wait, you said you saw it in a dream? Jasper Johns, 24, with Flag and saw, the lean-in variation, 1955, photographed by Robert Rauschenberg, who had a combine upstairs called Rebus, via RRF
What if I’ve been wrong all along about the origin story of Jasper Johns’s Flag?
The first flag painting I did came in the Fifties when I was trying to become a painter, and I had been working in various…styles, I guess. Nothing seeming to mean much to me, except that one made a picture, there it was. And I one night dreamed that I had painted a flag of the United States of America and I got up the next morning and went out and bought materials and began to paint this flag.
That’s the longest version of the story I think I’ve seen, from a 1966 TV interview with curator Alan Solomon. When I put parts of the interview transcript online in 2011, I was skeptical of the dream story. Not that I didn’t believe it, or thought Johns wasn’t telling the truth, but that it seemed like he hinted at other possible stories, but was now sticking with the one no one could question or investigate.
There’s nothing more subjective and unassailable than a dream. It completely removes the historic or referential or metaphoric or biographical possibilities for painting a flag. Or rather, “this flag.”
But instead of holding out for a truer or more revealing alternative, long suppressed, maybe there’s value in taking Johns at his word, and accepting the dream story on its own terms. Because there is a natural follow-on question: “Why did you do what you dreamed you did?”
Jasper Johns, Target with Plaster Casts (JJCR P4), 1955, encaustic and collage on canvas and wood with objects, also with encaustic on them, apparently 52 x 44 1/4 in., bought by Leo Castelli, 1958, sold to David Geffen 1993, currently on loan to the Guggenheim Bilbao, I believe.
Target with Plaster Casts (1955) has been vexing people since 1958 [or 1957, actually.] It’s the red-headed stepchild of Jasper Johns’s breakthrough work. Or maybe the green-dicked stepchild. The presence of body parts generally and a penis specifically have made critics’ questions seem especially awkward: What does it mean? What does it reveal about the artist? Oh wait, I didn’t mean that. But actually, does that mean the target’s a butt?
And the penis has been causing curators problems from the beginning. Meyer Schapiro selected Target with Plaster Casts and Green Target to show at the Jewish Museum in 1957. Then the museum put the work in a literal closet until Johns agreed to add some “mystery” to it by closing the penis lid; the artist angrily refused, and had the work returned. [This is where Leo Castelli saw Green Target and determined to track the unknown artist down and give him a show.]
It echoes the oft-repeated story—I’ve repeated it myself, in fact—of Alfred Barr at Johns’s groundbreaking 1958 show at Castelli, wanting to buy Target for Plaster Casts for MoMA, but only if Johns agreed to permanently closing the little door on the cast plaster penis. Johns refused again, and so Barr bought Target with Four Faces instead [and later gave the Sculls retroactive credit for the purchase, which they had nothing to do with], along with two other works, and he arranged for Philip Johnson to buy his other problematic fave, Flag, so he wouldn’t have to rationalize it to MoMA’s other trustees. And so Target with Plaster Casts became one of just two paintings that didn’t sell from that show. [Except that Leo Castelli bought it for himself, and kept it 35 years. So really, only White Flag didn’t sell, which is a mystery for another day.]
Anyway, a recent rightwing-coded attempt to rebrand AI fabrications as Saidiya Hartman-style critical fabulation reminded me of some of the contorted criticism of Johns’s work, his early work, and particularly Target with Plaster Casts. Gavin Butt’s 2005 dissertation on art world gossip, Between You And Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963, is an important and fascinating excavation, not just of often underground context of queer art history; it also makes the case for pulling what had been considered out-of-bounds subjects into meaningful, even revelatory art discourse.
But Butt also writes some hilariously cringe speculative monologues, ventriloquizing contemporary responses to Target with Plaster Casts from the likes of Barr and Andy Warhol. So instead of worrying about trustee reactions or public controversy, Butt imagines Barr angsting out out over his unexpected attraction to Johns’s [sic] penis, while Warhol size queens out about it, certain that it is, in fact, Johns’s, right? This emphasis, like Fred Orton’s much more muted but uptight interpretations, and Jill Johnston’s interviewing, and Jonathan Katz’s queer metaphors, and a lot of criticism since the mid-1990s, ends up concentrating on autobiography and Johns’s identity—acknowledged or not, performed properly [sic] or not—as a gay man.
