Jasper Johns. Catherine Craft
early responses to Johns’s work. Its ambiguous and ambivalent qualities set critics to ruminating on their own bemusement, by turns frustrating and pleasurable. Some turned to a curious term, “Neo-Dada,” to describe the work of Johns, Rauschenberg and a few others. Dada had been an international art movement that erupted in protest of World War I some forty years earlier. Its members attacked established ideas about art and used unconventional materials and techniques to create work that harshly criticised the societies that produced the bloodshed and destruction of the war. Johns had never heard of the Dada movement and was dismayed to find his art labeled with such a term. In fact, rather than being a reference to a historical relationship, the term “Neo-Dada” is perhaps better understood as an indication of just how great a shock Johns’s art was when it at last came to the attention of the art world. Johns and Rauschenberg were soon to become the reluctant standard bearers of the long-awaited reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Their intensely private exchange would now take on a more complex, and more public, dimension.
Alley Oop, 1958. Oil and collage on cardboard, 58.4 × 45.7 cm. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. S. I. Newhouse. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
The Changing Focus of the Eye
At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.[40]
I have begun to want an object to be free from the way I see it.[41]
False Start, 1959. Oil on canvas, 170.8 × 137.2 cm. Collection of Kenneth and Anne Griffin. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
The decade following his debut at the Leo Castelli Gallery was probably the most prolific, stimulating and active of Johns’s career. The gradual accrual of a body of work began to prompt him to examine his motivations and intentions more closely, as he recognised that certain assumptions and habits had informed even the carefully conceived works with which he had begun his life as an artist. This realisation prompted an investigation that would extend through most of the 1960s, with Johns questioning the relation between his intentions, the processes he chose to realise them, and the art that resulted.
Johns would also continue to explore the relationship between the acts of making and looking at art. In 1961, his relationship with Rauschenberg – and the intimate connections between artist and viewer it had nurtured – would end. Johns continued his friendships with Cage, Cunningham, and artists such as Jim Dine, but other, more public sorts of relationships would also play a role in his evolving thoughts about art. During this period, Johns’s work attracted considerable attention not only from friends and other artists, but also from critics and scholars. The emergence of Pop Art further increased his visibility; although Johns was not really a Pop artist, his use of commonplace images and objects in his art inspired Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and others. In 1963, Leo Steinberg published the first monograph on the artist, and in 1964, New York’s Jewish Museum mounted a retrospective exhibition with a catalogue, an especially noteworthy achievement for an artist still under thirty-five years of age. In fact, few other artists have seen their work subjected so quickly to intensive analysis and investigation as Johns, and his interrogation of himself during this period would thus also be accompanied by questions regarding the relationship between artists and viewers, and how the meaning of an artwork can change over time, depending upon who is looking at it.
In the months following his first exhibition, Johns seems to have been carried along on the sheer momentum not only of its success but of the flow of his creative process as well. Professionally, there were new milestones. In the summer of 1958 Johns was included in the XXIX Venice Biennale, his first exhibition in Europe, and toward the end of the year he won a prize in the prestigious Carnegie Annual in Pittsburgh. By then, he and Rauschenberg were selling enough work to enable them to retire Matson Jones.
Johns also tried new materials, techniques and processes at this time, making his first major oil painting, a large Target, and also a small oil painting called Alley Oop. The little canvas was a nod to Rauschenberg, who had often included comic strips in his red paintings and combines, but it was also a bold attempt to introduce a livelier array of colours into his work. Additionally, Johns took up sculpture in 1958, taking as his subjects such everyday objects as light bulbs and flashlights and working in a new material called Sculp-metal, a blend of vinyl resin and aluminum powder. Its malleable consistency yielded sculptures (Illustration 1, 2, 3) with a silken grey glow that was a fitting counterpart to Johns’s predilection for grey in his paintings.
Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 78.4 × 114.3 × 12.7 cm. 50th Anniversary Gift of the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, an anonymous donor and purchase, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Coat Hanger, 1958. Conté crayon on paper, 61.9 × 54.9 cm. Private collection. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
In 1959, Johns made changes in his work that seemed dramatic to most observers. Most noticeably, he changed the way he applied paint. Viewers who had been entranced by the quietly reticent surfaces of Flag, Canvas and White Numbers were startled by the aggressively bright colours and loosely brushed marks of paint in such new paintings as False Start, Highway and Out the Window, not to mention the evocative titles he began giving such works. Yet again, Johns confounded expectations: while superficially resembling the gestural style of Abstract Expressionism, his flickering clusters of brushstrokes were distributed more or less evenly, activating the painting’s surface as an unsettled field for visual experience rather than serving the self-expressive purposes usually associated with such a manner. As he explained in a statement made for the Museum of Modern Art’s important 1959 survey of young artists, Sixteen Americans: “At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.”[42]
If Johns’s lively new paintings were simply embodiments or analogues of this perception of the world, they could be understood as essentially representational, evocative of an experience if not of a recognisable object. However, other elements in these works make it difficult to understand them in such a simple way. In False Start and its grisaille counterpart Jubilee, the stencilled names of colours dot the surface of the painting as erratically as the bursts of brushwork that surround, underlie and occasionally obscure them. The words are positioned at various angles, but more importantly, they are patently “wrong” – that is, the word “green” is shown in blue, “red” in orange, and so on. These apparent contradictions immediately raise a number of philosophical questions in which language is implicated as unstable and ambiguous: How do we know what we know? How do we acquire knowledge and accept it as such? When we say “red,” how do we know that someone else will understand what we mean? Johns’s intense curiosity about such issues during this period would be fed by his interest in the writings of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was concerned with language and meaning and the relation of both to visual information.
Drawing with Two Balls, 1957. Graphite pencil on paper, 25.4 × 22.4 cm. Collection of Mrs. Lester Trimble. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Johns described the works of this period as speaking an “unsettled language,” and indeed their evolution is difficult to trace in a straightforward sense, especially since Johns’s life itself was somewhat unsettled for most of the 1960s.[43] In 1963, he moved his New York living space and studio from downtown to the Upper West Side, and then in 1967 lived at the Chelsea Hotel and worked in a friend’s studio while a building he bought on Houston Street was being renovated. He visited Japan in 1964 and 1966, staying long enough to make