Jasper Johns’s first truly abstract artworks are his “Crosshatch” paintings and prints, which he developed from 1972 to 1983. These compositions feature hatched lines in various colors, though the term “Crosshatch” is a bit of a misnomer—Johns’s lines never cross over one another, but rather fit together like puzzle pieces. Johns found inspiration for this pattern on a passing car. “I only saw it for a second but knew immediately that I was going to use it,” he recalled. “It had all the qualities that interest me—literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning.”
About the Artist:
Born: 1930 - Augusta, Georgia
Known for: Modernist flags, pop symbol painting, sculpture
Painter, sculptor, and printmaker Jasper Johns became one of America's best-known post-Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists. His name is most associated with pictorial images of flags and numbers, Pop-Art subjects that he depicted in Minimalist style with emphasis on linearity, repetition, and symmetry. Johns completed his first flag painting in 1955, alphabet subjects in 1956, sculpture in 1958, and lithographs in 1960.
Unlike Abstract Expressionism, these signature works seem removed from the artist's emotions. They are modernist in that they lack traditional perspective, focusing on inter-relationships of color and shapes, but are realist in that they have recognizable subject matter.
Born in Augusta, Georgia, Johns grew up in South Carolina, with no formal art training but did attend the University of South Carolina for two years. In 1949 he moved to New York City but was drafted into the Army. Returning to New York, he began experimenting with styles, and "Flag", dated 1955, earned him his first major attention. It was revolutionary in that it was simply a geometric design on a large canvas, divorced from emotional or political connotation.
His flag paintings are credited as key in the development of Minimal Art in that the focus of these pieces was their linearity and uniformity with de-emphasis on the unique creative talents of the artist. For Johns, major influences on this Minimalist style were his friendships with dancer Merce Cunningham, composer John Cage, and artist Robert Rauschenberg.
Over the next few years, Johns used the same approach with other images that were traditional symbols. In 1956 to 1957, he added numbers to his paintings; in 1958, he did his first sculpture of mundane objects; and in 1960, he executed his first lithographs.
In 1959, his work became increasingly abstract, influenced by Surrealism and Dadaism, with surfaces complicated by combining bold colors with letters and other symbols, some of them obvious such as maps and others hard to read. He created assemblage, and from 1972, used a cross-hatching method.
In 1997, a major retrospective of 225 of Johns' work was held in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, organized by Kirk Varnedoe. Following this, he began a new series that was much more muted, mysterious, and serene than his earlier work. The exhibition of these paintings debuted on September 15, 1999 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to the Yale University Art Gallery in January 2000 and then to the Dallas Museum of Art.
In the late 1990s, Johns has been working from a restored barn near Sharon, Connecticut and pursues a hobby of raising bees.
Source:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
Born in 1930 at Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns grew up in South Carolina. He was drafted into the army and stationed in Japan. Between 1949 and 1951, he studied at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and from 1952 to 1958, he worked in a bookshop in New York. He also did display work with Robert Rauschenberg for Bonwit Teller and Tiffany.
In 1954 he painted his first flag picture. He had his first one-man exhibition in 1958 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York and was represented at the Venice Biennale during the same year. His picture "Grey Numbers" also won the International Prize at the Pittsburgh Biennale. In 1959 he took part with Rauschenberg in Allan Kaprow's "Happening Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts." He was included in the collective exhibition Sixteen Americans in the same year at the Museum of Modern Art.
In 1960, Johns began working with lithographs. In 1961 he did his first large map picture and traveled to Paris for an exhibition at the Galerie Rive Droite. In 1964 he was given a comprehensive retrospective at the Jewish Museum, New York. The catalog included texts by John Cage and Alan Solomon. He was represented at the Venice Biennale in the same year.
In 1965 he had a retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, organized by Walter Hopps. During the same year he saw a Duchamp exhibition and won a prize at the 6th International Exhibition of Graphic Art, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. In 1966 he had a one-man exhibition of drawings at the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington. In 1967 he rented a loft in Canal Street and painted Harlem Light using a tile motif. He also illustrated Frank O'Hara's book of poems In Memory of My Feelings.
He was Artistic Adviser for the composer John Cage and Merce Cunningham's Dance Company until 1972, collaborating with Robert Morris, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Bruce Naumann. In that year he was represented at the Documenta 4 in Kassel, Germany, designed costumes for Merce Cunningham's "Walkaround Time" and spent seven weeks at the printers Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. In 1973 he met Samuel Beckett in Paris. He moved to Stony Point, N.Y.
He was given a comprehensive retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1977, shown in 1978 at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, Hayward Gallery, London, and Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo. He was represented at the Venice Biennale in 1978. In 1979 the Kunstmuseum Basel put on an exhibition of his graphic work which toured Europe. In 1988 he was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale.
Biography from The Johnson Collection
Arguably the most famous living American artist, Jasper Johns has built an extraordinary career around the most ordinary subject matter, pursuing and presenting iconic imagery based on familiar objects he describes as “things the mind already knows.” Before his staggering ascent, however, Johns’ roots were rather humble. His parents divorced shortly after his birth and, as a result, Johns grew up living with relatives in various towns across his home state of South Carolina. He attended the University of South Carolina from September 1947 until December 1948, where his instructors included Catharine Rembert, Augusta Rembert Wittkowsky Walsh, and Edmund Yaghjian, all of whom encouraged him to go to New York. Heeding their advice, Johns headed north; arriving in the city, he enrolled in standard introductory art classes at the Parsons School of Design and visited the array of museums and galleries before being drafted for military service. He was stationed at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and in Japan.
Upon his release from the Army in 1952, Johns settled in New York, and began to explore combinations of collage, encaustic painting, and other media. To support themselves, he and Robert Rauschenberg formed a partnership and designed storefront windows for major department stores, sometimes incorporating their own work as backdrops. In 1955, at the age of twenty-five, Johns created the image that would bring him international attention: a painting based on the American flag, a revolutionary move during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. He subsequently used the flag—along with other mundane, impersonal subjects such as letters, numbers, targets, and maps—in a variety of formats and materials. Explaining his penchant for reworking the same imagery, Johns asserted his mantra: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.”
Johns’ 1957 affiliation with the Leo Castelli Gallery brought critical and commercial recognition in the form of purchases by the Museum of Modern Art and exhibitions in Houston and Paris. He explored abstraction and also began working with Gemini G. E. L. and ULAE (Universal Limited Art Editions), two collaborative printmaking concerns. Using lithography, and later etching, Johns experimented with repetitive reversed imagery. Throughout this period of growth, he developed new and intriguing subject matter, applied stencil lettering for his signature, date, and title, and often affixed three-dimensional objects like rulers or strings to his paintings.
About the time Jasper Johns turned fifty-five in 1985, he embarked on a fresh body of work that was considerably different from his early imagery of commonplace numbers, targets, and flags. Not only did he begin to reveal things about himself and his childhood in South Carolina, but he also drew inspiration from earlier artists like Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch, Mathias Grünewald, and Hans Holbein. The break between early and late styles, however, is not absolute; several of his overarching themes persist, such as his preoccupation with perception and his use of visual and verbal puns.
With works represented in the world’s most prestigious institutions, Johns’ talents have been celebrated on the international stage including major exhibitions in London, Vienna, and Basel. In this country, the Museum of Modern Art saluted him with a career retrospective in 1996, the National Gallery of Art in 2007 featured work from his first decade, and the next year the Art Institute of Chicago mounted GRAY, an in-depth investigation of Johns’ favorite color.
The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina