jasper johns paintings

In 1964, architect Philip Johnson, a friend, commissioned Johns to make a piece for what is now the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. [25] After presiding over the theatre’s lobby for 35 years, Numbers (1964), an enormous 9-foot-by-7-foot grid of numerals, was supposed to be sold by the center for a reported $15 million. Art historians consider Numbers a historically important work in part because it is the largest of the artist’s numbers motifs and the only one where each unit is on a separate stretcher, fashioned from a material called Sculpmetal, which was chosen by the artist for its durability. [26] Responding to widespread criticism, the board of Lincoln Center had to drop its selling plans. [27]
Johns currently lives in Sharon, Connecticut, and on the island of Saint Martin. [12] Until 2012, he lived in a rustic 1930s farmhouse with a glass-walled studio in Stony Point, New York. He first began visiting Saint Martin in the late 1960s and bought the property there in 1972. The architect Philip Johnson is the principal designer of his Saint Martin home, a long, white, rectangular structure divided into three distinct sections. [13]

Photograph courtesy of James Klosty
Along with flags, targets are another of Johns’s striking motifs from his early career. Associated with repetition – reciting the national anthem, practicing firing skills – these commonplace items were ingrained in mid-century American life. Johns used them as part of his wider exploration of “things that are seen and looked at, not examined”. He was one of the first artists to depict everyday objects and symbols in the mid-1950s, pursuing “things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality”, as he said in 1965. In 2007 the New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote of Johns’s early works: “simply by existing they closed the door on one kind of art, Abstract Expressionism, and opened a door on many, many others”. Elevating mundane objects to the status of high art was a blow to the mystique of canvases splattered with the abstract emotions of their creators.

Johns originally designed this big lithograph as a poster for the Whitney Museum’s 1997 retrospective exhibition of his work. The motif of the Savarin coffee can appeared in several of Johns’ earlier works, both as a life-size, painted bronze sculpture and as a found object added to a painting. The Savarin image became a signifier for Johns and his oeuvre, which made it an ideal subject for this print. The background of the lithograph portrays brightly colored crosshatched lines, a style which he quoted from one of his most recent paintings. By visually placing the Savarin can directly in front of one of his current paintings, Johns succinctly referenced his entire career through the dialogue between the two items within the print, apropos for the self-promotion related to a career retrospective. Johns later revisited this same lithograph in a series of single edition mono-prints, in which he painted over the original print, adding a renewed sense of the artist’s presence and extending the reference to his oeuvre into the 1980s.
Description: A “catenary” is the curve formed by a rope or chain hanging freely from two fixed points, and is the theme that governs Johns’ recent Bridge series of prints, drawings, and paintings (1997). In this particular work, the sensuousness of paint dominates the canvas. Johns applied the monochromatic gray paint in long, loose brushstrokes over a multicolored underpainting, which reveals itself in the gaps between the strokes. He extended the paint beyond the canvas onto the wooden slats on either side of the painting, leaning towards the viewer and integrating the found objects into the painted field. On the left side, Johns attached the pine slat with a hinge at the bottom so it projects out into the viewer’s space. Similarly, on the right side, he attached two slats, connected to each other and the canvas with hinges. He secured both sides with a hook and eye, so that they do not fall against the wall, but dangle in the space in front of the painting, evoking the wood and ribbon tumbling block folk toy of the subtitle.

Gray Numbers went for $7,700,000 with buyer’s premium at Sotheby’s New York in 2009. Click here to visit the artwork’s page!
Two years after being discharged from the US Army, Jasper Johns created his first Flag in 1954. He was 24 at the time. It is now known that the series of paintings and other works inspired by the red, blue and white came from a dream the artist had, and that same year, his artwork was all over the news. Two Flags was made in 1974, with the right example being oil on canvas and left encaustic on canvas. The two vertically positioned flags were first sold at Sotheby’s in 1989, reaching a whopping $11 million, at the height of the auction market. In 1999, the artwork went to the hands of one Larry Gagosian, who was allegedly buying on behalf of Leonard Reggio, chairman of the Dia Center for the Arts.

Jasper Johns’s ongoing stylistic and technical experimentation place him at the forefront of American art. His richly textured paintings of maps, flags, numbers, and targets laid the groundwork for Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art. In New York in the 1950s, Johns was part of a community of artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, seeking an alternative to the emotional nature of Abstract Expressionism. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp, Johns’s early work paired the concerns of craft with familiar concrete imagery. His interest in process also led to innovations in lithography, screen-printing, etching and woodblock, using such materials as pencil, pen, brush, crayon, wax, and plaster to constantly challenge the technical possibilities of printmaking.
Jasper Johns’s ongoing stylistic and technical experimentation place him at the forefront of American art. His richly textured paintings of maps, flags, numbers, and targets laid the groundwork for Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art. In New York in the 1950s, Johns was part of a community of artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, seeking an alternative to the emotional nature of Abstract Expressionism. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp, Johns’s early work paired the concerns of craft with familiar concrete imagery. His interest in process also led to innovations in lithography, screen-printing, etching and woodblock, using such materials as pencil, pen, brush, crayon, wax, and plaster to constantly challenge the technical possibilities of printmaking.

References:

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/jasper-johns-10-works-to-know
http://m.theartstory.org/artist/johns-jasper/artworks/
http://www.widewalls.ch/jasper-johns-artwork/
http://www.artsy.net/artist/jasper-johns
http://www.moma.org/collection/works/78393