jasper johns – greg.org

Johns Said Leave It Open

jasper johns target with plaster casts is a yellow and blue target on a red background, all in textured encaustic collage, with a shelf/cupboard structure on top with nine little individual compartments, each with its own wooden lid. the lids here are open, which is how johns liked them. like lucky charms each compartment has its own shape and color, a plaster cast of a body part painted in purple, blue white red pink orange green and dark purple? i can't remember, but the green one is a penis, and that got everyone worked up. this painting is owned by david geffen — 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.

a young jasper johns leaning insouciantly, fingers interlaced, chin on hands, on the top of his sturdy wooden artwork, target with plaster casts, with three of the nine wooden doors closed, so he can fit, and the red yellow and blue target below him. he stands on a black and white tile floor, in a bright photo studio with black backdrop. above and behind him is target with four faces, a similar painting in color and composition, except there's one wide door open to show four plaster faces instead of various body parts. there's a red chair on the left edge. dan budnik took this portrait photo in 1958, and this particular print of it is for sale at etherton gallery in tucson for, i am sure, a fair price — 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, Tiny Three Flags

a tiny painting of three flags, or rather three paintings of gradually smaller us flags stacked on top of one another, made of acrylic paint on plastic, and attached to the top half of a roughly a4-sized sheet of plastic, and then matted and framed with a thin maple frame, a 2000 work by jasper johns, from the artist's collection, on view in spring 2026 at craig starr gallery in nyc — 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.

Jasper Johns: Flags, in memory of Agnes Gund is on view at Craig Starr through 27 June 2026 [craigstarr]

Hilton Als on Johns’s Little Guys

jasper johns, perilous night, 1990, is a vertically oriented revisiting of the right half of a pair of 1982 drawings of the same name. this one is neater, but still watery. two pages of the score of john cage's perilous night and a disembodied hand and arm print (facing down) sit in a black and grey background segmented by tracery that hints at another drawing, maybe with a sword, probably a detail from the isenheim altarpiece. but the pale green band at the bottom with three stick figures holding paint brushes renders the grey field as the sky instead. via matthew marks gallery, which showed it in 2024 — 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?

Prince & Johns: Now He’s Doing My Act

a richard prince canvas is collaged with an irregular grid of inkjet images, mostly black and white, of various prince sculptures, including sawhorses, a coffin, a bone, some muscle cars, a tightly cropped almost abstract image of a black bra on a white back. many pictures are overdrawn with loose doodle like elements, and all are outlined or roughly held into a composition with black paintlines, forming a raggedy grid. untitled folk songs is from 2022 and was shown at gagosian in nov 2025 — Richard Prince, Untitled (Folk Songs), 2022. Acrylic, oil stick, collage, and inkjet on canvas, 63 ¼ × 61 ¼ inches (160.7 × 155.6 cm) © [sic] Richard Prince. Photo: Jena Cumbo Photography, image via Gagosian

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.

decoy, a 1971 jasper johns painting, is a mostly black field of brushstrokes surrounding an overpainted picture of a ballantine beer can, with johns's characteristic stenciled color name text winding across it. along the bottom edge of the painting are six photo-type images of johns sculptures, like beer cans, and flashlights, reproduced in paint and outlined in brushy open pale grey strokes of paint. — Jasper Johns, Decoy, 1971, oil and brass grommet on canvas, 72 x 49 7/8 in., sold by SI Newhouse’s ghost at Christie’s in 2023, after being shown at the Whitney in 2021-22.

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.

Jasper Johns Is [Not] Over Painting

a jasper johns print with an oval-shaped image of a skeleton figure holding a skull at its crotch and wearing a hat standing among alphabet stencils and asl charts, and other johns imagery, all askew as if it's stored in a jumble against a brick wall, which has been overpainted in thin white acrylic, lightening but not obliterating many of the composition elements. a 2025 work at matthew marks gallery — Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2025, acrylic over print, via Matthew Marks Gallery

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.

a 2018 jasper johns print with an oval-shaped image of a skeleton figure holding a skull at its crotch and wearing a hat standing among alphabet stencils and asl charts, and other johns imagery, all askew as if it's stored in a jumble against a brick wall

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.

Universe And Little Guy

an untitled 2021 jasper johns work on paper is largely black with a vector map of slice of the universe, a contruction of red and blue dots representing, i think, galaxies or galaxy clusters along threads reaching across space, with a concentration in the center that bears an unusual resemblance to a stick figure spiderman, which may feel more prominent because the trompe l'oeil sheet of paper taped to the center right of the composition is of a lone stick figure with a raised brush, a familiar johns motif, here seemingly drawin in graphite. via matthew marks gallery — Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2021, acrylic and graphite over etching on paper, 16⅞ × 21⅛ in., via Matthew Marks

I’d like to go back to contemplating one little guy confronting the slice of the universe that looks, now that you mention it, a lot like a stick figure, please.

