January 13, 2022 9for almost everything that followed:
Pop art’s embrace of the world in all
its prefabricated glory, conceptual-
ism’s inquiries into making and mean-
ing, postmodernism’s philandering in
the flea market of historical styles and
personal artifacts. In the inventory of
twentieth- century art movements—
Cubism, surrealism, AbEx, and the
rest—Johns, like Picasso, is simply his
own chapter.
Now ninety- one, he has received
virtually every major honor the visual
arts have to offer. His studio note,
“Take an object / Do something to it /
Do something else to it,” has been
an art school mantra for generations.
He is famous enough to have had a
cameo on The Simpsons (as a
kleptomaniac—take an object
and run). Every species of schol-
arly thought, from psychoanalysis
to queer theory to iconographic
symbol hunting, has been brought
to bear on his work. The refer-
ence library includes a hefty
compendium of his own writ-
ings and statements, three cat-
alogues raisonnés of the prints
and another of the monotypes, a
six- volume catalogue raisonné of
the drawings, and Roberta Bern-
stein’s magisterial five volumes
of the painting and sculpture.
(The first volume, an essential
primer on all things Johns, is
available separately as a mono-
graph.)* One might reasonably
wonder, What is there left to say?It is the wrong question. With
Johns it has always been about
seeing; few artists have been so
attentive to the lapses and unre-
liability of the seeing/saying con-
nection. So the vast two- museum
retrospective “Jasper Johns:
Mind/Mirror” is, above all, a
once- in- a- lifetime opportunity
to use one’s eyes. With more than
five hundred paintings, prints,
drawings, and sculptures spread
between the Whitney Museum
and the Philadelphia Museum
of Art, “Mind/Mirror” presents
a wealth of celebrated objects
alongside rarely seen things from
private collections (including the
artist’s) and a welcome abun-
dance of works on paper. Integrating
these throughout, the exhibitions en-
gineer what feels like a natural mean-
der through Johns’s career, enabling
visitors to follow an idea or image as
it slips from one set of materials to an-
other and from one decade to the next.
The museums are close enough geo-
graphically that it made no sense to
travel the show from one to the next,though distant enough that most vis-
itors will visit only one. The curators,
Scott Rothkopf (in New York) and
Carlos Basualdo (in Philadelphia), thus
settled on the neatly Johnsian strat-
egy of echoing but not quite repeating
themselves. The two shows share the
same ten- part disposition of themes
(“Constellations,” “Reveries,” etc.) but
fill them in different ways: under the
heading “Display,” Philadelphia recre-
ates Johns’s 1960 show at the Leo Cas-
telli Gallery; the Whitney recreates his
1968 show at Castelli. Both exhibit casts
of his 1960 bronze flashlight sculpture,
and each gets two of the four “Seasons”
paintings (1985–1986) that marked his
half- turn to self- portraiture.The first, dream- inspired Flag (1954 –
1955) opens the proceedings in Phila-
delphia, positioned to bring you close
enough to notice its curious concatena-
tion of parts. At the W hitney, the eleva-
tor doors open onto a long, charismatic
wall of prints, running from the loosely
drawn black- and- white lithograph Ta r -
get (1960) to a new etching of stick
figures gathered around a large skull
under a night sky. Printmaking has
never been a sideshow for Johns; its lo-
gistical permutations—flipping things
left- right, switching between full color
and grayscale, transferring things from
one surface to another—suit his habits
of mind and feed into everything he
does. Hung in two rows that form a hor-
izontal axis of imperfect reflection, the
Whitney’s print timeline advertises the
show’s conceptual structure and, like
the overture to a musical, introduces
the main motifs and hooks to follow.
Given how widely Johns’s art has
been reproduced, it can be easy to for-
get how insistently physical it is, how
florid with incidental detail. The paint-
ings can be disarmingly clunky, joinedwith hinges and metal straps, blanketed
in dermal encaustic or paint roughened
with sand. Many of the drawings were
made on top of his own prints, reveal-
ing polyphonic conversations between
the given and the remade. In his eerily
beautiful ink- on- plastic drawings, pud-
dles become puzzles, and puzzles be-
come pictures built by surface tension
and evaporation. A mesmerizing room
at the Whitney is filled with small works
made throughout his career, each no
more than a few inches a side. It is pos-
sible to look at the wallet- sized Gray
Numbers (1959–1961) for a long time
and feel it change in your mind. Even
in this tiny canvas there are too many
particulars to hold onto, so you are
drawn back again and again to
the surface, away from the famil-
iar sequence and toward a kind of
limitless specificity.
Both shows are strikingly
handsome. Johns’s penchant for
bilateral symmetry and echoing
refrains, for cognates and ghosts,
lends a lively cadence to the art’s
exposition in space. In all these
ways, “Mind/Mirror” is a tri-
umph. And yet...For a record of the most am-
bitious exhibition of the world’s
most illustrious living artist, the
catalog comes with an unex-
pected whiff of apology. “Today,”
Rothkopf writes in his introduc-
tory essay, Johns’s work “can
sometimes feel more rooted in
the past than the present.” He
positions Johns as a lens for “un-
derstand[ing] an inflection point
in history,” undeniably important
but pinned in place, “an immov-
able feature in a landscape against
which contemporary life contin-
ues to unfold.” Johns’s conceptual
innovations, he suggests, have
been “outstripped by those of
wilder progeny that now perhaps
seem more of our time,” while the
artist’s continued attachment to
painting and “careful humanist
inquiry” mark him as “less Pro-
metheus than Moses, someone
who led his people to the Prom-
ised Land but didn’t go inside.”
