As someone who spent more than two years tracking down the greatest lost Jasper Johns painting, you’d think I would have already identified all the other lost Johnses. But I had not.
Though the list of destroyed Johns works is certainly longer and more mysterious—the artist is famous for destroying things he made before 1954, and the fire in his Edisto Island, SC home in 1966 wiped out many works Johns kept for himself, including many early sketchbooks—there are not that many lost or missing Johns works. There are only four, and all date from 1955-64.
Besides the Flag (1955) inside Robert Rauschenberg’s combine, Short Circuit (also 1955), and the Figure 4 (1959), there is another number painting, Figure 2 (1963, P138), whose trail goes cold after entering Karl Ströher’s collection in Darmstadt.
But the last one, and the second most interesting lost Johns, is called Gastro. It’s one of four paintings Johns made during his stay in Tokyo in the summer of 1964. It is an encaustic collage of a coaster from the Bar Gastro [バー ガストロ], which was a gift to the bar’s owners, Kiyo and Shōichirō Miyagaki. [宮垣 昭一郎,キヨ] .
Gastro was a hub of the Tokyo contemporary art community, and I assume it was in Ginza, near Johns’ temporary studio at the Artists Hall. It was decorated with artworks by regulars, who were known as the Gastro-ren「ガストロ連」, or Gastro-gang. Johns must have become an honorary member, and his little painting, just five inches square, remained in Gastro until Shōichirō’s death in 1988. According to the CR, the whereabouts of the entire Gastro-ren art hoard is unknown.
Given the prominence of Miyagaki and other Gastro-ren members like poet-critic Takiguchi Shūzō, I’m surprised some enterprising art historian hasn’t tracked everything down yet, but here we are.