Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns: Variations on a Theme celebrates the artist’s visionary response to printmaking. Johns uses the medium to revisit and vary his subjects, transferring, reversing, repeating, and layering imagery in new and exciting combinations. The exhibition opens with early prints from 1960 like Target, Flag III, and 0 through 9, when Johns first experimented with lithography at publisher Universal Limited Art Editions in Long Island, New York. It unfolds with variations of these subjects to reveal the artist’s evolving interests through the decades. Figure 1 (1969) shows his exploration of color and printmaking techniques in collaboration with publisher Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, California. The series Fragments–According to What (1971) excavates details from his 1964 painting, According to What. In the 1970s, an abstract aesthetic emerges with a crosshatch motif in works like Savarin (1977). In the 1980s, Johns began incorporating autobiographical references from his home and studio as well as traced fragments of other artist’s work, as seen in the remarkable intaglios The Seasons (1987). The grand etching Untitled (Black with Primaries) (1991), created with copper plates he had used 10 years earlier, demonstrates Johns’s inclination to use the materials of printmaking to interpret imagery in new ways. Johns’s latest prints, Fragments of a Letter (2010) and Shrinky Dinks 1–4 (2011), combine stenciled text and hand gestures from American Sign Language. This exhibition’s rich array of well-known works and ambitious new experiments traces the journey of Johns’s innovative prints from 1960 to 2011.

Artist’s Profile

Jasper Johns has been a central figure in modern and contemporary art since the 1950s. Born in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina, Johns wanted to be an artist at an early age. After attending classes at Parsons School of Design and serving in the army during the Korean War, Johns moved permanently to New York in 1953. There, he worked as an artist and belonged to an intimate circle of friends that included artist Robert Rauschenberg, composer John Cage, and dancer Merce Cunningham.

Johns’s exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958 was a major turning point in his career; his depictions of everyday subjects—“things the mind already knows”—pulled away from the grandeur of Abstract Expressionism and paved the way for Pop Art and Minimalism. The Museum of Modern Art purchased three pieces from the show, a feat which opened many new opportunities for Johns. For over 50 years, Johns has challenged the possibilities of printmaking, painting, and sculpture, laying the groundwork for a wide range of experimental artists. Some of the iconic motifs that Johns has interpreted throughout his career include: flags, targets, numbers, ale cans, maps of the U.S., the crosshatch pattern, and, more recently, the catenary curve and gestures from American Sign Language.

His works have been exhibited in major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Kunstmuseum Basel. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and was awarded the Grand Prix. He was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2011. Johns currently lives and works in Sharon, Connecticut, New York, and the Caribbean island of Saint Martin.