Category: johns, rauschenberg, et al

Little Guys Show Trials

In 2010 the National Gallery of Art acquired hundreds and hundreds of trial proofs from Jasper Johns. They document, if not easily reveal, the intricate process of making Johns’ prints, a process Johns has brought into the center of his practice from almost the beginning.

Searching through proofs on the NGA’s website is a bit of a slog, but when this sketch for Leo Castelli’s Little Guys print turned up, I thought I’d better go through the stacks.

a trial proof by jasper johns for a 1990 print titled the seasons includes three plates: the top two are tiled together into a wonky boomerang shape and contain the head and part of the arms of a stick figure johns quotes from picasso; the bottom landscape rectangle contains three stick figures, a motif he first used in 1982, in a little group, each holding a brush or two. there is an x on what seems to be the ground of the space they inhabit. this tria print is in the colleciton of the national gallery of art.
Jasper Johns, The Seasons (Trial Proof), 1990, etching & aquatint, three plates on a 29 3/8 x 21 1/4 in sheet, collection National Gallery of Art

And so I found this trial proof for The Seasons, a 1990 ULAE print that is one of the earliest print appearances of the trio of stick figures. And it looks like they travel by themselves. The proof is actually three separate plates from what would be a much larger composition. Coincidentally or not, the other plates contain part of the other stick figure Johns uses, from the UNESCO Picasso.

the seasons, 1990, by jasper johns, is a 50 inch tall print published by ulae with a jumble of motifs relating to the series of paintings of the same name: angled ladders and shaded areas form an indistinct cruciform arrangement, with a figure of some kind in each arm: a shadow of the artist, a shadow filled with dots, a silhouette of a small child standing like the aliens in close encounters, if you ask me, and a stick figure from picasso. other motifs johns likes to use are sprinkled around, and below them all are the three little stick figures that are the most interesting to me. ymmv obv
Jasper Johns, The Seasons (ULAE 0249), 1990, intaglio, 50 1/4 x 44 1/2 in., ed. 50, via ULAE

Whether all prints, or all Johns’ prints, are made this way, I have no idea. But now that you mention it, this print in particular feels very much like that: composed by assembling and setting multiple, prepared plates together like an old timey newspaper publisher. That certainly takes away much of the stress of working images into a 50-inch plate without error or change, I guess.

In any case, the plate with the Little Guys is 4 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches, and notably includes another element, an X marking the spot over to the left, and a line defining their ground.

The Picasso stick figure is embedded in the center of the composition, and all the other figures—the child silhouette, the shadows and inverted shadows from the Seasons paintings read as Johns himself, the Duchamp profile, even the snowman—are integrated as well. But these three stick figures at the bottom seem to still be set apart and doing their own thing, in their own space, even with their own ground to stand on—while still a part of the entire image.

Jasper Johns, The Seasons (trial proof), 1990 [nga.gov]
Previously: Jasper Johns’ Little Guys: Origins

Jenny Saville On Twombly Looking And Working

Via Wayne Bremser comes a shoutout to Cy Twombly’s Duchamp references, but not the ones I’d thought, and not where I’d expected it to come from.

In February 2024 Jenny Saville spoke on Twombly’s work and her connection to him at The Menil Collection. After acclimating to her regularly not mentioning the gallery she shared with Twombly, it turned out to be a fascinating talk, full of insights on painterly technique and reference and inspiration. Which, hold that thought.

At the moment cued above, though, Saville describes Twombly’s “banging together” of avant-garde modernism and the ancient world through “the Duchampian act of writing ‘APOLLO’ on a piece of paper or a canvas.” I’ll need to sit with it a minute, but I guess if anything can be a readymade, then so can the 4,000 years [sic] of human association with that word.

