Jasper Johns Watermark

photo of two open copies of jasper johns artist book in a vitrine, with a thickly printed black cross hatch pattern facing a kind of bodily text by samuel beckett, at gagosian in 2026 — two examples from the edition of 250+30AP+20HC of Foirades/Fizzles, by Samuel Beckett, with etchings and lithographs by Jasper Johns, 1976, at Gagosian

It never really clicked for whatever reason, but maybe it was seeing two copies of Jasper Johns’ illustrated collaboration with Samuel Beckett in the Gagosian crosshatches show; the book just blew my mind. What a gorgeous object. And stuffed—absolutely stuffed—with Johns etchings and lithographs, and wrapped in another lithograph.

Foirades/Fizzles got a lot of attention immediately, and its origin story has been retold over the years, its anecdotes mined for insights. [This discussion in 2025 in Gagosian Quarterly is good, if a bit hype.] There was a whole book and show about it, before my time. I somehow missed how different it is from a traditional artist-illustrated edition of a text.

jasper johns 1972 untitled painting in four parts has two panels at the center with red and black flagstone shapes in or on a field of white flagstone tracery. on the far left panel a cross hatch pattern roughly the same scale as the flagstones in orange, green, and purple. on the far right, a cast assemblage of boards and body parts affixed to a tan background. this painting is in the collection of the museum ludwig now in cologne — Jasper Johns, *Untitled*, 1972. Oil, encaustic, and collage on canvas with objects (four panels), 72 × 192 1/4 in. (182.9 × 488.3 cm) overall. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, via The Brooklyn Rail’s conversation around the 2021-22 Johns retrospectives

Johns asked Beckett for unpublished texts to work with; Beckett’s response was to translate texts he’d originally written in French, only some of which had been published. Johns’s prints used elements of what he considered his most successful painting to date, Untitled (1972), part of his now-recognized process of continuing to explore elements from paintings in other mediums. And he worked with Picasso’s printer, who opened up an etching world to him. The result is its own entirely separate, integrated thing, inextricable from his entire practice.

an open spread from jasper johns and samuel beckett's book foirades-fizzles, with the outline shape of a torso unpainted/unprinted, and the stenciled word torso underneath, and a spraypainted splatter and drip spot that covers it all, except the whole thing is an etching. some beckett text on the facing page. this copy from moma shows how oil from the thickly printed ink was absorbed like a ghostly monotype into the facing page. — Jasper Johns, Torso from *Foirades/Fizzles, Folio 17*, aquatint with so much ink it made that ghost print on the facing page of MoMA’s copy

Ironically, Foirades/Fizzles‘ distinctiveness comes in spite of Johns using a classic orange/purple/green crosshatch print that appears in the endpapers and box lining for at least two other book covers: a screenprint on a 1977 Brooke Alexander catalogue, and a lithograph dustjacket on the 1977 Whitney exhibition catalogue. So maybe I can cut myself a little slack if I’d mostly seen it in artist book auctions looking familiar, and routine, when it was exactly the opposite.

this example of jasper johns and samuel beckett's artist book sold at sothebys in 2021. the grey fabric box is standing open behind it, with a purple tassel pull that matches the orange, green, and purple cross hatch lithograph lining the two faces of the box. the book is open, with impossibly sexy and tactile edges of handmade paper, to a two-page spread print by johns, with a crosshatch design on the left and a flagstone motif on the right. but this is here really for the paper — ed 44/250 of Johns/Beckett’s Foirades/Fizzles, 1976, sold at Sotheby’s in 2021

And as the photo of an edition sold at Sotheby’s indicates, this book is a deliriously sexy object. It is the paper. A raw sheaf of gorgeous paper with an image surprise on every leaf. And I somehow missed until this weekend that the paper for Foirades/Fizzles, from Moulin Richard de Bas, is watermarked with Beckett’s initials and Johns’s signature. Twenty years before Yvon Lambert had Twombly’s handwriting turned into a watermark—for an On Kawara artist book, which is weirder the longer I think about it—Jasper Johns had paper made with his own signature—AND Samuel Beckett’s. I thought I appreciated Johns’s paper game, and I did not.