Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jasper Johns
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
New York, NY: Whitney Museum of American Art
92%
Racing Thoughts. 1983. Encaustic, screenprint, and wax crayon on collaged cotton and linen
It's tough to say whether Johns deployed his complex conceptual systems in order to justify indulgence in the basic tactile and optical pleasures of painting, or whether, instead, he saw in this beleaguered medium (painting) a fertile ground for planting the convolutes and paradoxes about thought and vision which he tended to throughout his career. Arguably, it's the slippage between these two possibilities — or, it's the practical untenability of any distinction — that is the main engine of Johns's work. As an arrangement of shapes and colors this painting is spectacular, with its overdetermined halving at the center, and its cramming together of so many different possibilities of pattern, and its juxtaposition of signifying with nonsignifying elements, and its network of planes that by turns push each other towards and repel each other from the surface of the image. Out from all of this emerges (or is it layered on top of? I really can't tell) a set of propositions about what a picture is that fails to ever resolve itself, and that is edged towards continually stranger and more tenuous positions by the way the painting’s actual appearance. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Gagosian Gallery (Exhibition: Jasper Johns: Between the Clock and the Bed)
83%
Untitled. 1975. Oil, encaustic, and collage on canvas, in 4 joined parts
Johns's crosshatch artworks tend to be good to the extent that certain aspects of their visual presentation muddle or undermine their relationship to the crosshatch series as a whole, but without removing them completely from the series or making it seem like they're not in the final estimation answerable to its formal logic. To put this differently: these paintings make their claims on our attention at the point where their status as discrete works of art intersects with their status as nodes in a network of ideas and possibility. The breaking-up of this painting into four parts of unequal size, the clouding and the dripping of the paint at the top right, the occasional continuity but occasional discontinuity of lines and colors at the spots where the canvases meet, and especially the darkening of the pigments in the picture's bottom right rectangle — none of these creative decisions are prepared for or even entirely sensible within the methodical mark-making program that governs the crosshatch series as a whole. And yet they bear down on our experience of this one individual expression of the sum of the series, and thereby they implicate themselves in its meaning. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Gagosian Gallery (Exhibition: Jasper Johns: Between the Clock and the Bed)
82%
Corpse and Mirror II. 1974-1975. Oil and sand on canvas, in 4 parts
Most of the aesthetic substance of any one of Johns's crosshatch artworks accrues from the specific way it situates itself (or fails to) within the system of his crosshatch series as a whole. By this, I mean to say something more than, "it's interesting how Johns kept returning to this one theme obsessively," but something less than, "the series in toto is the actual artwork, at the expense of the individual significance of its discrete print- or painting-components." This painting — a good, almost a great crosshatch entry — has a band of grey behind the colored lines at its right that replaces the white ground of the rest of the visual field. Additionally, the artwork's "image" (if you want to use that word to refer to the sum of all these red and blue and yellow lines) extends out past the boundary of the joined canvases onto the interior of the frame. Little flourishes like this are not exactly explicable; they provide visual spice — differentiation — to the manic regularity of the hatchmarks, but they also make it so that this particular work, due to the many particularities of its appearance, cannot be reduced to the logic of the series overall. This is a good Johns crosshatch piece because it contains much that resides outside of the series' program, and yet these elements don’t at all undermine the painting’s relationship with the conceptual scheme overall. The work shows you how art's autonomy and art's heteronomy are intertwined, and proceeds to make this intertwinement itself the object of your aesthetic consideration. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Craig Starr Gallery (Exhibition: Jasper Johns: Flags)
74%
Flag. 1955. Graphite and graphite wash on prepared paper
Among the most remarkable things about Johns is the clarity and immediacy with which, in his first few years as an artist, he developed the iconography and posed the problems which he would carry with him throughout his entire career. This drawing of a flag (among his trademark visual phonemes) is just the second thing in his catalogue raisonné: from the get-go, he was already working out how to make symbols scream with meaning and to signifying nothing, all at once. To the degree to which Johns's whole project is embedded in this one very early piece, it's an interesting artifact. To the degree to which that project is actually expressed by Flag, it's a good work of art — and by and large, it is. That the banner is cropped at its right edge, turning it into something somewhat less or other than a real American flag, is compelling; that the hatchmarks sit so nervously atop their ground of graphite wash is compelling, too. The uneven shading of the flag, especially in its lower right, pulls it back from meaning, as does the eerie difference between the hard-line left and bottom edges and the unbound top and right. While Johns is certainly at his best when he incorporates his conceptualism into more elaborated, classically unified, "autonomous" works, there is nevertheless a lucidity of thought (despite their obscureness) that characterizes his simpler gestures like this drawing. (TFS, 2026)
New York, NY: Craig Starr Gallery (Exhibition: Jasper Johns: Flags)
60%
Flag. 1960. Bronze
In critiquing Johns, you have to be careful to balance the "autonomous" aspect of his artworks against the role they play as nodes within the larger conceptual systems that constitute his "practice." The proposition that a work like this makes — that a single symbol like the American flag can take on an infinity of presentational guises and still cling to something of its original meaning, if perhaps by its fingernails — is merely interesting in a vacuum. But within the totality of Johns's oeuvre it becomes (at least potentially) aesthetically sophisticated. As a discrete work of art this thing is slightly more than a navel-gazing exercise: it's palpable, the tension between the symbolic clarity of the stars-and-bars and the obscurity of the object-image's actual surface; but there are few rewards for sustained contemplation. (TFS, 2026)