| Jasper Johns, born in
1930, American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, who has played a leading role
in the development of mid-20th-century American art. In 1954 he began painting
works in a manner radically different from the abstract expressionist style that
then dominated American art (see Abstract Expressionism).
His canvases were devoted to such familiar objects as targets, American flags,
numbers, and alphabet letters. He painted these subjects with objectivity and
precision, applying paint very thickly, so that the paintings became objects in
themselves rather than reproductions of recognizable items. This idea of
art-as-object became a potent influence on later sculpture as well as painting;
he often integrated three-dimensional objects into his paintings.
By the end of the 1950s Johns's paintings showed a freer,
looser arrangement. In some of them, he attached real objects—such as rulers and
compasses—to the canvas. False Start (1959, Scull Collection, New York
City)—in which he stenciled intentionally incorrect labels over painted objects
and patches of color—is a playful, punning work that was an immediate forerunner
of pop art.
From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s Johns’s paintings
featured cross-hatching patterns. Until the 1980s Johns had focused on painting
impersonal objects, but thereafter his paintings became more autobiographical. A
series from the mid-1980s, entitled The Seasons, brought together
artifacts and images that represented the seasons of the year and stages in the
artist’s life and career. Johns’s work of the 1990s combined references to art
history—through imagery borrowed from earlier painters—with personal references
to his past. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City surveyed 40 years of his
work in a 1996 exhibition. |
