(Only once, for a 1969 poster for the Moratorium Committee to End the War in Vietnam, did Johns produce a flag with a clear partisan aim. Johns’s ambivalent American paintings, equipoised between image and object, invention and preexistence, have long confounded art historians and critics-unsure of whether they stand for the United States and what sort of political orientation Johns imagined for them. I saw “Something Resembling Truth” in London this past October, and, especially abroad, the flags were hard to take. An even more substantial showcase is in the works: the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present an unprecedented two-part retrospective of Johns’s entire career in 2020. One of the flag paintings on view, a fifty-starred beauty from 1967, belongs to Eli and Edythe Broad the show is now on view, in an expanded form, at their private museum in Los Angeles. A multi-volume catalogue raisonné of his drawings is in the works.) Six of the flags were also on view this fall at the Royal Academy in London, where Bernstein and the curator Edith Devaney organized “Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth,’” a stately recapitulation of sixty years of Johns’s sphinxlike signs and symbols. (Johns’s complex, often extraordinary prints are omitted a catalogue raisonné of those was published in 1994, and a new one of Johns’s monotypes was published last year. The painted flags are all accounted for in the Johns catalogue raisonné, which comprises three volumes of documentation of his paintings and sculptures a one-volume bibliography and a monograph by the art historian Roberta Bernstein, also available as a single book under the title Jasper Johns: Redo an Eye. There were double flags and triple flags, flags with forty-eight stars and flags with fifty, flags made from encaustic and oil paint and pastel and in one case Sculp-Metal, a medium for hobbyists that, as the ads went, “models like clay-hardens into metal!” One flag, drawn in ashy graphite, has sixty-four stars: an error Johns didn’t catch until he’d finished the drawing, and decided not to correct. Gray Flag, from 1957, is even closer to a monochrome. White Flag, painted in the summer of 1955 and now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is larger, ten feet by six and a half, and the flag pattern remains perceptible beneath its whited-out surface thanks to the collaged papers and a subtle use of charcoal. Johns would go on to paint or draw more than three dozen flags. The stars, their points somewhat raggedy, cohered through the collaging of wax-dipped fragments, white or blue, along carefully penciled outlines. Melting the wax on his hot plate, stirring in oil paint and varnish, he produced a fast-drying encaustic that would yield a textured surface and would embalm collaged clippings from The New York Times and New York Daily News, a rag found on the street, and even a certificate of American citizenship. He then applied layer after layer of enamel paint, but it took forever to dry, so he picked up a package of beeswax at a store around the corner from his Financial District loft. A canvas of that size would have been too expensive for the young artist, so he took a bedsheet and stretched it across three wooden supports, one for the spangled canton, two for the stripes. The painting is five feet wide and three-and-a-half feet tall. 5 in the enormous new catalogue raisonné of Jasper Johns, a five-volume monument to the most inscrutable figure in modern American art. But the next day he was at work, and by the spring of 1955, he had completed the painting he had seen in his vision.įlag now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, and it is painting no. It’s hard enough to remember a dream the next morning, let alone decades on, and Johns recounted his vision of himself painting a flag with slight variations in the decades that followed: he may or may not have told Robert Rauschenberg about it over breakfast. A year out of the army, asleep in a loft in lower Manhattan, Johns closed his eyes and saw the Stars and Stripes in the dark, not fluttering, not flying over a battlefield, but on an easel-and he was there, too, painting it. For Jasper Johns, the dawn of creation came in the late fall of 1954, and was instigated not by divine revelation but something close to it: a vision in a dream. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Pearl Street, New York, 1954 photograph by Rachel RosenthalĪ good mythology needs a Genesis story. Rachel Rosenthal/Rachel Rosenthal Lifetime Trust
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