Category: art

In 1974 collector Victor Ganz told Jasper Johns that a couple of prints had been damaged by a water leak. Johns said to send them, and he’d see what he could do. He then reworked them with gouache, pencil, and pastel into new, unique drawings. “Victor naturally called Johns to thank him, and when asked what he had been up to, Victor replied, ‘I am pouring water on all the other prints.’”

That story came from modern print dealer Susan Lorence, and it was included in Pepe Karmel’s essay for “Drawing Over,” a 2010 show of Johns’s overdrawn and overpainted prints at Castelli Gallery. [The gallery has a PDF of the catalogue.]

Lorence’s Flag, above, was one of six reworked Flag lithograph proofs included in that show. Karmel explained the process, where, in 1994, Johns painted and drew over a set of proof prints from the upper stone from a 1972 lithograph, Two Flags, in a variety of mediums. Several, including Lorence’s were repainted with a corborundum wash, a material used in intaglio printing, that, like the graphite washes Johns used in the 1960s, had “a granular texture and a gunmetal sheen” that stood apart from the lithograph ink’s matte surface.

The other corborundum wash Flag in the show sold at Christie’s in 2016. I saw another one at Matthew Marks in 2024. Christie’s says Johns reworked seven 1972 Flags, though I don’t know if that’s the Castelli six plus one, or if they mean he did seven corborundum wash ones. They’re all in the CR, though, so you’ll have time to research it before the Contemporary Day Sale on May 21st. I’m just happy for the granular texture and the gunmetal sheen.

21 May 2026, Lot 429: Jasper Johns, Flag, 1972-94, est $1-1.5m [update: sold for $1.245m][christies]

Some of the most amazing artworks in S.I. Newhouse’s collection are coming up for sale, and of the sixteen works at Christie’s next month, Jasper Johns’s Alley Oop is the one I’d place an insider petroleum futures trade about the reopening of the Straits of Hormuz for. Actually, no, but it is l0w-key the best, even among some greats.

Though it is similar in form to Johns’s two Flag on Orange Field paintings that precede it, it’s based on an entirely different found image: a comic strip about ae thrown-out-of-time caveman named Alley Oop, collaged onto a piece of cardboard, and abstracted with gestural brushstrokes in oil.

The provenance is tight, not because it was in S.I.’s collection, but because Johns made it for Rauschenberg, and it stayed with him until Newhouse bought it in 1988. Rauschenberg sold his art collection to finance ROCI, his multi-year international initiative to foster cross-cultural understanding and appreciation of differences through art.

It was first seen in public in 1964, in Johns’s show at the Jewish Museum, but it is a painting for one person, or rather, for two. Jonathan D. Katz did important work tracing Alley Oop to comic strip references in two of Rauschenberg’s early combines made in 1954—Collection and Charlene—artworks that the artists lived with throughout their time together. Rauschenberg actually used three copies of the same comic strip, from multiple copies of the same day’s newspaper, in the two works. But the twist is, the comic was called Moon Mullins, and it used the original acrobat-related meaning of Alley Oop as a punchline about the reckless things a boy does to impress a girl.

Whatever its meaning—and Katz floats several possible queer theory-based interpretations as he maps out the context of these artists at this moment in their lives, and at this moment in their homophobic culture—Alley Oop was a reference Johns and Rauschenberg shared. It’s an example of the private language of couples that appeared in both of their work at a pivotal point in their practices, when such personal, autobiographical, and expressionistic content was supposedly stripped from their art.

It turns out it’s there, but it was just not meant for you, or me, or anyone else to recognize. And I love that for them.

Craig Starr has a show of Jasper Johns Flags organized with the artist, in memory of Agnes Gund. I like the little catalogue and Richard Schiff’s essay about the artist as a subject. But I really love this bit of the show’s announcement text, which sums up where we find ourselves right now on the US flag as a subject:

Across the exhibition, Johns tests how far this familiar symbol can be altered while remaining legible. The flags are stripped of their usual conventions—their singularity, their expected color palette, and even their stable symbolic meaning—turning the motif into a flexible structure whose identity is transformed. These nontraditional treatments activate the associations embedded within the symbol itself. A flag is never neutral: it carries meanings that shift with the viewer’s nationality, historical moment, and personal relationship to the nation it represents. As an emblem of the United States—its government, ideals, and people—the image is inevitably political. It is also a popular symbol that, much like the Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, can be recontextualized through repetition and display. By altering its palette, multiplying its form, or isolating its structural elements, Johns transforms the flag from a stable symbol into a site where cultural attitudes, anxieties, and projections surface. The motif hovers between familiarity and estrangement, inviting viewers to reconsider an image they thought they already knew.

I also love the little ink on plastic Flag on Orange Field Johns gave to Mark Lancaster in 1977, which is at once a depiction of an image as object—the original 1958 painting—and an incredible object itself.