Saville’s illustrated discussion of Twombly is full of painterly details found in artists from Leonardo to Cézanne, and it feels rare to hear and see these references. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve felt Twombly’s painting and mark-making has been considered alone, if not sui generis, or in the context of his poetic sources, and not so much in relation to art of the world/past. Not for Saville, though.

a youtube screenshot of two brushy, obscured blobs, as jenny saville would call them, details from cy twombly paintings, and a detail of a brushy, blurry, atmospheric painting by turner of a dark cloud dumping rain into a darker sea, with jenny saville to the right in a little inset box, from her feb 2024 lecture at the menil collection in houston
screenhsot of Jenny Saville discussing Cy Twombly and Turner in February 2024 at The Menil Collection

One artist she comes back to more than any other is Turner, and the juxtapositions of Turner’s and Twombly’s atmospheric and spatial and abstract pursuits are fascinating.

Most of the talk is a close look/walkalong of the Menil’s Twombly centerpiece, Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor). But she ends with an expansive read of a blackboard painting [Untitled, 1971] filled with figure eights descending from left to right, and she didn’t mention Duchamp. And it still made sense.

Marion Barthelme Lecture: Jenny Saville on Cy Twombly [youtube, s/o @waynebremser]
Previously: Send More Twombly Duchamp Nudes

The Lost Jasper Johns

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.

black and white photo of jasper johns' lost 1964 painting titled gastro after the name of the bar owned by miyagaki shoichiro and his wife kiyo, which is printed on the round coaster affixed to the 5-inch square canvas by brushy blobs and drips of encaustic. one of four missing or lost paintings by jasper johns, it disappeared when gastro closed in 1988.
Jasper Johns, Gastro (CR P138, 1964, 5 x 5 in., encaustic and collage on canvas,

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] .

a group of japanese men in suits and one woman seated in a rock walled bar in harajuku in 1967, celebrating the completion of takiguchi shuzo's proof of poetic experiments: 1927-1937. looks like quite a party
Miyagaki Shōichirō [top row, right corner] and gang at a 1967 launch party for Takiguchi Shūzō’s Poetic Experiments: 1927-1937, photo: Funaga Mitsutoshi via Keio U

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.

Send Twombly Duchamp Nudes

a framed cy twombly work on paper, 30 x 40 inches, is a medium grey background with noticeable brushstrokes, and a cascade of figure eights and fragments thereof in white crayon, descending from the upper left to the lower right, the same direction as duchamp's nude descending a staircase, of which this was once considered a study, which would make it kind of figurative, which might explain why it was de-titled when it sold at sotheby's in nov 2024
Cy Twombly, apparently not titled Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase after all, 1968, oil and crayon on paper, 30 x 40 in., sold yesterday by the estate of Lothar Schirmer at Sotheby’s

When it was published in the 1999 catalogue of his own collection, Cy Twombly’s publisher Lothar Schirmer listed the title of this amazing 1968 drawing, which he’d acquired directly from the artist in 1968, as Study after Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase.

marcel duchamp's nude descending a staircase tracks the cubist, overlapping, fractured motion of a human figure painted in beiges as it descends from upper left to lower right, against a darker brown background. at the philadelphia museum of art
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (N0. 2), 1912, collection Philadelphia Museum of Art via Sotheby’s

When Schirmer (RIP) sold it yesterday at Sotheby’s, however, it was listed only as Untitled. And whoever wrote the lot essay for the Twombly wanted to connect it to Duchamp’s painting so bad, they began the essay with a picture of it.

And they said, “Untitled also pays homage to art historical forerunners and their attempt to capture movement in space and time,” without naming Duchamp. And then they quoted Suzanne Delehanty,

Like shadows of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, figure eights, frequent personages in Twombly’s cosmos of signs, borrowed perhaps from the mathematical symbol for infinity, multiply, recede and climb through the surface of a 1968 oil and crayon on paper to express, as does the 1912 nude, an abstraction of motion in space-time.

trying to call Twombly’s symbols and signs personages without surrendering their status as abstract marks. [Delehanty’s text is cited as coming from the collected writings on Twombly edited by Nicola del Roscio in 2002, which elides its origin as a catalogue text for Twombly’s 1975 show at the ICA in Philadelphia, the city of Duchampian love.]

Discussing this and a couple of other related works on paper in his catalogue for Twombly’s 1994 MoMA retrospective catalogue, Kirk Varnedoe mentioned Duchamp exactly once, before going on at length about the Futurists:

That language of flow and fracture draws directly on the early modern fascination with the “cinematic” decomposition of forms in motion, in Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase,1912) and most notably among Italian Futurist artists, particularly Giacomo Balla.