See? He’s not doctrinaire about it: Dan Budnik, Jasper Johns at the Ernst Haas Studio with Target with Plaster Casts and Target with Four Faces, East 71st Street, New York, 1958, signed archival pigment print, 22 x 17 in., at Etherton Gallery
And suddenly it occurs to me that these constructions don’t do justice to Target with Plaster Casts specifically, and vice versa, and actually even miss some key things Johns was doing, and the context in which he did them. Here’s what I’m wondering, seeing and thinking: my sense is, this work is not an anomaly, but fits in perfectly with what Johns was making and seeing at the time, and with how he worked. And it wasn’t abandoned, a path not taken; it resonates with things he continued to explore.
Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 2000, 11 x 7 1/2 in., acrylic and graphite on four sheets of plastic, collection the artist, on view at Craig Starr
Can’t you just imagine making this? Or rather, Jasper Johns making this?
In 2000, when he was seventy, he sat down with three flag-shaped sheets of plastic, a pencil, and a ruler, and painted this tiny version of Three Flags, which he affixed to another sheet of plastic. His signature is like filigree.
He’s made stacked Three Flags works on paper [sic] before. What prompted this, I wonder? He’s kept it, as one would, obviously. Can you imagine doing anything else with this but keep it?
I’m trying to remember where I read that the parts of the Three Flags covered by flags are actually painted a monochrome grey. Is that from the CR? Emily Tremaine’s biography? I’ll work on that.
Meanwhile, who is going to find out what’s under these flags on plastic? The plastic should be easier than the canvases to investigate non-invasively. But who’s going to ask Johns to take it out of the frame so they can shine a light through it? Not me. I’ve peppered him with enough Flag-related requests already.
Cy Twombly Facsimile Objects CT3 & CT4, 2026, dye sublimation prints on aluminum
A trip to Rimini was not on his chronology but Twombly’s photo of Miramare was from 2005, and I think his trips to Wal-Mart in Lexington were endless, but this one was from 2007. The range is incredible. NGL, these things are intoxicating.
I’ve never been able to keep up with Robert Rauschenberg’s print practice, which has often passed by me in a blur. So I wasn’t surprised not to recognize @garadinervi’s post of what turned out to be a proof of a single stone from Visitation I & II, a pair of 1965 ULAE lithographs. Each of the “actual” prints was made with two of three different stones, but when the Art Institute of Chicago bought ULAE’s collection, they also got seven variants.
Sorting this out led me to ULAE’s own site and archive, and the 1999 Ruminations series, where Rauschenberg made splashy portrait/homages of nine people who influenced his early life and artistic career, by brushing developer of photogravure plates. The resulting images echo the imperfections of his earlier solvent transfer process works, and seems to use previously published photos of the subjects, so no new intimacies or revelations. But honestly, what gets me is the project itself—and the names.
Ileana, Tanya, Jap and John [Cage] are canonical. ‘topher for his son Christopher (and his uncredited ex-wife Susan Weil), Bubba’s Sister (the artist’s sister Janet) and Big and Little Bullys (his parents) feels like a lot of familial complexity. And the last two exes, Ace (Steve Paxton) and Eagle Eye (Cy Twombly).
There’s a combine titled Ace (1962) from the Paxton era. But unless it’s Cockney rhyming slang, the best I can come up with so far for Eagle Eye is Dodie Kazanjian’s 1994 Vogue profile of Twombly where Rauschenberg has all the best quotes. [“He spent my half of our grant on Roman sculpture.” It was Twombly’s grant.] Anyway, of their window shopping in Rome, Kazanjian wrote, “His eagle eye for quality deceives some people into thinking of him as a great decorator,” and I wonder if it stuck.
