Birth Year : 1930
Death Year :
Country : US
Jasper Johns, one of the most uniquely original of the artists who came
to prominence in the late fifties, was born in Augusta, Georgia, the son
of a farmer. His youth was a period of uprootedness in which he lived successively
with various relatives. During a brief period at the University of South
Carolina, he had his first formal training in art. While in New York, in
1949, Johns was drafted into the Army and stationed in Japan. By 1952,
back in New York, he began to paint, supporting himself with various odd
jobs. Johns shared a loft, in New York, with Robert Rauschenberg,
and came to meet the composer John Cage. Johns became fascinated with Cage's
ideas about the lack of boundaries between art and the ordinary materials
of the world and, in 1955, he began a series of paintings based on the
American flag, followed by a series of targets and sequences of numbers
and letters.
These subjects are formal systems or grids, and are central to Johns'
art, which he explained as being concerned with things that are looked
at, seen over and over, but not really seen. Because their basic design
had already been accomplished elsewhere, he could, by transferring them
to the canvas, "recreate" them, creating new perceptions of these forms
by questioning their basic identity. These early paintings all use the
rare medium of wax encaustic: pigment folded into wax and newspaper strips
then dipped into the colored wax and affixed to the canvas. More wax was
then brushed on the surface, giving a heavily brushstroked appearance and
causing the object to seem slightly embedded within the medium.
In 1959, Johns saw a collection of Marcel Duchamp
"objects," an experience which was to cause a metamorphosis in his work
during the sixties. Johns began to use the paint itself as a new kind of
structure, affixing objects such as a broom or ruler to the canvas. Johns'
paintings had a considerable influence on both the "Pop Art" of the sixties
and on the depersonalized, hard edged abstractions of artists such as Frank
Stella and Kenneth Nolan.
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Jasper
Johns
Three
Flags
Flag,
1954
Jasper
Johns
Map
Jasper
Johns
Target,
1974
Jasper
Johns
Map,
1978
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