It feels like a confluence of aversions: to figuration, to referencing other artists’ work, or to referencing Duchamp’s works specifically, but it feels acute in the detitling of this particular drawing. Looking at Duchamp’s painting had an impact on Twombly’s most significant body of work, which he apparently referenced many times. And Twombly went to great lengths to make sure his work was permanently installed down the hall from Duchamp’s. I, for one, would love to see something more on this connection than a passing namecheck.

Al Ordover’s Johns’s The Figure 8

a 10 by 8 inch painting of the figure eight in messily blended black, grey, and white, without a distinct background or foreground object, but an overall abstract painting that also happens to depict a figure 8, was made in 1959 by jasper johns, and is being sold in november 2024 at sothebys
Jasper Johns, The Figure 8, 1959, 10 x 8 in., oil on canvas, [NOT?] being sold 20 Nov 2024 at Sotheby’s

In 1960, Leo Castelli’s gallery director Ivan Karp estimated that there were no more than fifteen people seriously collecting contemporary art. One of them was Al Ordover, who was one of the first people Karp took to Warhol’s studio.

Ordover bought this amazing little 1959 Jasper Johns painting, The Figure 8, from Castelli. One minute it’s obviously an 8, and the next it feels like it barely holds the 8 together.

Its only public exhibition was a December 1959 fundraising exhibition to benefit painter Nell Blaine, who had contracted polio during a summer trip to Mykonos. [Since vaccines are in the news, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced in 1955, and was still in early distribution stages in 1959. Blaine’s paralysis left her in a wheelchair for life and unable to paint for several years.]

Why none of the history or context of this painting, as opposed to Johns’ use of numbers as a form/subject generally, is in Sotheby’s lot text, is a mystery to me. But with generalities, unrelated quotes, hyperbole, and a single jpeg are how six-figure paintings are sold these days, I guess. [update: OR NOT.]

20 Nov 2024, Lot 34 : Jasper Johns, The Figure 8, 1959, est. $3-4m [sothebys]

Wants vs Needs

the cover of Gregor Stemmrich's Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Modernism, Literalism, Postmodernism is off white with blue text, like a museum wall label, above an empty gold but not metallic rectangle that might allude to the work discussed within for 1,028 pages
Gregor Stemmrich’s Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Modernism, Literalism, Postmodernism, 2023, from Hatje Cantz

I was like, this is it, I am going to finish Gregor Stemmrich’s 1,028-page monument of a book on Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing on this plane, and I put it in the bag.

And I ended up bingeing all six hours of the BBC Pride & Prejudice instead.

All The Erased de Kooning Drawings

The first wall at Glenstone that used to have Hilma af Klint drawings has been rotated. Now there is a whole row of stunning Willem de Kooning drawings of women, each, I thought the other day, more tantalizingly erasable than the next.

Mike Bidlo Erased de Kooning Drawings, installation view, Francis Naumann Fine Art, Sept-Nov 2005

While contemplating this embarrassment of targets and what Duchamp guru Francis Naumann had to say about the shovel, I was primed yet unprepared to know that in 2005 Naumann staged an entire show of Mike Bidlo’s Not Rauschenberg Erased de Kooning Drawings.

Mike Bidlo, Not De Kooning Woman, c. 1951, 12 1/2 x 9 1/4 in., as published in Francis Naumann’s 2005 catalogue, Mike Bidlo Erased de Kooning Drawings

According to Robert Rosenbaum’s essay in the catalogue I just got—and which seems like the only source for images of the actual works—Bidlo’s NREdKD began as almost a performance, when he erased what looked like a de Kooning in front of his shocked fellow guests at an artsy retreat in Maine in 2003. When a collector couldn’t buy it, he appealed to Naumann, who appealed to Bidlo, who agreed to make a whole show of them.

Mike Bidlo’s Not Robert Rauschenberg: Erased de Kooning Drawing, 2005, 22 1/4 x 18 3/8 in., ibid.

