Johns, Jasper

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JOHNS, Jasper

(b. 15 May 1930 in Augusta, Georgia), painter and sculptor who presented the first viable challenge to the authority of abstract expressionist painting and to formalist criticism in American art after World War II.

Johns was the only child of William Jasper Johns, a farmer who had practiced law, and Jean Riley, and was raised in Allendale, South Carolina, near the Georgia border. His early artistic training came from occasional art classes in high school and from three semesters at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia. In 1948, a year after dropping out of the university, Johns moved to New York City. There he took courses at Parsons School of Design and viewed work by Picasso, Pollock, Cézanne, Munch, and others who would provide inspiration and motifs throughout his career. In 1951 he was drafted and stationed in Sendai, Japan, where he achieved the rank of private first class. Honorably discharged two years later, Johns returned to Manhattan, burned all his existing work, and decided that he was now an artist.

Johns received his first one-person show in January 1958 at the gallery of young Hungarian émigré Leo Castelli. Castelli remained Johns's representative until the dealer's death in 1999. The debut was a critical and financial success. Target with Four Faces (1955) appeared on the cover of Art News, and three paintings sold to the Museum of Modern Art. The show introduced Johns's controlled technique and what would become his signature motifs: flags, numbers, targets, and letters. His work during the early sixties was singled out by critics, including formalist Clement Greenberg and minimalist Donald Judd, for its curious combination of abstract handling and representational content. As critic Robert Rosenblum noted, Johns made "loved, handmade transcriptions of unloved, machine-made images." These quiet and meticulously painted objects posed the first significant challenge to the emotional catharsis and psychological exploration of abstract expressionism. Johns produced self-conscious analyses of the means of picture making that would be elaborated on for the rest of the century.

Johns's challenge to the 1950s New York School was fundamentally one of inversion. He confused abstract means and representational ends and avoided the surrealist influences of the abstract expressionists to address the dadaist projects of Marcel Duchamp. In works like Painted Bronze (Ale Cans, 1960), Johns turned the tables on Duchamp's ready-mades (ordinary objects elevated to the status of art through the artist's declarations). Reintroducing technique to Duchamp's antiaesthetic, Johns presented ready-made subjects, "things the mind already knows," as he described them, crafted through laboriously handmade processes. In works that replicated everything from styles of painting to beer cans and paintbrushes, Johns created art that, like the music and dance of his close colleagues John Cage and Merce Cunningham, did not appear inventive in conventional terms. The search for alternative indications of artistry provides a link from Johns's work to the projects of Pop, minimalism, and Conceptual Art of the 1960s. Even identity-oriented art of the 1970s and 1980s returned to the stylistic analyses carried out by Johns in the 1960s.

Though Johns's work asserted the right to address content, his messages came veiled in their own coded structures. Like the work of many of his peers, from Robert Rauschenberg to Frank Stella, Johns's art proclaimed the importance of content while taking pains to obfuscate its specific meaning. Paintings like In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O'Hara (1961), or Periscope (Hart Crane) (1963), refer through their titles to love poems and, like the flags, suggest serious content without explaining it. The interpretative strategies Johns's work has inspired have included formal examinations of his motifs, attempts at cracking his codes, and queries into the meaning of coding itself. These studies have made Johns relevant to discussions of communicative strategies that rely on coded behavior, of which modern art is but one.

The early sixties were tumultuous for Johns. He saw his career and influence rise, found and visited audiences from New York to Tokyo, moved his studio from cosmopolitan Manhattan to the isolated Edisto Beach, South Carolina, and ended an intense romantic and professional relationship with Rauschenberg. During the latter part of the decade Johns ruminated over his early work, expanding compositions, repositioning elements, and changing media. With the encouragement of Tatyana Grosman at Universal Limited Art Editions, a small publishing company, he become one of the premier artists working in print media in the second half of the century. His editions include the most developed explorations into lithography to date, as well as screen prints, etchings, aquatints, and even lead reliefs. Print technology appeared in his works on canvas as well, further developing his interest in mixing media.

Since the 1960s Johns has become one of the most influential American artists of the century, arguably second only to Jackson Pollock. His methodical combination of expression and reserve in both content and form has been a touchstone for a variety of artists and critics. His strategy of combining intellectual and highly abstract stylistic devices with emotionally loaded objects has been a mainstay in his art, from the target or poetry paintings of the 1960s to fragmentary citations of Picasso, Mathias Grünewald, and the artist's own home and studio in the 1980s and 1990s. Since his debut in the 1960s, when the existence of universal certainties was being disputed, Johns has created a workable model for addressing both form and content in art. An inspiration to those of his own generation sorting out the legacy of abstract expressionism, Johns has been no less important to artists struggling to prioritize analysis and doubt over catharsis and purity.

Biographies of Johns include Leo Steinberg, Jasper Johns (1963); Alan R. Solomon, Jasper Johns (1964); Richard Francis, Jasper Johns (1984); Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns (1994); and Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns (1996). Discussions and illustrations of Johns's work are in Roberta Bernstein, Jasper Johns Paintings and Sculpture 1954-1974 (1985); Nan Rosenthal and Ruth E. Fine, The Drawings of Jasper Johns: 1954–1984 (1990); Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (1994); and Gary Garrels, Jasper Johns: New Paintings and Works on Paper (1999). Jasper Johns: Writings Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, Kirk Varnedoe, ed., (1996) contains the same.