Johns, Jasper

Johns, Jasper (1930– ). American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. His career has been closely associated with that of Robert Rauschenberg, and they are considered to have been largely responsible for the move away from Abstract Expressionism to Pop art and Minimal art that characterized American art in the late 1950s. Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, and studied at the University of Southern Carolina before dropping out and moving to New York in 1949. After two terms at a commercial art college, he worked at various jobs and did military service before meeting Rauschenberg in 1954. They 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. In 1955, inspired by a dream, Johns painted a picture of an American flag—a faithful flat copy of the real thing, except that the brushwork was heavily textured: ‘One night I dreamt I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I went out and bought the materials to begin it.’ It was the first of many, and much of his subsequent work has been done in the form of series of paintings representing such commonplace two-dimensional objects—for example Targets and Numbers. 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. Johns has said that he is not concerned with their symbolism, but simply wants to look at familiar objects with fresh vision.

In 1958 Johns had his first one-man show—at Leo Castelli's gallery in New York—and it was a huge success; the Museum of Modern Art bought four works and only two remained unsold. After this he rapidly became one of the most famous (and most wealthy) of living artists. As early as 1961 he bought a house on Edisto Island, off the coast of South Carolina, to escape some of the pressures of celebrity (it was destroyed by fire in 1968). In the 1970s many of his paintings were characterized by a cross-hatching motif, and in the 1980s he often introduced autobiographical elements, as for example in Racing Thoughts (Whitney Museum, New York, 1983), a collage that depicts various elements from his bathroom and other personal references. Much of his later work has been in the form of his prints (he took up lithography in 1960 with Universal Limited Art Editions—see PRINT RENAISSANCE). His other work has included designs for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, of which he was appointed artistic adviser in 1967.