For each work, he made a beautiful Not de Kooning drawing, which he erased into a Not Rauschenberg. Each got a Johns-style label, and a facsimile FRAME IS PART OF ARTWORK frame, in a variety of dimensions. The show included documentation of the drawings, but also all the eraser crumbs, under glass, which, ngl, seems kind of corny.

Still as someone who, as I’ve already confessed here, thinks about erasing de Koonings whenever I see one, I can do naught but stan.

Mike Bidlo Erased de Kooning Drawings, Sept-Nov 2005 [francisnaumann]
previously, related riffs on Erased de Kooning Drawing: Archival Bühler-Rose

‘Now I’m Done.’

Slice, 2020, oil on canvas, 50 x 66 1/8 in., promised gift to MoMA

Catching up on Sean Tatol’s always invigorating takes at The Manhattan Art Review, including his review of Jasper Johns’ drawings show at Matthew Marks. Which, like his previous show, includes variations on his 2020 painting, Slice, that got a lot of attention during his double retrospective.

And this line caught me off guard: “He’s apparently announced that Slice is his last painting, and as far as last works go I can’t imagine a more eloquent invocation of mortality and infinity.”

So before getting to the “Wait, what??” let’s cover the, “Yes, and”: Slice certainly is a helluva painting to end on. With themes Tatol observed, rich source images across the board, and a popping backstory that’ll keep people talking, it delivers on multiple planes at once.

2020 photo of then local boarding school student Jéan-Marc Togodgue with Slice (2020) in Johns’ studio, taken by his basketball coach, Jeff Ruskin [via]

And after its star turn in the Whitney/PMA show, Slice was made an anonymous promised gift to MoMA, where the credits for Johns’ reference images expanded in 2023 to include not just ACL doodler Jéan-Marc Togodgue and astrophysicist Margaret Geller, but all Geller’s scientific collaborators on the 32yo Slice of the Universe map she sent the artist unbidden.

Untitled, 2020, graphite, watercolor, and colored pencil on paper, 23¼ × 18¼ in. via Marks

But all that said, Wait what? I could neither imagine nor find any context in which Johns would have made such an announcement. So I asked Sean where he’d heard it. And he mentioned a post artist and editor Walter Robinson made last month to two social media platforms: “Jasper Johns (b 1930): ‘MoMA got my first work and MoMA got my last work. Now I’m done.’ A drawings survey opens at Marks on West 24th on Sept 12.”

When reached, Robinson did not say from whom he heard this, or when, but only clarified he didn’t hear it from Johns. Meanwhile, the sound of it is still ringing in my head. “Now I’m done.”

Untitled, 2019, Graphite on paper, six sheets, each: 8¼ × 6 in. via Matthew Marks

Did Johns decide that after finishing Slice? How’d that go down? How done is he? The newest drawings in the current Marks show date from 2021, the year of the anonymous gift. Is he done with making altogether? The show also includes older works that have never been seen. Has Johns moved to curating? Maybe he’s decided to focus on just revealing stuff now? Let’s start with those little guys, but there is a long list.

Manhattan Art Review: Jasper Johns – Drawings 1982-2021 – Matthew Marks – **** [19933.biz]
@walterrobinsonstudio [threads]

Previously, very much related: Taking A Knee;
Gerhard Richter Painted;
Jasper Johns’ First Flag

Jasper Johns Little Guys

Jasper Johns, Perilous Night, 1990, Watercolor and ink on paper, 30½ × 23¼ in., on view at Matthew Marks

I know I’m never going to get a tattoo, but that doesn’t stop me from making a shortlist of tattoos I’d get. And the top Jasper Johns entry on the list are these little guys, with their little rakes, or brooms, or brushes. They’ve been turning up in Johns’s work for decades. They were there in his last drawings show at Matthew Marks, and they’re there again now.

They’re being towered over by an inky armprint, a tracing of Grünewald’s fallen soldier, and torn sheets of John Cage’s pivotal score in a dark and ominous sky, but they’re not daunted. They’re just going about their work, setting the scale, completing the composition. [This watercolor from 1990 predates the first appearance of the little guys in a painting by two+ years, btw. Is this Little Guys: Origins?]

