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Jasper Johns
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 Jasper
Johns by Michael Crichton
This little book has an
essay at the front by Leo Castelli, the legendary New York art
dealer who in the late 1950s snapped up the young Jasper Johns for
his stable of new artists--nearly all of whom became wildly
successful. Most of the rest of the book is like a snapshot album,
immersing the reader in pictures of Johns, his studio, his
paintings, and historical artifacts. These last include the Art
News magazine cover of 1958 that put Johns on the map.
Speaking of maps, there are reproductions of Johns's famous U.S.
maps, and also of his targets and the late double shadow,
crosshatch paintings. In the back of the book, there is a brief
chronology, plus captions explaining the preceding plates. It's a
surprisingly good idea to place them at the end--nicely
non-intrusive.
Read Castelli's essay to get a sense of the
renowned and perspicacious Leo Castelli, rather than for what it
tells you about Johns. For that, there are hundreds of other
sources. One startlingly thoughtful analysis of Johns's work
appears in James Fenton's book Leonardo's
Nephew. Castelli reveals that MoMA's Tom Hess had "a
friend" buy one of Johns's early American flag paintings for
the museum in order to bypass a conservative acquisitions
committee. Fenton tells us it was the architect Philip Johnson,
and that it then took 15 years for MoMA to wrest it from Johnson's
appreciative grasp. --Peggy Moorman
 Jasper
Johns : Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews by
Jasper Johns, Christel Hollevoet (Editor), Kirk Varnedoe
(Editor)
Published in conjunction with the 1996-97
retrospective exhibition of Jasper Johns's work at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, this book is the very first to place this
prolific artist in the context of his own words and private
writings. This unprecedented collection of notes from Johns's
private sketchbooks, published writings, interviews, and
conversations with critics, friends, and other writers--many never
before published in English--is an indispensable reference work
for anyone interested in learning more about this profound
American artist. Also included are 51 rare black-and-white
photographs of the artist at work.
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October 20, 1996 – January 21, 1997 The life's
work of an artist who has had a profound influence on American art
was featured in this, the first full retrospective of Jasper
Johns's work.
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This site includes links to gallery sites that
host works by Jasper Johns, as well as articles and reviews of
various pieces, exhibitions and retrospectives.
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By Jonathan Katz
Excerpt:
Almost from the very beginning of their
relationship, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were linked
together, usually by people who had little or no idea of what they
really meant to each other. Early critics tagged them both with
the same facile labels--neo-Dada, assemblage, junk art--and viewed
and reviewed them as a pair. They showed together, were discussed
together, even discovered together by their dealer. Still later,
they would be declared Pop, or more subtly, proto-Pop, and
credited with the development of the first American style that led
away from Abstract Expressionism. Artistic movements generally
involve more than two artists: theirs was confined to them alone.
All the more remarkable then that the work of
Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg is so completely distinct;
one could simply never mistake one artist's hand for the other's.
It seems that the fact that Johns and Rauschenberg were involved
together determined to some extent how they were understood. And
yet, paradoxically, while their partnership was widely
acknowledged, few comprehended what it really meant, and fewer
still knew that it transcended simple friendship. John and
Rauschenberg are in the curious position of being understood as a
pair, but not a couple. Yet they were a couple; and the rather
obvious silences, ellipses, and omissions that permeate the usual
accounts of their history make no sense unless arrayed against an
insistent and damaging homophobia that has led both artists to
actually deny the substance of what they had together...
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By Christopher Reed
From Nikos Strangos (ed.), Concepts of Modern Art - From Fauvism to Portmodernism (World of Art),
1994, Thames and Hudson, pp. 271-93.
Excerpt:
Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy
Warhol, David Hockney or Gilbert and George are cited, their
sexual identity is ignored as irrelevant to their artistic
production. While the conventions of modernism (still championed
by many) ruled such concerns 'ideological', and hence outside
the realm of art and aesthetics, parallel expressions of
heterosexual masculinity - like the Futurists' machismo and
'contempt for women', Pollock's aesthetic of 'physical
violence', or Rothko and Newman's determination to be 'human' by
producing 'man-sized' paintings - were perceived as easily
compatible with artistic achievement.
If the biases of earlier writings now seem
obvious, it is because of the feminist and gay movements, which,
beginning around 1970, challenged conventional assumptions about
sexuality and gender. Although these movements did not originate
in the art world, from their inception artists and critics were
involved. Explicitly feminist and gay perspectives began to affect
the arts, therefore, at precisely the same moment as the rise of
postmodernism. Looking at the definition of postmodernism advanced
in the introduction to this essay, it is easy to see how these
artistic and social movements might connect. From the outset,
postmodernism dislodged the wedge that mainstream modernism had
driven between art and life. Frankly engaging in social issues,
postmodernists, like feminist and gay activists, deal with
ideology, the mass media and the dynamics of authority...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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