PrideFest America 2001 Archives

PrideFest America Archives

Artistic Alternatives:
The Works of Keith Haring, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschendberg, and Andy Warhol
March 20 to May 13, 2001

Jasper Johns
by Dr. Amy Ingrid Schlegel, Curator, Philadelphia Art Alliance

Targets
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Jasper Johns, painter, printmaker, and sculptor, is regarded, along with Robert Rauschenberg, one of the forerunners of Pop Art. Over his long career, Johns has developed and refined a repertoire of imagery based on "ready-made", ubiquitous objects and symbols -- flags, targets, numbers, letters, maps, and rulers, to name just his most typical. Regardless of the medium in which he works -- encaustic (hot wax with pigment), oil painting, collage, lithography, etching, and casting -- Johns's work, like Rauschenberg's, exhibits a lucid consistency of vision. (Examples of his masterful printmaking skills are exhibited here.)

Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, GA and grew up in rural South Carolina. Between 1947 and 1948 he attended at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. In 1949 he attended commercial art school for two semesters. After serving in the Army, Johns moved back to New York in 1951. While working at a bookstore and painting at night, Johns met Rauschenberg in 1954, who convinced him to quit his day-job and to work together department store window displays to earn quick money. In1954 Johns painted his first "flag" and "target" paintings.

Land's End
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In 1958 Johns had his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, which still represents him. Three paintings from that exhibition were bought immediately by the Museum of Modern Art and in 1959 he was included in an exhibition there called Sixteen Americans. In 1964 Johns was given his first retrospective exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. In 1966 he had a solo exhibition of drawings at the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C. In 1970 the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective exhibition of his prints.

In 1973 Johns bought a house near John Cage in Stony Point, NY and moved out of New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art organized a full-scale retrospective in 1977 that traveled to Europe. It was not until 1988 that Johns was awarded the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale. Some of Johns's more recent major exhibitions include: The Drawings of Jasper Johns, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (traveled to Switzerland, England, and New York, 1990-92); Jasper Johns: 35 Years with Leo Castelli and Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 1997. In 1993 The Prints of Jasper Johns, 1960-1993: A Catalogue Raisonne was published.

The several works, including the Land's End prints on view in this gallery, were inspired by Jasper Johns's reading of the poetry of Hart Crane, who had committed suicide by drowning. In both the painting and prints titled Land's End, Johns combined the stenciled words "red," "yellow," and "blue" (spelled both correctly and backwards) with a drawing of a ruler, a target, and an outline of his own handprint and arm on a painterly, tripartite surface. Kirk Varnedoe has described these works based on Crane's poetry as "evok[ing] the extreme reach of a solitary figure virtually crucified in space" and the outstretched arm as "seem[ing] to reach with a thwarted desperation" (see Jasper Johns, Museum of Modern Art, 1996).

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