Johns, Jasper

Johns, Jasper (b Augusta, Ga., 15 May 1930). American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. His career has been closely associated with that of Robert Rauschenberg, and they are considered the leading figures in the move away from Abstract Expressionism to the types of Pop art and Minimal art that succeeded it. They met in 1954 and were close friends until 1962, when they broke up with some bitterness (for a time they were lovers, sharing a triangular relationship with a woman). Soon after meeting they formed a partnership to design window displays for upmarket stores, the money they earned allowing them to pursue their artistic experiments. Johns had his first one-man show at Leo Castelli's gallery in New York in 1958. This was an enormous success, and since then he has become one of the most famous (and wealthy) living artists. Much of his work has been done in the form of series of paintings presenting commonplace two-dimensional objects—for example Flags, Targets, and Numbers—and his sculptures have most characteristically been of equally banal subjects such as beer cans or brushes in a coffee tin. Such works—at one and the same time laboriously realistic and patently artificial—are seen by his admirers as brilliant explorations of the relationship between art and reality; to others, they are as uninteresting as the objects depicted. Much of his later work has been in the form of prints.