Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns(born May 15, 1930 in Augusta, Georgia) is a
contemporary U.S. artist in painting and printmaking.
Jasper Johns grew up in Allendale, South Carolina, and recounting
this period in his life, he says, "In the place where I was a
child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really
didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I
would be in a situation different than the one that I was in."
Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to
1948, a total of three semesters.[1] He then moved to New York City
and studied briefly at Parsons School of Design in 1949.[1] While
in New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and
John Cage. Working together they explored the contemporary art
scene, and began developing their ideas on art. In 1952 and 1953 he
was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War.[1]
He is best known for his painting Flag (1954-55), which he painted
after having a dream of the American flag. His work is often
described as a 'Neo-Dadaist', as opposed to pop art, even though
his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular
culture. Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns
as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical
iconography.
Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps,
targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is
often lush and painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media
as Encaustic (wax-based paint), and plaster relief in his
paintings. Johns played with and presented opposites,
contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp
(who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces
intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs.
Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by
others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus
allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for
subject. Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject
matter, in the end it could be said that they simply changed
subjects. Johns neutralized the subject, so that something like
pure paint--painted surface--could declare itself. For twenty years
after Johns painted "Flag," the surface--in Andy Warhol's
silkscreens or Robert Irwin's illuminated ambiances--could suffice.
In contrast to the concept of macho 'artist hero' as ascribed to
Abstract Expressionist figures such as Jackson Pollock and Willem
de Kooning, whose paintings are fully indexical (that is, standing
effectively as an all-over canvas signature), "Neo-Dadaists" like
Johns and Robert Rauschenberg seem preoccupied with a lessening of
the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead
to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols,
painted indexically in mockery of the hallowed individuality of the
Abstract Expressionists. There is also the issue of symbols
existing outside of any referential context; Johns' flag, for
instance, is primarily a visual object, divorced from its symbolic
connotations and reduced to something in-itself.
In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York paid more than
$20 million for Johns' White Flag.
In 2006, private collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin (founder of
the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel Investment Group) bought
Johns' False Start for $80 million.
|
cart is empty