[tbf I was actually looking back through these recent shows from after the CR cutoff, to find out how wrong I might be about Johns only making one alphabet painting by looking for when the sign language alphabet motif came in, and did it happen in any paintings, and I don’t think so, even though I remember thinking there sure was a lot of sign language alphabet in one of those Marks shows, but maybe it’s all in prints and works on paper? And then yes, there is sometimes a very prominent stencil of the entire alphabet behind that skeleton getting worked on by the little guys, but not in the paintings, or at least not in the ones he showed. But after 60 years, Johns should feel free to revisit a motif if he wanted, and making it the stencil tool, not the letters themselves, does help rein in the chaos a bit.]

We Don’t Know Johns’s Alphabet

screenshot of deborah solomon underscore truly's intagram of a snapshot of barbara jakobson smiling with a dark brown bob as she stands in front of a bulletin board filled with clippings and photos, and a smallish square painting of the alphabet with a wooden slat frame, a replica of the jasper johns painting she used to own. rip barbara — “You can guess which one is in the photograph.” via ig:@deborahsolomon_truly

Collector and longtime MoMA trustee Barbara Jakobson died at 92. She was a sharp, funny, insightful hoot. I got to know her a bit when I became co-chair of the successor to the Junior Council, which she’d led back in the day. But that’s not important now.

I also knew her as one of Jasper Johns’s earliest collectors. Writer and Johns biographer Deborah Solomon posted the news of Barbara’s passing on instagram, alongside some magnificent photos. Like the oddly shaped blank ghost on the wall after Jakobson sold a massive Frank Stella. And this photo of Barbara posing with what looks like her and her then-husband John’s first Johns. They purchased Alphabet new, in 1959. She got it in the divorce.

Johns only made one Alphabet painting. Solomon said he decided there were too many variables, and it felt chaotic, so he stuck with numbers.

In 1989 Jakobson sold Alphabet it at Christie’s [for $3.52m]. It has since found its way, through the Edlis Neesons, to the Art Institute of Chicago. So what’s this? A copy Barbara had made when she sold it. And so now there were two.

a small painting of the alphabet stenciled in five rows, in brushy, multicolored, and hard to read strokes primarily of blue yellow and red encaustic, a 1959 painting by jasper johns now in the collection of the art institute of chicago — Jasper Johns, *Alphabet*, 1959, 12 x 10 1/2 in., encaustic and collage on fiberboard, collection Art Institute

This is a whole, underappreciated category of copies I love: replicas or replacements made for owners of the work. Or former or soon-to-be-former owners.

After selling them, Hubert de Givenchy and his partner Philippe Venet remade their Giacometti tables. And their Picassos. And their Miro. And their Leger. Or maybe they just replaced the Miro with a “homemade” Leger? Architectural Digest’s story not quite clear.

As part of the settlement to donate it to the Nelson Atkins Museum, super-reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark got a copy of a Degas that had been stolen from her by a servant, and later acquired by the H&R Block guy.

Isabelle Dufresne’s Large Flowers was so big, (7 x 13 ft) she had to hang it vertically in her living room. Visiting with a collector friend, I asked if he thought she’d ever sell her Warhol. He replied with a laugh that she already had, and that the Flowers were the replacement.

I can’t find it now, but I swear I just read [or heard?] about auction houses offering to make reproductions of works to win consignments.

a small nearly abstract painting on a wood block by jasper johns titled small numbers in color, rows and rows of tiny stenciled numbers in various multicolored brushstrokes of red yellow blue and white, as installed in his show in philadelphia in 2022 or whenever that was — Jasper Johns, *Small Numbers in Color*, 1959, 10 1/8 x 7 1/8 in., encaustic & collage on wood printing block, installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for Mind/Mirror, collection:the artist

And very specifically, though in a sub-category of its own, the small size and dense composition of Jakobson’s Johns Alphabet reminds me of Small Numbers in Color, a tiny painting Johns made for himself in 1959 before the larger Numbers in Color (1958-59) was shipped off to the Albright Knox.

What to make of the unparalleled aspects of these replicas? Their connection to ownership, and their function as literal replacement of the original? Whatever the experience was of living with the work, for the owners themselves, these copies seem to be [close] enough. Which feels wild: that a fresh copy can effectively replace everything except the market value.