Untitled, 2019, Graphite on paper, six sheets, each: 8¼ × 6 in. via Matthew Marks

Here they are in 2019, in these little drawings, just as busy as ever, working on the skulls. The 1990 guys look drawn by hand, but these guys, and the skull, are clearly reproduced with some mechanical means. I haven’t seen the show yet to figure it out, but nothing could be more Johnsian. [Or haven’t I? I remembered the related prints, but forgot that these little drawings were included in his 2021 show.]

On one level they’re pure exercises in composition. They’re literally just lines. But I can’t not also think of them as little scenes; the grouping practically demands a narrative of some kind. Can you imagine Johns just making up little situations and stories for his little guys? It’s been decades now. Do they have names? Do they have lore?

Even as the autobiographical elements of Johns’s project move in and out of focus over the years, it still feels a little weird or retrograde to wonder such things. But it also feels OK to assume that motifs and figures and strategies recur for a reason; Johns is not some automaton, throwing the same five ingredients into the pot every day.

Until I hear different, then, I’m going to assume they’re these little guys, happily working and living inside Johns’s capital I:

Previously, related [and I love that they used a knee drawing on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, btw]: Taking A Knee; also Blackened Angel; also Little Johns

Signatures of Significance

When I said I can’t get autographs? I meant, unless conceptually.

Sitting with this unexpected Bach auction for a minute, I realized I actually do get autographs when they convey a meaning beyond, “This person signed this,” or “I met/corresponded with this person.”

Unititled (Merce at the Minskoff), 2015-2018, interim state

Or when I project entirely subjective meaning onto them. Like when I found a souvenir towel from a Merce Cunningham performance on Broadway signed by Cunningham, Cage, and Rauschenberg, and I conjured a “logic” for this object that involved getting Jasper Johns to sign it.

That “logic,” or the pretense of it, was predicated on Johns being the designer of the performance poster. But of course, there were multiple other logics possible, from the art historic to the romantic, to the starkly commemorative, forcing an object into existence that links these four men—physically, contractually, notationally, quasi-publicly, as if there weren’t already countless other products of their decades-long interactions, filling archives and beyond. Here the autograph functions as a singular piece of evidence, superficial and contrived, of some other form of more substantial cultural meaning. But when signs are few, signatures will do.

“Rob Pruitt’s Autograph Collection,” exhibited at Luxembourg & Dayan London in 2012

And of course, the significant emptiness can become the subject itself. Like in Rob Pruitt’s Signature Series, large-format autographs on Belgian linen he’s collected since the Pruitt-Early days. I remember several occasions when Rob would suddenly produce a big piece of linen and a fat Sharpie from his backpack, and turn around, offering his back as a writing surface when none other was available.

Rob Pruitt’s Autograph Collection, 2012, published by Karma back in the day

Autographs then became a project, an artistic practice, which art world celebrities and citizens alike could appreciate. I remember seeing a few loosies in the wild, but eventually, after years of accumulation, Pruitt showed The Signature Series en masse. And like Byron Kim’s skin tone monochromes, these accumulated markers of somebody else become a self-portrait of the artist moving through the world.

Now going back to Bach and his chopped up and shuffled autograph collection, it’s possible to interpolate meaning from the otherwise random-seeming clusters. Maybe the lots reflect the order in which Bach collected his autographs, a project of a lifetime sliced into tranches based on minimum viable auction estimate.

Rob Pruitt’s Signatures Series [luxembourgco]
Previously, related: Untitled (Merce at the Minskoff), 2015-2018

‘This Is A Book I Haven’t Read’

photo of Jasper Johns by Bob Cato, via davidhudson

This morning David Hudson posted this c. 1950s photo of Jasper Johns I’d never seen in a space I didn’t recognize, and I had to know more. Looking for the photographer, Bob Cato, took me to another image he made of Johns and crew, which ran in the NY Times in February 2001, accompanying an article about a Carnegie Hall program celebrating John Cage and his collaborative circle. Kay Larson, who would go on to write a biography of Cage, did not actually discuss the photo.

