Flash Art uses cookies strictly necessary for the proper functioning of the website, for its legitimate interest to enhance your online experience and to enable or facilitate communication by electronic means. To learn more about cookies please see Terms & conditions

Flash Art
Flash Art
Shop
  • Home
    • CURRENT ISSUE
  • Features
    • Conversations
    • Reviews
    • Report
    • On View
    • FLASH FEED
    • Audacious Advice
    • Dance Office
    • Listening In
    • The Uncanny Valley
    • Flashback
    • (In)Visible Hands
    • PARADIGME
  • STUDIOS
    • Dune
    • Flash Art Mono
  • Archive
    • DIGITAL EDITION
    • Shop
    • Subscription
    • INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION
    • Contact
→
Flash Art

337 WINTER 2021-22, Reviews

10 February 2022, 9:00 am CET

Jasper Johns “Mind/Mirror” Whitney Museum of American Art / New York, and Philadelphia Museum of Art by Aaron Bogart

by Aaron Bogart February 10, 2022
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, “Mind/Mirror”. Exhibition view at Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021. Photography by Joseph Hu. Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, “Mind/Mirror”. Exhibition view at Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021. Photography by Joseph Hu. Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, “Mind/Mirror”. Exhibition view at Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021. Photography by Joseph Hu. Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, “Mind/Mirror”. Exhibition view at Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021. Photography by Joseph Hu. Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, “Mind/Mirror”. Exhibition view at Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021. Photography by Joseph Hu. Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, “Mind/Mirror”. Exhibition view at Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021. Photography by Joseph Hu. Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, “Mind/Mirror”. Exhibition view at Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2021. Photography by Joseph Hu. Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Over the course of nearly seven decades, Jasper Johns has produced some of the most iconic art in America and influenced countless artists and movements — notably Pop Art. From his early paintings of flags and targets of the 1950s and ’60s, to his later Usuyuki series from the 1970s and ’80s that makes use of colorful cross-hatching, his has been an art that insinuates itself coolly within both art history and the popular imagination. Now, across two museums — the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York — Johns’s contemporary cachet is being tested through the display of sixty-five years’ worth of work.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55. Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on wood. 3 panels, 104,8 x 154,3 cm. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, Perilous Night, 1982. Encaustic on canvas with objects. 170,8 x 244,2 cm. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, Corpse and Mirror II, 1974-75. Oil and sand on canvas. 4 panels, 146,4 x 191,1 cm. Courtesy of the artist. © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, Flashlight, 1960. Bronze and glass. 121,1 x 19,7 x 10,8 cm. Ed. no. 2/3. Courtesy of the artist. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2014. Unique etching on Arches Cover white paper mounted on Arches Cover white paper support. Six plates, 110,05 × 201,9 cm. Photography by Jerry Thompson. Courtesy of the artist. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1972. Oil, encaustic, and collage on canvas with objects. Four panels, 182,9 × 488,3 cm overall. Courtesy of Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Donation Ludwig, 1976. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, 5 Postcards, 2011. From left to right: encaustic on canvas, 91,4 x 61 cm; oil on canvas, 91,4 x 68,6 cm; oil on canvas, 91,4 x 64,6 cm; oil and graphite on canvas, 91,4 x 68,6; and encaustic on canvas, 91,4 x 61 cm. Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art; promised gift of Keith L. and Katherine Sachs. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Cumulatively, the shows are composed of more than 550 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, as well as numerous photographs and personal objects—like Johns’s copy of Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box (at the Whitney). Together, the exhibitions offer viewers an unprecedented opportunity to discover the depths of one artist’s oeuvre —not an easy task given the number of works in these shows — if they make it to both museums. The works have been placed in ten different thematic sections by the curators, Scott Rothkopf (in New York) and Carlos Basualdo (in Philadelphia), with sub-themes at each museum. “Flags and Maps,” for example, falls under the “First Motifs” section toward the beginning of the Whitney’s exhibition, and contains some of Johns’s most well-known, iconic works: Three Flags (1958), an encaustic on canvas work of three American flags, each on top of the other; Flagon Orange Field (1957), an encaustic on canvas painting of an American flag set against an orange backdrop; both flank Map (1961), a large (roughly two by three meter) oil painting of a map of the United States with the names of the states, like “Georgia,” where Johns was born in 1930, stenciled in the relevant location on the map. Done in hues of orange, blue, and red, the composition looks like an abstract painting from a distance, gaining more precision the closer you get, only to have the map’s accuracy frustrated by the vigorous, inexact application of paint. Johns here, and in many other works, mirrors a visual approach to everyday objects like maps and workaday symbols like numbers: they cross our visual field, but we don’t focus on them long enough to make out their details — when’s the last time you noticed the font of a numeral? In Philadelphia’s “First Motifs” section, subtitled “Numbers,” the focus is on another recurring subject in Johns’s work. This section of the show in Philadelphia is more intimate than its related room at the Whitney, with smaller works on paper, including Figure2 from 1963, a graphite wash and charcoal work. Here, the numeral 2, outlined in dark charcoal, blends into the grayish graphite wash, fading in and out of view with a change in perspective.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1965. Charcoal and graphite pencil on paper. 76,2 x 57,2 cm. Courtesy of Kirsten and Alex Klabin. © 2’21 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1998. Intaglio. 56,5 x 37,5 cm. Courtesy of Private Collection. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, Jubilee, 1959. Oil and collage on canvas. 152,4 x 111,8 cm. Courtesy of Private collection. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, Souvenir 2, 1964. Oil, charcoal, and collage on canvas with objects. 73 x 53,3 cm. Courtesy of Barbara and Richard S. Lane. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1960. Oil on canvas. 184,2 x 137,2 cm. Courtesy of Private collection. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, Fool’s House, 1961-62. Oil, Sculp-metal, and charcoal on canvas with objects. 182,9 x 91,4 cm. Courtesy of Private collection. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2018. Encaustic on canvas. 198,1 x 152,4 cm. Courtesy of Glenstone Museum, Potomac. © 2021 Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Across both locations, the themes Rothkopf and Basualdo have focused on interplay with one another, showing Johns’s diverse yet circumscribed pattern use: maps, flags, targets, numbers, and a smattering of Mona Lisa images and brooms about does it. The commonness of these symbols and objects lends itself to a reading of impersonality, of heady distance. I’m not sure this is the right way to read Johns’s early work, however: while it is true that the motifs that recur in Johns’s work are prevalent in our everyday lives and don’t typically have any “personal” or special qualities to them — a map is a map — the manner of making clearly shows the artist’s hand. In Three Flags, for example, the encaustic material encases each brush stroke, fixing it for time like a private archive. It’s not until work from the 1970s and ’80s, however, that we really see what many viewers might consider a personal side to the work. His Spring (1986) and Winter (1986) in each museum’s “Doubles and Reflections” section (within the “Mind/Mirror” area) parallel each other, offering a (presumably) male figure set against a background filled with an exploding star/leaf design, canvas frame shapes, and forms from some of Johns’s other works, like the pattern from his Usuyuki series, as well as other well-known images. The duck-rabbit occurs in Winter, while Rubin’s vase appears in Spring, each playing off the doubling theme of the section as well as Johns’s use of duality (spring/fall, summer/winter) in the titles of the series.

