THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 65
“Racing Thoughts,” from 1983. Johns has often been burdened with overinterpretation. His silence must be our guide.
THEA RT WORLD
JUST LOOK
The greatness of Jasper Johns is on display in a major retrospective.
BY PETERSCHJELDAHL
© 2021 JASPER JOHNS / VAGA AT ARS
with overinterpretation despite his stated
commitment, early on, to dealing with
“things the mind already knows,” start-
ing with flags, targets, numbers, and maps,
before proceeding to trickier motifs that
are nonetheless equally matter-of-fact.
Johns’s extraordinary virtuosity with line,
texture, and color is an adequate hook
for any of his works.
It all began in 1955, in a ramshackle
building on Pearl Street, in lower Man-
hattan, that Johns shared with his lover,
Robert Rauschenberg. The twenty-five-
year-old Johns, a South Carolinian sur-
vivor of a broken home whose upbring-
ing was largely farmed out to relatives,
had studied at the University of South
Carolina and done a stint in the Army.
Having had a dream in 1954 of paint-
ing the American flag, he did so, em-
ploying a technique that was unusual at
the time: brushstrokes in pigmented,
lumpy encaustic wax that sensitize the
deadpan image, such that there is an
aura of feeling, though particular to no
one. The abrupt gesture—sign paint-
ing, essentially, of profound sophistica-
tion—ended modern art. It torpedoed
the macho existentialism of many Ab-
stract Expressionist stars then on the
THE CRITICS
I
n sixty-six years of multifarious art
works by Jasper Johns, the subject of
a huge retrospective that is split between
the Whitney Museum, in New York, and
the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I can
think of only one work that expresses
an opinion: “The Critic Sees” (1961), a
sculpted relief of eyeglasses with blab-
bing mouths in place of lenses. (The
piece is not in the show.) The image sug-
gests exasperation from a great artist—
America’s greatest, post-Willem de Koon-
ing, in terms of a capacity to reset formal
and semiotic ideals for subsequent striv-
ing artists. Johns has often been burdened
