start" (1959) - Photo: Erich Lessing

"Jubilee" (1959) - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns

“Bushbaby” (2005), a painting that hangs in Mr. Johns’s Caribbean home. - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns

Left, the drawing “Within” (2007); right, the painting “Within,” begun in 1983 and finished in 2005. - Photo: Courtesy of Jasper Johns


Art

The Gray Areas of Jasper Johns

By CAROL VOGEL
Published: February 3, 2008

St. Martin

ONLY one artwork hangs in Jasper Johns’s all-white Caribbean home here. It’s a nearly nine-foot-tall canvas in three sections: a harlequin pattern that cascades down on the right, a series of colored circles on the left, and a montage of gray encaustic brush strokes in the center. Two overlapping wooden slats are attached to the painting.

“You can’t really have art down here because of the weather,” said Mr. Johns, 77, who keeps most of his art collection — works by Degas, Picasso and Duchamp as well as old friends like Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg — in the Connecticut farmhouse and studio where he lives for most of the year. “Somehow,” he said, inspecting the painting, “encaustic is impervious to the climate.”

Completed in 2005, the work, “Bushbaby,” encapsulates many of Mr. Johns’s familiar themes. There’s the encaustic, an ancient technique in which pigment is suspended in wax, giving each brush stroke a distinct materiality; the harlequin pattern, a nod to early Modern masters like Cézanne and Picasso; the strips of wood, introducing a three-dimensional element to an otherwise flat canvas; a string hanging from one slat, a suggestion of movement; and the color gray, which Mr. Johns has explored off and on throughout his nearly six-decade career.

To hear it from curators, gray is not just a familiar color for Mr. Johns but the essence of a long metaphysical journey, an exploration of “the condition of gray itself.” At least that’s the premise of a sprawling exhibition of his work that opens Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

But when pressed on the show’s focus, he said simply: “Yes, gray has been important to me. But I don’t tend to think of it as separate from the rest of my work.”

The response is classic Johns. In a parallel to his mysterious grays, suggesting both effacement and a resolute ambiguity, Mr. Johns seems to have perfected the art of talking about his work without ever revealing too much. Always courtly, he answers questions in a measured, seemingly straightforward manner that leaves a listener wanting to know far more. It’s as if he is aware that a myth surrounds him that he must be careful not to dispel.

For decades now his interpretation of flags and targets, numbers and letters — things, as he has often said, “the mind already knows,” “things that were seen and not looked at, not examined” — have become as embedded in the contemporary American art psyche as Andy Warhol’s soup cans or Jackson Pollock’s drips.

Yet until this exhibition was organized, his use of gray — as a pigment, a stenciled word, a section of crosshatching — had not been singled out for sustained attention. The show, which began at the Art Institute of Chicago, insists that attention must finally be paid to what Mr. Johns once said was his “favorite color.”

Sipping lemongrass iced tea on a recent 80-degree afternoon in a shaded pavilion on his property here, he spoke briefly about his early experiments with gray. “At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical,” he explained. “Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.”

Although monochrome paintings have existed throughout history, Mr. Johns said he wasn’t trying to be part of any tradition. “I was trying to do something else.”

Throughout this career he has relentlessly pushed his work to new places, from the flags of the 1950s to the maps of the ’60s to the “Seasons” cycle of the ’80s, in which he seems to appear as a vulnerable phantom figure. His explorations, in which the literal and conceptual can overlap in provocative ways, have served as inspirations to younger artists.

“Without question he’s one of the most important painters of his generation,” said Robert Storr, who is the dean of Yale University’s School of Art and has known Mr. Johns since the late 1960s. “He put bits and pieces of painting and conceptual practice together in a way that nobody has done.”

The artist Richard Prince said that he remembers viewing Mr. Johns’s crosshatch paintings for the first time. “I was bowled over,” he said. “He made me look at abstraction in a new way.”

Yet not all artists have been so adoring. His Abstract Expressionist predecessor Mark Rothko impatiently dismissed Mr. Johns’s targets and flags, saying, “We worked for years to get rid of all that.” In decades since, critics have often been eager to puncture Mr. Johns’s legend, deriding him as “self-mythologizing” or “undernourished and overthought.”

Mr. Johns said he tries not to pay attention to negative commentary. He lives very much in his own universe, working every day and generally juggling several projects at once: paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints. He is a voracious reader (then in the middle of the third volume of John Richardson’s Picasso biography), frequents his local movie theater in Connecticut (and relies on Netflix in St. Martin) and recently attended a performance at Dia:Beacon by the dance company of his friend Merce Cunningham. But keeping to himself has drawbacks. “For the last decade he’s been in a capsule all his own,” Mr. Storr said. “It’s a problem because he seems to have a very remote relationship with young artists.”

None of this seems to have had any effect on his commercial success. In 1980 the Whitney Museum of American Art spent $1 million for “Three Flags,” then the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist. In 1988 his painting “False Start” (1959) brought $17 million at an auction at Sotheby’s. In 2006 the Hollywood mogul David Geffen sold “False Start” to the Chicago hedge-fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin for $80 million.