Solomon proposed the question of which Alphabet was in the photo, and I have to assume that it’s what she calls the “cheap copy.” But. Every stroke looks like Johns’s original, which, on a painting like this, is no mean feat. Perhaps it’s a photo-based reproduction. I guess my point here is, I’d love to see it.

Jasper Johns Little Guys in Print

a mostly black on white jasper johns print is a dense composition of recognizable elements from his work in 1992 and before: trompe l'oeil paper prints of barnett newman etchings and a large photo of a spiral galaxy sit on top of an outline traced from the isenheim altarpiece, recognizable as something figural, or copied, but hard to discern. in the lower left corner is his optical illusion vase made from two profiles of, presumably, himself. on top of the galaxy are printed ladder fragments, a silhouette of a small child, the latter in blue, and inside [sic] the vase, three stick figures with brushes are printed in red against the grey gradient interior, hard to pick out. these elements all match up to etching plates from the seasons, a print johns made two years earlier, in 1989-90, so this is a crossover combo of several sets of elemtns, or series of images. a gift of the artist to the walker art center — Jasper Johns, Untitled, 1992, intaglio & aquatint, 43 1/2 x 53 1/2 in., with little guys in the vase, via WAC

You’d think I’d have taken the hint sooner. Like after seeing the big jump around 2001 of appearances of the three little, brush-wielding stick figures in Jasper Johns drawings—because they were in the prints he was reworking. Or after finding little guys gazing at the stars in the 1997 etching he made for Leo Castelli’s 90th birthday portfolio.

But no, it took finding little guys in Johns’s 2008 Artists for Obama print that made me realize there was much I didn’t know about Johns using the little guys motif in his prints. And it turns out they’re all over the place. Johns is a printmaker who paints, and his imagemaking crosses mediums with the ease Canadians used to have crossing the US border. So I was missing a big part of the little guys story.

Jasper Johns Little Guys For Obama

a jasper johns etching has two horizontal rows of squarish images, like a comic strip, in gradations of grey. most of the panels have an element that looks like an eye or a sun, in space or in a larger circle. the upper right panel has the three stick figures johns began using as an occasional motif in the 1980s, but especially after 2000. — Jasper Johns, *Untitled (from the Artists for Obama portfolio)*, 2008, etching and aquatint, 8 x 20 cm image, 21 x 30 cm sheet, ed. 13/150, selling as a loosie on 3 Sept 2025 at LA Modern [kinda wild that such a low edition number was broken up for parts]

Whoops, missed another one. I might have to check all the benefit print portfolios Johns contributed to in the last 30 years, to see if there are any more little guys out there.

Meanwhile, these little guys are in a little print—just 8 x 20 cm, smaller, even than the Ellsworth Kelly print in the same Artists for Obama portfolio.

a detail of jasper johns's 2008 print for obama comprises the upper right panel where three barely drawn stick figures are in motion against a gradient sky sprinkled with stars. the stars and guys are drawn in line,and the sky is brushed in around them all. feels kind of quick, looks kind of provisional — Jasper Johns, detail, *Untitled (from the Artists for Obama portfolio)*, this little scene is like 5 x 5 cm

And they’re pretty lyrically drawn, too. No stamps here. I assume those are pens in their hands, encouraging people to register to vote.

3 Sept 2025, Lot 310, Jasper Johns, Untitled, est. $2-3,000 [lamodern]
Gemini GEL got 14 Artists for Obama in 2008, tho technically they were Artists for the DNC [moma]
Previously, related: Jasper Johns Little Guys for Leo

For Your Jasper Johns Tablescape

a dinner plate printed with a round jasper johns pastel drawing from 2001 of two stylized heads hanging from stems of a leafy green treebranch. the left head is light purple with a central blush of orange, a distorted picasso head. the right is a yellow/orange optical illusion of a young and old woman's faces. 150 of these plates will be sold in two weeks in may 2025, most at an art fair, to raise money for the coalition for the homeless — Jasper Johns, Artist Plate Project, 2025, via Artware

I gotta say, I did not expect to see Jasper Johns in the Artist Plate Project. But as Benjamin Godsill was telling APP organizer Michelle Hellman in the latest episode of Nota Bene, this year is full of bangers.

This is the fifth year that Hellman has put together a collection of artist-designed plates whose sale benefits the Coalition for the Homeless in NYC, and it is remarkable. Once the APP began debuting the plates at art fairs, they’ve taken on a wild, competitive philanthropic eshopping energy.

