There is something very Alice in Wonderland about the work of Jasper Johns, an immense treasure house of games and allusions, seemingly playful and serious at the same time. You can get lost in his world, fall through the rabbit hole only to end up right back on the surface, never quite sure if what is deep can be separated from what is purely fun.
A new exhibition of Johns’s print work at the Phillips Collection is titled “Jasper Johns: Variations on a Theme.” It features about 101 prints made over the course of Johns’s career, from 1960, when he started experimenting with lithography, to virtuoso works he made as recently as a year ago. There’s been no shortage of recent attention to the life and work of the 82-year-old American artist. The National Gallery of Art focused on the seminal decade from 1955 to 1965 in a major Johns exhibition five years ago. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chicago Art Institute hosted an exhibition in 2007-08 devoted entirely to the artist’s focus on the color gray. And President Obama awarded Johns the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year.
(Bill O'Leary/THE WASHINGTON POST) - President Obama awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jasper Johns last year. At right is former president and fellow medal recipient George H.W. Bush.
But Johns’s work is dense, difficult and rewarding, and it’s hard to imagine it will ever be overexposed. The focus on Johns’s print work doesn’t capture the artist working in a lesser mode or merely duplicating his ideas in another format. Print has been central to Johns’s thinking since he started working with the Universal Limited Art Editions early in his career. ULAE sounds like a publishing house, but in the late 1950s and ’60s it was more like a religious collective, devoted to regenerating the tradition of printmaking by infusing it with an electrical jolt of contemporary artistic talent and experimentation. Invited to work in the form by ULAE’s visionary leader, Tatyana Grosman, Johns threw himself into the details and technique of the process.
The early results on display are tentative and strangely moving. Johns had carved out territory in the fractious New York world of abstract painting in the 1950s by focusing on visual material that lived resolutely in a two-dimensional, symbolic world. His paintings of flags, targets and maps seemed to point to a pop-art sensibility, but they proved a vigorous stimulant to Johns’s painterly tendencies, his love of the physicality of paint and the drama of making it seem to move and dance on the surface of the canvas. A target, merely a collection of concentric circles, was a way of painting something and nothing at the same time, a bit like dummy text that designers use when laying out a page before printing or the rote nonsense speakers use to test a microphone (“how now brown cow.”)
But look at Johns’s early lithograph of a target, and it’s hard not to see a very canny sensibility at work. When he was painting targets, Johns used bands of color to create his iconic image. In this early print, he was thinking in black and white, and the target is radically altered in the process. Johns’s scribbled shading produces something more akin to an eye than a target. Rather than the weightless and uniform clear bands of Johns’s target paintings — which often seem like instruction manual illustrations for how to draw a target — this lithograph is dominated by its dark center, which looks like an iris, an aperture or a portal.
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