Some of these same symbols can be found in Johns’s work until the mid-2000s, at which point, then in his eighties, he turns to portraying skeletons. Death is a likely theme for anyone in their eighties, and with death comes rebirth, of a sort anyway. If there is a scion of American postwar art who has passed the test of contemporaneity for each epoch they have been a part of, it is Johns, who now, at ninety-one, lives anew with each artistic reiteration.

Share this article
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Mail
More stories by

Aaron Bogart

I WANT YOU TO SHOW ME (BAGLIO ANTICO MIX). A conversation with Adam Farah

8 December 2021, 9:00 am CET

“Wearing your heart on your sleeve shows courage” – or so goes my psychotherapist’s favourite dictum. And though bravery is…

Read More

Transformative Potential of Social Spaces. A Conversation with Akeem Smith

15 December 2021, 9:00 am CET

It’s hard to circumscribe a figure like Akeem Smith: fashion designer, stylist, visual artist. From an early age he absorbed…

Read More

The Age of Love: Chapter IV Love and Poverty and Joy: Pauline Curnier Jardin

21 December 2021, 9:00 am CET

Something that interests me lately is poverty. Poverty not only as a notion, but as an experience. It seems to…

Read More

Korakrit Arunanondchai’s Spiritual-Material Ecosystems

5 January 2022, 9:00 am CET

“Follow my voice,” urges the shaman in the beginning of Korakrit Arunanondchai’s video Songs for dying, 2021 (co-commissioned by the…

Read More

  • Next

    Collecting Time Through Space. A Conversation with Ser Serpas

  • Previous

    New York, October 2021

© 2023 Flash Art

  • Terms & conditions
  • Contact
  • Work with Us