8 The New York ReviewThe House That Johns Built
Susan TallmanJasper Johns : Mind /Mirror
an exhibition at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art and the Whitney
Museum of American Art,
New York City, September 29, 2021–
February 13, 2022.
Catalog of the exhibition by Carlos
Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf.
Philadelphia Museum of Art/
Whitney Museum of American Art,
347 pp., $60.
(Distributed by Yale University Press)If contemporary art had a book of Gen-
esis, it might well start with the night
in late 1954 that Jasper Johns dreamed
he was painting an American flag. He
was twenty- four years old, a serious but
largely untrained artist making scruffy
assemblages of found objects, almost
all of which he destroyed. Of the
dream and its consequences he later
remarked, “The unconscious thought
was accepted by consciousness grace-
fully,” though completing the actual
painting took months.
However slick and Pop- ish it may look
in reproduction, Flag (1954–1955) is
insistently handmade: three joined can-
vases (one for the star- covered canton,
two for the stripes) covered with col-
laged newspaper over which he applied
enamel paint and then, dissatisfied,
took a crack at encaustic—pigment sus-
pended in melted wax that, like a candle
drip, keeps its volume as it cools and
dries. (The Roman Egyptians used it for
mummy portraits.) Tender and intense,
the strokes nudge at and shy from the
edges of the subcutaneous collage, exe-
cuting what Johns described as “a very
complex set of corrections.”
In Walter Tevis’s novel The Man
Who Fell to Earth, the hero’s extrater-
restrial origin is betrayed by his Bayer
Aspirin tin, made from platinum, in
not quite the right size, with fuzzy lineswhere the fine print should be—errors
that arose from using low- res inter-
planetary television transmissions as a
model. In the mid- 1950s, Johns’s Flag
must have felt similarly strange: utterly
mundane and inscrutably alien.
His first museum appearance was in
a show at the Jewish Museum in New
York in 1957 titled “Artists of the New
York School: Second Generation,” al-
though “New York School” generally
enfolded emotive abstraction, and his
Green Target (1955) was not abstract
(its concentric circles are subtle, but
the title is a tell), and its emotions were
muffled at best. There was just no bet-
ter handle for what he was doing. After
his Target with Four Faces (1955) ap-
peared on the cover of Artnews the fol-
lowing January, the term “Neo- Dada”
enjoyed a brief vogue (prompting
Johns to find out more about Dada),
but while his arrangement of plaster
faces in wooden cubbies was peculiar,
it has none of “the waywardness, the ir-
reverence, or the untidiness” of Dada,
Leo Steinberg noted.It can be hard now to fathom the thrill
and dismay Johns’s early paintings
sparked. We have lived too long in the
house they built. But to an art world high
on abstraction and existentialist meta-
physics (Clyfford Still once defined his
paintings as “life and death merging in
fearful union”), Flag delivered the gifts
of cognitive dissonance and paradox. It
was not abstract, nor was it a picture
of a flag limp on a pole or gallantly
streaming. There was no sky, no space,
no illusion. If it partook of “a new kind
of flatness, one that breathes and pul-
sates,” which Clement Greenberg ad-
mired in the art of Mark Rothko and
Barnett Newman, it did so within the
parameters of a very un- Greenbergianpopular artifact. It treated a politically
divisive symbol with technical care and
editorial indifference.
And yet it ticked all the boxes of
good art—it was visually engaging,
philosophically provocative, thought-
fully made, and, in its own backhanded
way, poignantly tactile, bruised, and
guarded. Johns came with no man-
ifesto, no plan for reforming people
or society. In conversation he was
pragmatic, explaining his work as re-
sponses to his own questions about
what to make and how. For all these
reasons, Flag came to bookmark the
chapter break between stereotypical
“modern art” (emphatic, high- minded,
heroically self- involved) and “contem-
porary” (skeptical, outward- looking,
and prone to question the terms of its
own making).
For a century after photography re-
duced the miracle of objective repre-
sentation to a trick of the light, modern
art had filled the gap with subjectivity,
expressing internal experience through
distortion and, eventually, abstraction.
As Greenberg wrote in the 1930s, the
avant- garde strove “to imitate God by
creating something valid solely on its
own terms... something given, incre-
ate, independent of meanings, simi-
lars, or originals.” But Johns wasn’t
interested in things without similars.
He was interested, as he put it in a fa-
mous formulation, in “things the mind
already knows”—things already famil-
iar to everyone, things read as code
rather than really looked at, things that
were flat, often printed, and generally
not thought of as “things” at all. When
he took up numerals as a subject, they
were not the swift working ciphers of
arithmetic but fondly recreated typo-
graphic forms, with serifs and ball ter-
minals and swelling tails. Arranged in
a grid, they might retreat into a snow-fall of brushstrokes only to pop back
into legibility with a slight change of
attention. Drawn on top of one another
in the images titled 0 through 9, their
outlines meet in a comely tangle, part
Nixie tube, part gothic tracery. We see
numbers all the time, but Johns made
us look.
Cubism had seized upon workaday
things in order to break them and re-
configure them like a spatchcocked
chicken, but Johns was quaintly loyal
to the coat hangers, thermometers,
and rulers he attached to his canvases.
(He has used fragments of the human
figure, mainly casts and imprints, but
even then the vibe is more Mr. Potato
Head than horror film.) A cast plaster
pen shrouded in encaustic on a 1961
canvas commands respect not for the
pen as metaphor—smug rival of the
sword—but for the pen as impartial
familiar presence. “It seems to me,” he
said of the commonplace, “that those
things can be dealt with without having
to judge them.”Born in 1930, Johns grew up in South
Carolina, shuttled between the house-
holds of his divorced parents, his grand-
parents, and aunts and uncles. (His
remark that it “wasn’t specially cheer-
ful” has an air of understatement.) A
stint at the University of South Caro-
lina was followed by a term at the Par-
sons School of Design in New York and
a string of odd jobs until he was drafted
in 1951. Returning to the city after two
years in the army (stationed in South
Carolina and Japan, he never saw com-
bat), he quickly found a cohort of exper-
imentally minded peers and mentors,
including Robert Rauschenberg, John
Cage, and Merce Cunningham. The
Johns–Rauschenberg romance ended
badly but remains legendary in the art
world for its “opposites attract” syn-
ergy and for the astonishing profusion
of era- defining artworks it produced,
among them many of Rauschenberg’s
blithe and adventurous Combines and
Johns’s object- paintings, with their
hints of thwarted revelation—a drawer
that does not open, a pen that cannot
write.
Cage and Cunningham, meanwhile,
offered proof of concept that one could
make things in the world without try-
ing to remake the world. To Cage’s be-
nign ideal of composition as “simply a
way of waking up to the very life we’re
living,” Johns added an autodidact’s
drive to take a machine apart and build
it back up again. He began by elim-
inating things that had already been
done well by other people—foremost,
illusion and emotional allegory—not
because he disapproved, but because
there was no need. (His admiration for
the trompe l’oeil painter John F. Peto
and for the expressionism of Edvard
Munch is acknowledged in the numer-
ous paintings, prints, and drawings to
which he added their names or initials.)
It is possible to see Flag or Target with
Four Faces as idiosyncratic studies in
functional design, iconography, tactil-
ity, and carpentry.
By thirty- two Johns was, according
to Newsweek, “probably the most in-
fluential younger painter in the world.”
Later it seemed he opened the doorJasper Johns: Flag, 1954 –Museum of Modern Art, New YorkTallman 08 10 .indd 8 12 / 16 / 21 5 : 44 PM