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Jasper johns5/28/2023 ![]() Both flags and targets are inherently flat, and thus as the subject for advanced painting, they call attention to the flatness of the picture pane, a key tenet for Modernist proponents like Clement Greenberg, but because they also point to popular culture, Johns's use of them runs against and subverts ideas of Modernist abstraction. By employing everyday motifs like flags and targets, Johns engaged simultaneously both abstraction and representation.This shifted modern art toward the consumer landscape of mid-20 th century America, inspiring a host of Pop artists throughout the 1960s. Through his use of shreds of newspaper, found objects, and even mass-produced goods, like beer and coffee cans, Johns erased the division between fine art and mass culture.Additionally, Johns's exploration of semiotics and perception also set the stage for both Conceptual Art and more postmodern interventions in the 1980s, while his multimedia collaborations with John Cage and Merce Cunningham ushered in the dominance of Performance Art in the 1960s and 1970s. ![]() Breaking down the boundaries traditionally separating fine art and everyday life, he effectively laid the foundation for Pop Art's embrace of commodity culture. The reverberations of the work of Jasper Johns affected nearly every artistic movement from the 1950s through the present day. Riffing on the divergent examples of Dada and Abstract Expressionism, Johns, along with his Neo-Dada collaborator Robert Rauschenberg, created a nuanced art that spoke to notions of autobiography, irreverence, and philosophical engagement. ![]() Beginning in the mid-1950s, Johns deliberately avoided art cut off from everyday life and made common signs, such as flags and targets, the subject of his work. For example, the lithographic stones and plates that Johns used to print Color Numerals had been reworked from those used to produce Black Numerals, a series made the previous year at Gemini.Jasper Johns's playful, enigmatic paintings interrogate the very ways in which we see and interpret the world. Johns has taken advantage of the opportunity offered by printmaking to test multiple options, and pursue different avenues of exploration in his repetitive, measured transformation of the numerical subject. His exploration of numeric figures began in 1955 and grew in intensity until about 1970 it is the motif to which he has returned most often, exploring it in paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. Do something else to it”- reveal the overarching serial logic of his creative approach. Johns’s basic instructions to himself, penned in a sketchbook-“Take an object. Johns’s series draws renewed attention to the fact that counting, something the mind already knows but overlooks, involves eye, mind, and body. The subject of Johns’s series, therefore, is the 10 base digits of the decimal system, derived centuries ago from humans’ 10 fingers. While Johns’s numerical sequence could in theory extend indefinitely, Color Numerals demarcates a terminal arithmetic progression, its finality reinforced by the heavy white outline of Figure 9. This succession is color-coded by Johns’s signatures, which match the topmost hue in each print. Seen in sequence, each print functions as a point on a continuum, with color transitioning from primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) in Figure 0 to secondary colors (orange, green, and purple) in Figure 9. The meaning of any series is to be found not just in its individual parts, but also in the spaces between them. This is wittily underscored by the Mona Lisa (printed in reverse) in Figure 7, a pun on the multiple definitions of “figure.” Counteracting over-familiarity, each of the Color Numerals prints elevates a number, its form derived from a commercial stencil, to a striking, rainbow-hued portrait. Johns favors subjects that “the mind already knows” but overlooks due to constant exposure. ![]() Since the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns (American, born 1930) has reworked key motifs-flags, targets, maps, the alphabet, and numbers-in a serial fashion, exploring the impact of changes in color, scale, sequence, and medium. ![]()
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