#Jasper johns broad series

His focus on the work of art as an object in its own right paved the way for Minimalism, while his appropriation of familiar everyday imagery was a major influence on Pop Art. In turn, Johns has been hugely influential on younger generations of artists.

#Jasper johns broad series

Harlequin patterns in the Bushbaby series of 2003 to 2006 can be traced to Pablo Picasso’s paintings of harlequins made at the beginning of the 20th century, and his 2012 series Regrets took as its starting point a photograph of Lucian Freud by the photographer John Deakin. His early paintings and sculptures paid homage to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, while the cross-hatching motif he developed in the 1970s found its origins in Edvard Munch’s Self Portrait. Johns has a deep knowledge of art history, which has always played a central role in his work. He holds a singular position in the history of art In 1976, Johns produced 33 etchings for a set of five texts by the Irish writer and poet Samuel Beckett in a publication they titled Foirades/Fizzles. The same year, he designed the costumes for another piece by Cunningham, Rainforest, while Andy Warhol designed the set. In 1968 Johns designed the set for Merce Cunningham’s Walkaround Time using Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23) for inspiration. He would say, ‘I’ve got a terrific idea for you,’ and then I’d have to find one for him”. Of his relationship with Johns, Rauschenberg recalled that “Jasper and I literally traded ideas. The group met regularly to share ideas, and in 1963 they formed the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. Soon after settling in New York in 1953, Johns formed a close circle of friends that included the choreographer Merce Cunningham, the composer John Cage, and the artist Robert Rauschenberg. He has collaborated with some of the greatest artists, writers and composers of his generation He has also used sculpture to question “things the mind already knows”, as he has put it, casting torches, lightbulbs, ale cans and objects from his studio in bronze, wittily reformulating everyday objects as precious works of art. The resulting output of lithographs, etchings, screenprints, aquatints and intaglios has placed Johns alongside Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch as one of the most important and innovative printmakers of the 20th century. Printmaking soon proved to be an ideal tool for an artist concerned with repetition and re-examination, providing Johns with a means to manipulate the motifs that informed his paintings over and over again. Johns himself has maintained that he was simply inspired by a dream.Īfter establishing himself as a painter in the 1950s, Johns began making lithographs in 1960. Critic Robert Hughes said that the Cold War “brought national paranoia to both Russia and America and in its grip of fear and self-assertion all symbols of American identity got a new charge – including, most obviously, the flag”. Others have linked the flag paintings to the ongoing Cold War and the fears stoked up by McCarthyism. Some argue that he simply wanted to use a familiar, everyday image in order to focus on the technique of painting. He continues to inspire curiosityĬritics have long disagreed over the reasons behind Johns’s decision to paint the American flag. Forever questioning meaning, Johns has pushed the form of his subjects to the absolute limits, with numbers repeated until they no longer make sense and letters that are almost impossible to read. In addition to the flags, Johns’s interest in reformulating recognisable signs and symbols as artworks has seen him use targets, maps, numbers and alphabets to encourage the viewer to take a more active role in perception and to look afresh at “things which are seen and not looked at, not examined”. The mixture dries very quickly and so preserves the precise details of the brushstrokes, resulting in the beguiling, tactile surfaces that characterise much of Johns’s work. He started out working in household paint but was unhappy with the results, so he switched to an ancient technique known as encaustic, which involves dissolving paint into melted beeswax. The first of these, Flag (1954–55), was prompted by a dream: “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag” he recalled, “and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it”. The flag paintings that Johns began producing in the 1950s are among his most famous works. He has made some of the most recognisable artworks in the world