The catalog works hard to com-
pensate for this perceived lack
of timeliness: its wrapper reproduces
eighty- six artworks in the format of a
Google image search, and its contrib-
utors include “artists, poets, and phi-
losophers, most of whom are writing
about his art for the first time.” Some
offer historical information and analy-
sis, some present personal reflections,
some interrogate the artist’s sexuality,
his whiteness, his southernness, and (as
always) his lack of interest in declara-
tive position statements.
This is not, however, just a prophy-
lactic mea culpa for having ceded so
much real estate to an eminent old
white guy. The intimation that Johns is
not quite cutting- edge has been around
for a good fifty years. He may have con-
cocted a paradigm shift back in the day,
but, the refrain goes, what has he done
for us lately? It’s reasonable to ask. His-
tory is full of artists who made crucial
contributions in one decade and then
just puttered along through those that
followed. Johns, like Picasso again, is
unusual in the precocity of his early
achievement and in his longevity, but a
chart of his “works cited” in the art his-torical literature would take the shape
of a playground slide—flags and targets
at the top of the ladder followed by a
long downward slope. So while “Mind/
Mirror” performs a valuable service
in illuminating the shape and texture
of that early paradigm shift, it also,
and perhaps more importantly, follows
the artist into the present. Johns’s last
New York retrospective took place at
MoMA a quarter- century ago. There’s
a lot to catch up on.Though Johns is known for endlessly
recycling earlier motifs, he has never
stood still. By the early 1960s, his sta-
ble geometries of stars, bars, and circles
had grown ganglier and more fitful. In
Land’s End (1963, shown in Philadel-
phia) stenciled color names float over
and under an umbrous field of blues
and grays; a ruler lies horizontally in
the semicircle it has inscribed like a
windshield wiper, and a skid of dark
paint rises through the center, topped
with a handprint. The impression of
a storm at sea is inescapable—brief
bits of yellow and red at top recall the
breaking light in The Raft of the Me-
dusa—but the anthemic thrill is sub-
verted by the onsite list of parts: hand,
ruler, red, yellow, blue. It’s like getting
a joke and having it explained at the
same time.
This darker, more precarious tone has
been attributed to Johns’s breakup with
Rauschenberg, but he had also started
reading Wittgenstein and looking hard
at Duchamp, whose work, he wrote,
“brings into focus the shifting weight
of things, the instability of our defini-
tions and measurements.” To enact that
instability, he created pictures like the
boisterous, sixteen- foot- long mashup
According to What (1964, at the Whit-
ney) that were stylistically eclectic and
overtly linguistic. Aluminum letters on
hinges spell out color names; screen-
printed pseudo- newsprint runs into
smoothly painted gradients and hectic
brushwork; a half- body cast hangs in
an upside- down chair. At the bottom, a
small canvas can be unhooked to reveal
a silhouette of Duchamp. Like a scroll-
ing panorama, it has no center; unlike
a panorama it changes personality at
every seam.
In the 1970s Johns changed ap-
proach again, taking up a motif that,
for the first time, actually meant noth-
ing. The “crosshatches” (a slight mis-
nomer since they don’t actually cross)
are clumps of parallel marks, roughly
the length of adult fingers, a pattern
he once glimpsed on a car driving the
other way on the Long Island Express-
way. Repeated in certain formulations,
they create rolling, spatially confusing
territories. When sufficiently complex
and regular, the structure is sensed sub-
liminally long before it can be named
analytically. The tessellation might
mirror itself, as in the prismatic Ror-
schach painting and prints Corpse and
Mirror, with their ghostly intimation
of a hovering figure, or it might roll up
and down like icons in a slot machine,
as in the Usuyuki series, whose flicker-
ing light is as close to elegance as Johns
has allowed himself to get.
The snapback to recognizable things
came as unexpectedly as the departure
from them. Adapting the pictures-
gathered- on- a- wall format of Amer-
ican still- life painters like Peto and
William Harnett, Johns painted bor-
rowed images in a shallow space. TheWhitney Museum of American Art, New York*Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook
Notes, Interviews, edited by Kirk
Va r ne do e (MoMA, 1996); Roberta
Bern stein et al., Jasper Johns: Cat-
alogue Raisonné of Painting and
Sculpture (Wildenstein Plattner Insti-
tute, 2014); Menil Collection, Jasper
Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Drawing
(Menil Drawing Institute, 2018); Susan
Dackerman and Jennifer L. Roberts,
Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of
Monotypes (Matthew Marks Gallery,
2017); Richard S. Field, The Prints of
Jasper Johns, 1960 –1993: A Catalogue
Raisonné (Universal Limited Art Edi-
tions, 1994); Roberta Bernstein, Jasper
Johns: Redo an Eye (Wildenstein Platt-
ner Institute, 2017).Jasper Johns: Untitled, 1998Tallman 08 10 .indd 9 12 / 16 / 21 5 : 44 PM