Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns 1930-, American artist, b. Augusta, Ga. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp in the mid-1950s, Johns attempted to transform common objects into art by placing them in an art context. Along with his close friends Robert Rauschenberg , John Cage , and Merce Cunningham , Johns eschewed the idea of the artist-hero and embraced the experimental, the accidental, and the everyday—aesthetic approaches that became extremely influential in contemporary arts. His flags and target images executed from 1954 to 1959 heralded the pop art movement. Other recurring motifs, which continued into the 1960s, include his beautifully delineated numerals, letters, and maps of the United States. Acclaimed for his painterly touch, Johns based his technique on the informal brushwork and texture of abstract expressionism , sometimes attaching literal elements such as rulers and brooms to the canvas. His bronze castings, such as Beer Cans (1960), are also derived from common objects. His critically acclaimed abstract crosshatch paintings of the 1970s were followed by the allusion-filled, self-referential works of the 1980s and 90s, e.g., the four Seasons (1985-86), which use recurrent motifs as symbols to pull the viewer into engagement with the works. Many of his spare paintings of the early 2000s incorporate real or painted catenaries (curves created by cords hanging from two points), others echo the flagstonelike motifs he used several decades earlier. Throughout his career, Johns has also created drawings and a variety of prints.

Bibliography: See K. Varnedoe, ed., Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook, Notes, Interviews (1996); studies by R. Bernstein (1985), M. Rosenthal (1988), G. Boudaille (1989), F. Orton (1994), J. Yau (1996), and J. Weiss (2007).

Johns, Jasper (1930– ) US painter, sculptor, and printmaker. Johns and Robert Rauschenberg led the movement away from abstract expressionism towards pop art and minimal art. Johns' canvases feature banal, everyday images, such as Three Flags (1958) and Target With Four Faces (1955).

Johns, Jasper (1930– ). American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. His career has been closely associated with that of his friend 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. In the early 1950s he worked as a commercial artist in New York, doing display work for shop windows. He began to emerge on the art scene in 1955 and 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.