Photograph: Jasper Johns/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2017. It is a pity that this retrospective – which presents us with over 60 years of paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints – doesn’t make more of this.įool’s House, 1961–62. His relationships with Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage fed his thinking. Along with commonplace images, beer cans, shoes, brooms and the everyday clutter of his studio crept into his art. Early in his career, ideas seemed to come to him in a flurry. So too with his targets and his painted and drawn words, maps and numbers, his later cross-hatchings and crazy-paving shapes. They are both the thing itself and its depiction. His flags are not paintings of flags, but flags themselves, painted. Both the imagery and the application were a sort of rejoinder to abstract expressionism, though with hindsight Johns’s early art looks less of a break than a stepping aside. There is also something corpse-like about the wax that may have appealed to him. The medium gave Johns’s work a particular timbre and voice, full of immediacy and also reserve, a feeling of deliberateness and of ideas embalmed in the surface. There is something terse about these layered, waxy marks, the drips that solidify immediately rather than run down and disturb the layers below. The hot wax dries as soon as it hits the canvas. Impatient with the slow-drying enamel he was painting with, he turned to encaustic, mixing the colour with melted wax as a way of completing the painting quickly. T he idea of painting the American flag came to Jasper Johns in a dream, during the autumn of 1954.
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