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scene and anticipated Pop art’s demotic
sources and Minimalism’s self-evidence.
It put art into the world, and vice versa.
Politically, the flag painting was an icon
of the Cold War, symbolizing both liberty
and coercion. Patriotic or anti-patriotic?
Your call. The content is smack on the
surface, demanding careful description
rather than analytical fuss of a sort that
is evident in this show’s heady title,
“Mind/Mirror.” Shut up and look.
Take “False Start” (1959), in Phila-
delphia, a burlesque of Abstract Expres-
sionism with energetic splotches of
mostly primary hues bearing stencilled
color names that do or don’t match. A
blue may be labelled “blue,” but so may
an orange. The almost incidentally beau-
tiful result is a delirium of significa-
tions—and it’s thrilling. Or “Watch-
man” (1964), a mostly gray painting with
the attached rugged sculpture of a leg
and butt cast in wax in an upside-down
upholstered wood chair. There’s a sense
of some engulfing emergency, no less
urgent for being entirely obscure. You
are roped in at a glance, blessed with
heightened intelligence and fraught with
nameless anxiety. Arbitrary blocks of
red, yellow, and blue assure you that this
is a game local to painting, but it reso-
nates boundlessly.
Johns’s famous silence about his art’s
meanings must be our guide. He heroizes
for me a remark of the most vatic of the
Abstract Expressionists, Barnett New-
man—“The history of modern painting,
to label it with a phrase, has been the
struggle against the catalogue”—even as
catalogues swarm him. Johns has faults:
at times, he can be a mite precious, though
winningly so, or given to complexities
that dilute his powers. In past writing,
I’ve complained about those frailties in
the face of pious praise of everything
from his hand. I guess I wanted him,
great as he is, to be greater still. Now,
amid his art’s abounding glories, I de-
clare unconditional surrender.
H
is styles are legion—well organized
in this show by the curators Scott
Rothkopf, in New York, and Carlos Ba-
sualdo, in Philadelphia, with contrasts
and echoes that forestall a possibility of
feeling overwhelmed. Each place tells
a complete story. Regarding early work,
New York gets most of the Flags and
Philadelphia most of the Numbers.
Again, looking rules, as in the case of
my favorite paintings of Johns’s mid-
career phase, spectacular variations on
color-field abstraction that present all-
over clusters of diagonal marks—that
is, hatchings. These are often mislead-
ingly termed “crosshatch,” even by Johns
himself, but the marks never cross. Each
bundle has a zone of the picture plane
to itself, to keep his designs stretched
flat, while they are supercharged by plays
of touch and color and sometimes po-
eticized with piquant titles: “Corpse and
Mirror,” for example, or “Scent.”
Make your own Johns show, as I did.
There are major paintings among some
that are not so hot, along with terrific
drawings and prints that belie the com-
mon status of those mediums as “minor.”
Curatorial eccentricities in Philadelphia
include the use of a computer program
to select prints for display, in rotation,
from the museum’s immense collection,
and a maddening sound element, in that
prints section, of John Cage—a forma-
tive early influence on Johns, like Mar-
cel Duchamp, both of whose ideas he
thoroughly subsumed—droning through
some not very good poems that he wrote
in response to words of Johns’s. The
Whitney display would have profited
from being two-thirds its size. Johns
stumbled a bit in the nineteen-eighties
and early nineties, repeating tropes to
diminishing reward, though with inter-
mittent tours de force such as the paint-
ing “Racing Thoughts” (1983), an om-
nibus of affections that includes Johns’s
paintings of the “Mona Lisa” and a work
by Newman. Plumbing fixtures hint
that the point of view is from within a
bathtub. He then recentered himself,
triumphantly, in a poetics of death, the
most personal of impersonalities.
Many of the later works take surpris-
ing cues from art history, as the hatch
paintings do from the bedspread pattern
in Edvard Munch’s masterpiece of his
wizened self, “Between the Clock and
the Bed” (1940). The show alludes to that
and to Johns’s further spiritually symbi-
otic involvements with the Norwegian,
notably with several monotypes of a Sa-
varin coffee can filled with used brushes
above a skeletal arm. Other raids on art
history include the pilferage of a gawky
interstitial passage—a shapeless shape—
from Matthias Grünewald’s ferocious
crucifixion scene in the Isenheim Altar-
piece (1512-16). You’d never guess the
source without being told. It’s like Johns
to daintily invoke holy rage. His prolif-
erating skulls and skeletons anchor var-
ious of his caprices to comic effect: their
subjects are dead, as he is not. Johns taunts
the Grim Reaper, putting the “fun” in
“funereal” and sailing past the mortal
irony of his own advanced age. (He is
ninety-one.) He savors losing battles.
Speaking of which, his series “Farley
Breaks Down,” starting in 2014, rends
the heart with adaptations of a photo-
graph of a U.S. soldier in Vietnam weep-
ing at the loss of a comrade—a quintes-
sential evocation of an insane war.
Is there an overriding melancholy
about Johns’s art? Sure. It is instrumen-
tal, forbidding sympathy. He’s not sell-
ing it—with such rare exceptions as
“Skin with O’Hara Poem” (1961), part
of a series that salutes the poet Frank
O’Hara, one of Johns’s most valued
friends, with black ink directly imprint-
ing the artist’s face and hands. Also com-
pelling to me are renderings of a pho-
tograph of the dealer Leo Castelli, whose
chance discovery of Johns, in 1958, while
on a visit to the celebrated Rauschen-
berg, initiated a whole new art world. I
found a small canvas of the image, over-
laid with a pale puzzle-piece grid in pas-
tel colors, at the Whitney, desperately
moving. I revered Castelli.
Although Johns is regularly embraced
by art institutions, he has suffered spells
of relative neglect by working artists, I
think owing to intimidation. When you
go to his art, you can’t sensibly hit on
ways to get back out. In his tenth de-
cade, he remains, with disarming modesty,
contemporary art’s philosopher king—
the works are simply his responses to
this or that type, aspect, or instance of
reality. You can perceive his effects on
later magnificent painters of occult sub-
jectivity, including the German Gerhard
Richter, the Belgian Luc Tuymans, and
the Latvian American Vija Celmins. But
none can rival his utter originality and
inexhaustible range. You keep coming
home to him if you care at all about art’s
relevance to lived experience. The pres-
ent show obliterates contexts. It is Jas-
per Johns from top to bottom of what
art can do for us, and from wall to wall
of needs that we wouldn’t have suspected
without the startling satisfactions that
he provides.