“False Start” thus holds the title of most expensive painting by a living artist and is a star in the Met’s show. A riot of blues, reds and oranges with stenciled letters spelling out the names of colors (including gray), it plays neatly off the exhibition’s premise — it has a grisaille counterpart in the show, “Jubilee” — and harks back to Mr. Johns’s storied collaboration with Mr. Rauschenberg in the 1950s.

While Mr. Rauschenberg was glorying in incorporating objects like taxidermied animals into what became known as combines, Mr. Johns was painting maps, targets, numbers and alphabets that, like Mr. Rauschenberg’s inventions, made viewers rethink the nature of art itself. Long viewed as a mere interregnum between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, their collaboration is now sometimes compared to that of Picasso and Braque.

Mr. Johns’s early story is well known. Born in 1930 in Augusta, Ga., and raised in Allendale, S.C., he received his early education in a one-room schoolhouse in rural South Carolina, where he was sent to live with an aunt who did the teaching.

He said he had wanted to be an artist for as long as he can remember. “I don’t know why,” he said. “The only logical thing I can think of is that I knew there were such things as artists, and I knew there were none where I lived. So I knew that to be an artist you had to be somewhere else. And I very much wanted to be somewhere else.”

He studied briefly at the University of South Carolina before coming in the late 1940s to New York, where he supported himself working odd jobs. It was there that he met the composer John Cage, Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Rauschenberg in turn introduced Mr. Johns to the dealer Leo Castelli, who gave him his first one-man show in 1958.

About 60 years after he first arrived in New York, Mr. Johns is still very much the Southern gentleman. He retains his accent and his soft-spokenness. Yet his quiet demeanor and his six-foot frame make him intimidating at first; he chooses his words with such care that a questioner is tempted to do likewise.

Each year, as soon as the temperature begins to plummet in Connecticut, he decamps to his house here, joining his two resident dogs, Pepper and Pumpkin — both were found abandoned on the island — to work, garden, read, cook and do crossword puzzles.

He first began visiting St. Martin in the late 1960s and bought the property here in 1972. The architect Philip Johnson is the principal designer of his home, a long, white, rectangular structure divided into three distinct sections. There is a 40-foot living room, dining area and kitchen; a bedroom; and his studio. Sliding glass doors span the entire length of both sides of the building. On one side they open onto a terrace overlooking the lagoon and Marigot Bay; on the other are views of the swimming pool and pavilion.

This has been an unusual winter for Mr. Johns. For one thing, he has been preoccupied with the “Gray” show and with a large exhibition of drawings that opened on Friday at the Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea. “These shows bring you into a different frame of mind because you’re having to think a lot about things that you have already done rather than about what you’re doing,” he said.

Still, he said, “I’m working in my mind.” A new sculpture, which he steadfastly avoided describing, will be awaiting his attention when he returns to Connecticut.

It was crucial to Mr. Johns that “Gray” include not just his paintings but also prints, drawings and sculptures. He often executes drawings after he finishes a canvas, rather than before. “To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished,” he said. “It’s done out of a different kind of energy. I love drawings, so I’ve always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own.”

Yet the idea for the “Gray” show originated when Mr. Johns departed from that norm, producing a predominantly gray untitled drawing in 2001 that paved the way for a large 2002 painting.

After the Art Institute purchased the work on paper, said Douglas Druick, chairman of its medieval through modern European painting and sculpture department, “we loved the drawing so much that we were intrigued to know how the painting would turn out.”

So he and James Wood, then the museum’s director, visited St. Martin to view the painting, “Near the Lagoon,” which measures nearly 10 by 7 feet and, like the drawing, was inspired by Manet’s “Execution of Maximilian” from 1867-68. The Art Institute ended up buying the painting.

“It was a eureka moment,” Mr. Druick said. “It was then we thought by tracing an idea like gray, we could look at his entire career afresh.”

For Nan Rosenthal, one of the curators of the Met show, it was crucial that the museum take an in-depth look at Mr. Johns’s career. (The Met acquired its first Johns painting, “White Flag” from 1955, only a decade ago.) “A show as luscious and challenging as Jasper’s gray works definitely belongs here,” Ms. Rosenthal said.

Some of the drawings at Matthew Marks — all of which date from the past 10 years — correspond to paintings in the Met’s show. Among them is “Within,” a 2007 drawing with a predominantly gray background and Mr. Johns’s signature crosshatched imagery, over which he has painted a flagstonelike motif. It was inspired by a painting he started in 1983 and did not finish until 2005.

Unlike so many contemporary artists producing in today’s overheated art market, Mr. Johns relies neither on dozens of assistants nor a computer to make his creations. He executes his work by hand. “It’s a different art world from the one I grew up in,” he said, relaxing in his living room in a pair of khaki shorts, a light blue shirt and sandals. “Artists today know more. They are aware of the market more than they once were. There seems to be something in the air that art is commerce itself.

“I haven’t really been a part of it, although I’m sure in some way I am. It just doesn’t interest me.”

Asked what influence he feels he may have had on those young artists, Mr. Johns paused. “To me,” he said, “self-description is a calamity.”

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