From the New York Times: “’That’s my first sculpture,’ Alessandro, who became an artist, told Maia. Father and son created this elaborate sand castle in 1963 on the beach in Sperlonga, which has been a resort in southern Italy since the time of the emperor Tiberius.”
News of a previously undocumented sculptural collaboration between Allesandro and Cy Twombly would normally be the lead story. But, of course, it was documented, and it is the documentation that here deserves attention.
Tatiana Franchetti Twombly, Cy’s wife, took thousands of photos over sixty years, including this one, on a beach in Sperlonga in 1963. Alessandro’s daughter Maia found the negatives in the house where Tatiana died in 2010. She is putting on a show in Rome in June, and has published just a hundred in a book, Stella Honey, Cy’s pet name for Tatiana. There are 18 in the Times.
Jasper Johns, Flag, 1972/1994, carborundum wash over lithograph on paper, 17 1⁄8 x 23 3⁄8 inches, selling at Christies in May 2026
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.’”
Six Flags: installation view of Jasper Johns: Drawing Over, at Castelli Gallery, Nov-Dec. 2010
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.
Jasper Johns, Alley Oop, 1958, oil on newsprint and paper on cardboard mounted on masonite, 23 1/4 x 18 in., selling from the collection of S.I. Newhouse at Christie’s on 18 May 2026 [update: sold for $5.8m]
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.
Christie’s has a cleaner image of the 22 Jun 1958 Alley Oop comic strip that Johns painted over than that guy who’s so mad about Lichtenstein. Johns also either reformatted the panels to fit his form, or had a version printed wider than this onw.
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.
Alley Oop from 22 June 1958 reconfigured to match the 3-row layout Johns used. Newspapers regularly edited comic strips, so maybe this is how Johns found it? Or did he reconfigure it himself to make it more flag-shaped? Why not buy Alley Oop and have your conservators study it and see?
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.
Jasper Johns, Flag on Orange Field, 1977, Ink on plastic, 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches, originally a gift to Mark Jenkins
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’sSoup 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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
if it’s 1969, I believe this photo of the Twombly sofa is by Ugo Mulas
Like I said, every Ugo Mulas photo rewrites art history, if only by making us realize every other photographer of the Twombly rooms at via Monserrato decided to censor his sofa.
Ugo Mulas, c. 1969/70, the Twombly/Franchetti salon in Rome, with Warhol and Chamberlain installed properly, and a Bolsena painting, off its stretcher and unrolled ON THE FLOOR WTF, via Cy Twombly Homes & Studios
We still live in a Cy Twombly world Horst built. His European dealers made their own versions of via di Monserrato to live in. And whether it’s to identify works in the background, or to copy the floor, we’re all left poring over the same few photos, a dozen or so slivers from which we try to construct some meaning, to conjure a view of a place and a moment. We make do with what history has left.
Except there’s more. Photographer Ugo Mulas was everywhere in the art world in the 1960s and 70s, taking pictures of everyone and where they worked and everything they made there. Mulas published a couple of books early on, hard to find and expensive; fact is, we haven’t really seen Mulas’s world or processed it. And it feels like every one of his thousands of photos could change Art History forever, yet his only apparent option is to try to sell a dozen of the aesthetic ones as editioned prints.
There are a dozen Ugo Mulas photos of c. 1969/70 via di Monserrato in the Cy Twombly Homes & Studios book, including the one above. There’s another photo of the same room in which the large table covered with an unprimed canvas looks like a mattress. In a third photo, there are instead two acrylic coffee tables covered with photos and art tchotchkes, so the mattress was a choice, or a moment.
Those spindly floor lamps are everywhere in Mulas’ Twombly photos, and nowhere in Horst’s. So is non-Twombly artwork. Warhol, Chamberlain, Johns, Alex Hay, Picasso, the Franchettis didn’t just have an artist in the family; they had direct access to Castelli’s backroom—and a guy who could get it for them wholesale.
But when I say every single Ugo Mulas photo could change Art History, this is what I mean:
Bela Lugosi, Bed
Is this where the mattress ended up? The bedroom is not in Horst, and this Mulas is not in Homes & Studios. The carpet, the velvet, the sheets, Twombly’s love affair with green didn’t start in Bassano. The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) is one of Warhol’s earliest screenprints, which he made himself, on paper. On November 22, 1963.
