I’ve had this tiny Jasper Johns drawing about Duchamp in my tabs for months now, but I guess I’m finally going to post it now because the Wolfgang Tillmans window photo reminded me of to.
Litanies of The Chariot is Johns’s first quotation of another artist’s work, sort of: it’s a note/poem/text from Duchamp’s The Green Box (1934), as translated in 1960 by George Heard Hamilton and Richard Hamilton:
SLOW LIFE
VICIOUS CIRCLE
ONANISM
HORIZONTAL
ROUND TRIP
FOR THE BUFFER
JUNK OF LIFE
CHEAP CONSTRUCTION
TIN, CORDS
IRON WIRE
ECCENTRIC WOODEN
PULLEYS
MONOTONOUS FLY WHEEL
BEER PROFESSOR
Johns had a copy of The Green Box by then—he loaned it to the Whitney in 2021—and he even reviewed The Green Book, as the English version is known. But he apparently made this drawing in 1961 at the request of Robert Scull, who gave it to MoMA curator Dorothy C. Miller. The timing of it all makes me wonder if it’s related to the Sculls being retroactively credited with buying Target With Four Faces for the museum, a 1958 transaction they had nothing to do with, but which by the time of Johns’s show at the Jewish Museum in 1964, was listed as their gift.
But I’ve posted this about Target, and I’ve posted this about Litanies before. What sticks with me now is the way Litanies of Chariots has grown over the years.
When it was first shown at the Jewish Museum in 1964, it was listed as 4 5/16 x 3 1/2 inches. [Also it’s title was Litany of The Chariot (on a text by Marcel Duchamp).] In 1996 Litanies appears with the same dimensions as an illustration in Roberta Bernstein’s essay for MoMA’s Johns retrospective. Bernstein also notes that in The Green Box, “Duchamp crossed out the Litanies with a large X and followed them with the instruction: “(to be entirely redone).”
[Which, honestly, feels like it heightens the appeal for Johns, and confounds me a bit that it might have somehow been Scull’s idea. Miller didn’t need Scull to get her a Johns; she bought one for herself when she bought three for MoMA from his first show. She was in Johns’s studio and putting him in shows before Scull even knew who he was. So again, why was this work commissioned?]
When it sold at Christie’s after Miller’s death in 2003, it was 5 1/8 x 3 5/8 inches. The width feels within the margin of error, but the height was including something else.
In the drawings catalogue raisonné, the work is the sheet, basically: 7 1/8 x 6 1/8 inches. The sense of what the work is, what marks constitute the work, changed. It was once just the most worked over block. Then it was also the signature. Then/finally it was the palimpsest structure of lines that guide the traced lettering and outline the graphite washed field.
I think that’s the measurement I’m going with: the one the artist said.