“Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Pari Dukovic for New York Magazine One night in 1986, while standing at the top ramp of a Guggenheim Museum opening as an art-world wannabe, peering down at this social universe that seemed so distant and magical to me, I found myself standing next to an older man. He seemed to be doing the same thing. Both of us were in our own worlds. After a while, he turned at me and said, “Hello, Jerry.” I was surprised.
Johns remarked that Flag took “a long time” to paint. He has also called it “a very rotten painting — physically.” What he meant is that the different paints were applied to an unstable surface. Since his mind was helpless to slow down his thinking and seeing to the speed of enamel, he had to speed up the paint. Flag is a triptych of panels and isn’t the proportions of a “real” flag. The work’s surface has been built, collaged from newspapers, headlines, bits of print, ads, and the like.
In the studio, they saw different flags, targets, numbers, letters, and more. Sonnabend bought Figure I, a numbers painting, on the spot. Castelli told the best chronicler of the period, Calvin Tomkins, that the first time he saw Green Target, “I was thunderstruck … I saw evidence of the most incredible genius.” He said it was like wanting to “get married.” Castelli offered Johns a show at his new 4 East 77th Street gallery. Rauschenberg seemed excited for Johns.
In the mid-1970s, Johns stopped making art out of “things the mind already knows” and began making a more inward, arcane, convoluted art — “things my mind already knows,” you could say. Tracings of paintings he liked, patterns that caught his eye, prints of his own body and genitals, illustrations of insects, favorite pieces of pottery, and much else.
Painted Bronze, 1960. Photo: © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society , New York. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art The first Johns show I ever saw in the flesh was the 1984 Leo Castelli exhibition, where I witnessed an artist being reborn. Here were crosshatch paintings begun in the 1970s, now seemingly put through an abstract blast furnace that produced compression ruptures and expansion cracks across what looked like broken ice sheets.
I’ve had scores of small dinners with him in other people’s homes. Each time I’m around him, I feel a kind of tidal force. He is much taller, larger than you might imagine. Every time. He is witty, articulate, patient, curious, thinks of things in almost microscopic detail, is generous with information, a great story- and joke teller. He is interested in everything — nature, politics, poetry, ceramics, plants, plays, history, movies, dance, cooking, whatever comes up.
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jerrysaltz 🇺🇸 Inspired by Jasper Johns
jerrysaltz A brilliant artist. If you look, you can see fractals in his art.
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jerrysaltz .jerrysaltz's essay on how Jasper Johns invented contemporary art — and changed Saltz's life — was featured today in One Great Story, our reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly:
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