[a few weeks later update] As I was saying…
This photo of the Twombly sofa is apparently from 1969, by Mulas. Which means every photographer at via Monserrato since then decided NOT to photograph this sofa. They’re all implicated. The Mulas interior shots were also apparently for/published in Vogue Italia in 1971 [not Jul/Aug, Nov, or Dec.] Also, here is a 1968 fashion shoot in Twombly’s apartment.
Jasper Johns, Perilous Night, 1990, Watercolor and ink on paper, 30½ × 23¼ in., on view at Matthew Marks in 2024
I really wished I’d seen the show of Jasper Johns drawings at Matthew Marks when I went deep on the little stick figures motif. Perilous Night, a 1990 watercolor, was the earliest of several works in the show in which the little guys appeared.
And I REALLY wish I’d gotten the catalogue immediately, because I just picked it up this afternoon, and Hilton Als had this to say about the stick figures in Perilous Night:
The right side of this watercolor and ink on paper is a replica of a score by John Cage, a close friend of Johns for many years. Cage wrote “Perilous Night” in 1943 and 1944. A composition for a prepared piano, it’s an angry piece whose strong rhythms speak to us emotionally—he was going through a difficult time with his then wife, the surrealist artist Xenia Cage—even as we understand that Cage is asking questions about what the piano can and cannot do. Who’s to say? In Johns’s piece, the sheet music floats against an abstract field made up of vertical shapes that reach up, up, up toward the top of the page. On the bottom of the work, a strip of green field. Three little stick figures stand on that green, gesticulating. Who are they? What are they? Fallen notes from Cage’s score?(Johns doesn’t render the notes in Cage’s score; all we see are traces of notes.) Or are those tiny figures from Johns’s and Cage’s past? Johns’s Perilous Night is an exercise, too, in depth—an experiment that challenges Johns’s famous flatness. One image tells us about another: the sheet music leads us to the abstraction, and the abstraction leads us to that little strip of green. It’s a work that’s giddy with possibility, a kind of “what if” piece. What if I put a little green here? And figures there? What happens to the work? To the eye? To the eye of the ideas?
I still have to see Richard Prince’s current show at Gagosian, and from the pre-press, I thought I’d be more interested in the sculptures. But looking through the works online, a couple of good-looking paintings reminded me of his hippie drawing paintings, which are works I regularly dig. And a couple, like Untitled (Folk Songs) above, from 2022, remind me—very unexpectedly—of Jasper Johns. And those are two streams I somehow never imagined would cross on this blog.
But maybe the surprise is from the Johns side. Just the other day @digitaldetritus posted an important but underappreciated [by me, anyway] Johns on tumblr: Decoy from 1971. Decoy was a painted variation of a complex series of prints, which were all part of a larger, retrospective reworking of Johns’ sculptures.
NGL, it was the heavily processed mechanical images of the sculptures that first made the connection. But then it was seeing the connective tissue of messy, even aggressively messy brushstrokes extend across both paintings. Prince talks a lot about de Kooning and Picasso, and there are interesting Guston shoutouts in other paintings in the show. But it was less this kind of throwback reference or direct engagement than the realization that some of Johns’s painting rhymed, or reverberated, with what Prince was doing.
Turns out Jasper Johns has not stopped painting after all. Matthew Marks’ preview for Art Basel Paris includes an untitled work from 2025 that’s an overpainted print. It’s a mode he’s used a lot, for many years. I think it’s like this one from 2018, with the skeleton in Johns’s image basement.
Johns showed a variety of skeleton-related works, including paintings and monotypes, at Marks in 2019, including, obviously, several works with the Little Guys stick figures. Besides the use of acrylic, the other thing to note about this new painted work in Paris is that it has no Little Guys. And the only conclusion I can arrive at is that I have made too much of a public deal about this motif, and Johns has set out to obliterate them from his work. My bad.
