An itinerant childhood between relatives often left him feeling like a guest in his own home. The son of an alcoholic farmer in South Carolina, Johns was three when his parents divorced and he was sent to live with his grandfather. Rauschenberg and Johns’s romantic involvement was said to have ended in 1961, and one can see the influence of this event in the work of the latter as he turned to a darker palette of grays and black in works like Map and In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O’Hara, both painted in the early sixties. It was on a visit to Rauschenberg’s studio in 1958 to discuss an upcoming show that Leo Castelli first saw Johns’s work and decided to show him instead. Installation view of ‘Jasper Johns: Something Resembling the Truth.’ Jordan Riefe The two met in 1954 and worked together designing window displays for Tiffany’s during the day, while evenings and weekends were spent in their paint-smeared apartments devising a palette and visual language that would redirect twentieth century art. This image was based on a map given him by his collaborative parter and lover Robert Rauschenberg. There’s a Saverin coffee can holding paintbrushes, a sculpture of a flashlight and light bulb, a broom and teacup attached to a canvas and three versions of a map of the United States. If Johns paints the word “red” on yellow, as he does in 1959’s False Start, does that make it red or yellow? It’s a conundrum that dates at least to Marcel Duchamp and his use of found objects and “readymades,” or even to Rene Magritte, whose The Treachery of Images has the phrase “this is not a pipe” written under what isn’t a pipe but an image of a pipe.Ĭommon objects provided a way out of Abstract Expressionism, and “Something Resembling the Truth” is full of them. Text and numbers played a major role, influencing subsequent artists like Ruscha, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein and others. Johns focused on what he famously called “things the mind already knows.” That wasn’t just a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, but aimed to provoke viewers to question fixed perceptions. There was very little room to move within that because so many people had attacked it and solved it.” He told an audience at the opening of the exhibition that his first glimpse of Johns’s Flag blew his hair back. “I think these artists felt there was no room within that realm -Abstract Expressionism and abstract painting. “The pop art thing…I felt like the artists who were associated with that were artists that were frustrated by the tone of art being created at that time, which was Abstract Expressionism,” Ed Ruscha told Observer. Identified as Neo-Dada at the time, works of this period were later relabeled Proto-Pop as the sixties ushered in a new kind of art. They weren’t chicken shit.” Installation view of ‘Jasper Johns: Something Resembling the Truth.’ Jordan Riefe “It’s just that it was so blatantly in your face. I didn’t see anything that looked like art in Venice after that,” he recalled to Observer. “I saw Jasper Johns’ Flag and that was it. “MoMA was worried that the flag would be seen as a complicated gesture inside of America at that time, that people would be confused as to what Johns was doing as either a patriotic act or its opposite,” the show’s co-curator Ed Schad told Observer about the museum’s attempt to obtain the work by asking architect, Philip Johnson (long associated with MoMA), to purchase it with the understanding it would eventually enter their collection.Īrtist Billy Al Bengston, one of L.A.’s original Ferus Gallery “Cool School” practitioners that included Ed Ruscha, John Altoon, Larry Bell and others, first saw Johns’s work at the Venice Biennale in 1958. It was rumored the museum wanted to purchase Flag but were concerned about its political overtones. In an auspicious debut, Johns sold three paintings (two targets and a numeral), to Alfred Barr, founding director of MoMA. The art world was nearly a decade deep in Abstract Expressionism when this 3.5-by-5-foot encaustic replica of the Stars and Stripes turned up at the Leo Castelli Gallery. A collaboration with London’s Royal Academy, the sprawling show features 120 paintings, sculptures and drawings marking the largest exhibit of Johns’s work ever shown in California and his first museum survey here since 1965.ĭefined by motifs that occur throughout his body of work, including targets and numbers, Johns’s career began with Flag, which sparked a revolution when it appeared in 1958. is getting a teaser with “Jasper Johns: Something Resembling the Truth” at the Broad, open through May 13. The upcoming landmark Jasper Johns retrospective at the Whitney isn’t due until 2020, but L.A.
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