Jasper Johns

FROM THE BOOK

No living American artist has both fascinated and frustrated his public longer or more deeply than Jasper Johns. The perplexity he induces in his own country has resulted in his becoming something of a cult figure. That status is paradoxical, insofar as cults tend to be small and insular while the familiarity of Johns’s signature images and tropes has never ceased to grow in the six decades since his debut at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. From that point until Castelli’s death in 1999, the widening reach and singular tenacity of Johns’s hold on the imagination of the American public as well as his institutional and art-world pre-eminence were owed in no small degree to his mentor’s promotional genius.

To date, Johns’s stature abroad hasn’t consistently matched his stature at home. This has been so particularly since the turn
of the second millennium, and this show will be the first major comprehensive survey of his work in Europe since 1997 and the first in the UK since 1978. Reasons for this discrepancy are several. They include the ambivalent and hence easily misunderstood ‘nationalism’ of his iconography – American flags and maps of the 48 contiguous states first and foremost – and, in the eyes of critics such as Pierre Restany, who in the late 1950s launched Nouveau Réalisme in competition with New York School Neo-Dada and
Pop, an identifiably American nostalgia. Nevertheless, Johns was included in the 1958 ‘XXIX Venice Biennale’ – his first appearance in Europe – and during his early years exhibited at the Galerie Rive Droite in Paris and at the Paris gallery of Castelli’s first wife and business partner, Ileana Sonnabend. From then on he was well collected by both individuals and museums abroad.

A case in point is the Museum Ludwig in Cologne,
which houses the trove of Pop Art assembled by the German ‘Pralinemeister’ and patron Peter Ludwig. It includes Johns’s
”Flag on Orange Field” (1957), “Edingsville” (1965), “Map (Based on Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Air Ocean World)” (1967–71) and “Untitled” (1972), though the fact that Johns’s works are rhetorically associated with Pop and clumped together in galleries with
those of Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann and others better suited to the Pop label raises profound problems of classification and interpretation. The Kunstmuseum Basel also acquired considerable holdings of Johns’s œuvre, notably prints, thanks largely to Christian Geelhaar, one of whose early exhibitions as curator in 1979 was devoted to the artist’s working proofs.

Johns’s interest in the Renaissance master Matthias Grünewald’s “Isenheim Altarpiece,” located in the French city of Colmar just across the border from Basel, dates to his project with Geelhaar. So do the tracery inscriptions in his own paintings and drawings of figures from the altarpiece, for example “Perilous Night” (1981), whose title cross-references that of composer John Cage’s most anguished and expressionistic score with images of excruciating death and miraculous transfiguration from Grünewald’s polyptych. Inflected also by the death of thousands of gay men during the onset of the AIDS plague are Johns’s three “Tantric Details” (1980–81), a meditation on Eros and Thanatos which for all its explicit iconography – a skull and an erect but truncated phallus and scrotum – remains profoundly enigmatic.

Meanwhile in Japan, where Johns sojourned from April
to July in 1964, the taste for Johns’s work developed among artists he met, and, having been whetted, spread to collectors and institutions. During his time there he produced “Watchman,” “Souvenir” and “Souvenir 2” plus drawings such as “Untitled (Cut, Tear, Scrape, Erase)” and “No” – though none of these remains in Japan.

Johns’s complex renown in his native country derives in appreciable measure from the mystique that has grown around the man himself. That, in turn, can be ascribed to the enigmatic persona he has always presented to many of his intimates and has cultivated in wider circles. His dry, daunting wit accounts for much of this effect, as do other tactics for remaining aloof and preserving confidentiality. Responses to and reactions against the artist’s diffidence vary widely, from total infatuation among those enthralled by impenetrable mysteries, to impatience and hostility among those who suppose that artists owe it to their audience
to ‘come clean’ and ‘tell all.’ The craving for ineffable truth and the worship of the oracles of such truth have been constants within Romanticism, Symbolism and other metaphysical schools of thought and aesthetics. Such cravings will never be satisfied by Johns’s work, nor has the artist ever taken it upon himself to gratify them. Quite the contrary: from the outset he has been at pains to thwart or eschew them, the title and stated premise of this exhibition being, to that extent, the perfect rhetorical foil for the artist’s habitual elusiveness and insatiable doubt.

Neither will he satisfy the expectation that artists demonstrate an exemplary capacity for introspection and self-expression, a belief belonging generally to the past but which
was especially strong in the mid-twentieth century among the American Abstract Expressionists who dominated New York when Johns first appeared on the scene in 1948. Postwar celebrity culture only exacerbated matters by convincing people that artists whose work is well known should themselves be well known. Hollywood-style fame was suddenly conferred on previously obscure and, as such, relatively protected practitioners of other art forms. Famous for well over half a century, Johns has shown prudent resistance to the notoriety for which Warhol clamored – although Warhol too hid behind a public persona.

Arguably, though, it is not so much that Johns wishes to
be left alone, Greta Garbo-style, but simply that he is alone. For despite close and longstanding friendships, he may be among
the most solitary, and often saturnine, artists alive. Wounded
in love both as a child by the break-up of his immediate family
and during his adult life, in particular by his rupture with Robert Rauschenberg in the early 1960s, he has sublimated his suffering and structured his existence around what he does by himself:
his art. Even with others in a busy print studio, he works alone, although appreciation of the quiet fellowship of assistants and master printers may be among his reasons for devoting so much of his time to the graphic media he has mastered and innovated.

Still, Johns manages to be elegantly, entertainingly social when the occasion arises as well as remarkably solicitous of those he trusts, which may be why betrayal by members of his inner circle – for example the former studio assistant who stole drawings from him in recent years, and the rebellion of a street kid he cared for during the 1970s – has caused such hurt. That said, to whatever extent emotional traumas may have prompted or may imbue certain works, these do not provide the ‘missing links’ to understanding the artist’s motivations, much less his achievement overall.