![]() But is it an image of a thing or the thing itself? Both and neither: A mute presence, yet also an ironic commentary on America’s superpower status by a gay Southerner obliged to deal with the macho pretentiousness around him. Obvious on its face, it is a rendering of Old Glory on a canvas conforming to its shape. ![]() Johns’ breakthrough Flag from 1954 (which came to him in a dream), was a particularly provocative riposte to AbEx. He countered their performative sturm und drang with subjects that obdurately concealed as much as they revealed. ![]() By reviving Marcel Duchamp’s readymade aesthetic through painting (a medium Duchamp himself disparaged), Johns coolly dissected the broad, gestural psychodrama of artists such as Pollock and De Kooning. NYC’s art scene was still dominated by Abstract Expressionism, the movement that had brought American artists to the dance of art-historical relevance. His work became a sensation, eventually pointing the way to the rise of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism in the following decade. Castelli gave Johns his first show in 1958, which nearly sold out. Within five years, he’d risen to art stardom, thanks, in part, to Johns’s lover at the time, Robert Rauschenberg, who introduced him to the legendary gallerist Leo Castelli. Raised in South Carolina, Johns moved to New York City in 1953, when he was twenty-three. From the start, he’s stirred up cloudy enigmas around the simplest of images (flags, targets, numbers, maps) and objects (silverware, beer cans, lightbulbs), and continued to muddy his work’s meaning even as it grew more autobiographical. Halfway through the sixth decade of his career, Johns’s output has been prodigious enough to demand a retrospective hosted by not one, but two institutions: The Whitney and The Philadelphia Museum of Art.Ī titanic figure in art history, Johns’s achievements are all the more remarkable given his preference for turbidity over clarity. Exhibit, sell, buy, create and discover incredible creativity in painting, illustration, design, sculpture, drawing, photography, 3d, fashion and more.At ninety-one, Jasper Johns has been around for so long that it’s easy to forget that he is-well, still around.
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