1958 Bob Cato photo of Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, M.C. Richards, and Jasper Johns, as published in the NY Times, Feb. 4, 2001, via blackmountaincollege.org

It is from the 1958 photoshoot for the liner notes for the album version of “The 25 Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage.”

Continue reading “‘This Is A Book I Haven’t Read’”

El Arbol de Barbero

D245: Sketch for The Barber’s Tree, 1975, watercolor on paper, 22 1/4 x 30 1/4 in., collection of the artist, never been shown [at least through 2014], via JJCR-D

Maybe not being able to find the flagstones motif source, a Harlem wall glimpsed once through a taxi window and then lost, changed Jasper Johns’ approach a bit. Because by 1973, he did take note of the inspiration The Barber’s Tree. At least for the sketch [above], if not the painting, which turned out to be a mostly typical crosshatch motif executed in red and white.

And now we know what Johns knew.

Here is photographer Charles O’Rear’s image from “Mexico: The City That Founded A Nation,” a dispatch by Louis de la Haba and Albert Moldvay from the May 1973 issue of National Geographic.

It is small, and slight, but indeed eye-catching. It’s not clear who is responsible for this cringe caption, though, about “Indulging the national craze for color” and “The Mexicans’ passion for bright hues,” when every barber pole north of the border has the same color scheme.

What is notable, perhaps, is that Johns chose this painting—found, vernacular, and anonymous—only after seeing this on the preceding page:

Albert Moldvay’s spread of David Alfaro Siqueiros’ March of Humanity, one page before the anonymous barber painting a tree in Nat Geo May 1973.

Looking on the web for contemporary images of David Alfaro Siqueiros’ absolutely gargantuan mural, la Marcha de Humanidad, in what was supposed to be the auditorium for the Hotel de Mexico, I can’t see that anyone managed to capture it more fully than Albert Moldvay did in 1973. The Mexicans sure have a national craze for murals. Jasper Johns, not so much.

[Next morning update: Joke’s on me, it’s been on my shelf the whole time. While looking for an image of the 1975 painting The Barber’s Tree, I stumbled on it and O’Rear’s photo in Michael Crichton’s 1977 Whitney catalogue:

it was worth $6 to see it in color, I guess, and to discover the Siqueiros. But let’s be honest, without the intervening watercolor, this tree motif feels kind of far from Johns’ cross-hatches.

I’ve been saying it is barber pole-colored, but Crichton describes The Barber Tree (1975) as “flesh-and-blood colors.” Which, you’ll have to trust him, because the catalogue only had black & white images, and it was in the Ludwig’s collection until they donated it to the National Art Museum of China in 1996.

The Barber’s Tree, encaustic and collage on canvas, 34 x 54 in. (87 x 137.8 cm), snapped from the Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 3 (P196)

Now that they’re all together, maybe the overlapping structure of the cross-hatches is what carries through from the tree. Crichton noted Johns deployed different structures in the cross-hatch paintings of this period, 1973-76, including various degrees of mirroring or duplication. That is not what’s going on here.

Previously: Jasper Johns Drawings CR Driveby

Jasper Johns Drawings CR Driveby

Sure, curating is great, but have you ever just gone through an artist’s six-volume catalogue raisonné of drawings in chronological order, seeing every wild, weird, and eye-popping thing they worked on for 60 years?

I’ve dipped into Jasper Johns’ drawings CR before, but have not spent any sustained time with it until this week, when I went looking for the diagram he made to explain a print to a pushy university president. [It wasn’t included.] And it is fascinating. It feels more revealing than the paintings CR—which I have and enjoy, don’t get me wrong—like it tracks the artist’s process more closely. Here are just a few snapshots of things that caught my eye:

D19: Flag on Orange Ground, 1957, 10 1/2 x 7 3/4 in., fluorescent paint, watercolor, graphite on paper mounted on board, image via JJCR-D

This watercolor and pencil version of one of Johns’ early Flag paintings is one of two works made on pages from an old college yearbook; the logo of a sorority, Alpha Delta Pi, is visible in the lower right corner. Also it looks like it was spraypainted. ALSO, it was a gift from Johns to Susan Weil, Robert Rauschenberg’s ex-wife.

Continue reading “Jasper Johns Drawings CR Driveby”