This year there are fifty plates, each in an edition of 150, with the first 100 reserved for the opening day of Frieze NY. The rest will go on sale the following week at Artware Editions. The plates are just $250 each, about the price of a lunch at an art fair. [Artware also has some previous years’ plates, including individually signed plates, and a couple of complete sets, no waiting.]

a round jasper johns pastel drawing from 2001 comprises two stylized heads hanging from stems of a leafy green treebranch. the left head is light pinkish purple, a distorted picasso head. the right is a yellow/orange optical illusion of a young and old woman's faces. via matthew marks gallery — Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2001, pastel on paper, 25 1/2 inches diameter, via Matthew Marks Gallery

What’s wild about Johns is not that he did it, but that he had a tondo drawing ready for instant plate adaptation. Johns had used both the Picassoid head and wife/mother-in-law optical illusion in many works for years; having them sprout surreally from a tree branch, in a round pastel? Not so much. But he showed this picture in the 10th anniversary drawings show at Matthew Marks at the end of 2001.

Oh wait, actually he did not. That is an entirely different work—same motif, different object. When the Marks drawing turned up at auction in 2015, it had an uncharacteristically full essay, especially for a day sale, with a surprisingly full discussion of Johns’ references.

Jasper Johns: Take An Object, Add Some Little Guys To It

a close up film frame grab of jasper johns touching up the corners of a copper intaglio plate sitting on a white worktable at ulae. the horizontal rectangular plate features three stick figures holding brushes, a motif johns first used 7 years earlier. via hans namuth and judith weschler's 1990 film, jasper johns: take an object — Johns adding these little figures in Namuth & Weschler’s 1990 film, Jasper Johns: Take An Object

“I thought to add these little figures, which appear in a different drawing of mine, an old drawing. They’re in the bottom of Perilous Night, for John Cage.”

Oh hey, look, it’s Jasper Johns in 1989 discussing the addition of his little stick figures to another work for what sounds like the first time since he used them in 1982.

jasper johns 1990 print, the seasons, is a jumble of elements from his painting series of the same name, rearranged into an interlocked cross form, with three tiny stick figures appended to the bottom. — And little guys: Jasper Johns, *The Seasons (ULAE 0249)*, 1990, intaglio, 50 1/4 x 44 1/2 in., ed. 50

Johns is talking to filmmaker Judith Weschler, who produced Jasper Johns: Take An Object with photographer Hans Namuth in 1990. The short film is bracketed by two extended scenes of Johns at work: in 1972, painting in his own studio, and in 1989, printmaking at ULAE.

Villa Jasper: He Sold The House in St Martin

the patio and pool of a hilltop villa in st martin is enclosed by trees along the right edge. on the left, a tile roof held by thick, round columns shades a teak seating arrangement on the terra cotta tile patio. through it to the left, past a row of blue upholstered lounge chairs facing the rectangular pool, another deep veranda with tile roof leads inside a white stucco house and immediately through to a distant view of blue water, shore activity, and green mountain. the sky is bright blue with clouds. at the lower front edge, the corner of a similarly rectangular lily pond is surrounded by low shrubs. villa jasper used to be jasper johns' house in st martin, where he'd spend almost every winter since 1980 working. it's now a luxury rental property, part of the st martin blue luxury villa collection. — Oh sprawling farm in Sharon, we’re really in it now: the pool and patio at Jasper Johns’ old place in St Martin. I do not think the flamingo conveyed.

Speaking of artists retreating to remote beaches, it turns out Jasper Johns, 94, sold his hilltop house and studio in St Martin early in the pandemic.

Johns began visiting St. Martin in 1968, two years after a fire destroyed his home and studio in Edisto, South Carolina. He bought a house in 1972, which he had nazi architect Philip Johnson renovate in 1980.

From Sotheby’s International Realty: “While major upgrades have been made to the property’s comfort and amenities, much care and attention was taken to ensure that Philip Johnson’s distinct minimalism and purity of line was preserved and that the soul of Jasper John’s [sic] house remain palpable.”

It is now called Villa Jasper, and is available for rent as part of the St. Martin Blue Luxury Villa Collection. If the flamingo in the pool is not new, we’ll have to significantly update our understanding of Johns’ home vibe.

This Is The Time To Hang Your Johns Flags Upside Down

an installation view of three jasper johns flag paintings on a white wall with a dark floor, from a 2018 show at the broad collection in los angeles, but each painting has been turned upside down. original image by eugenio rodriquez via artforum — altered installation photo of upside down flag paintings from The Broad’s 2018 exhibition, “Something Resembling Truth,” original image by Eugenio Rodriguez, via artforum

When I first thought of it, it was still within the framework that has dominated art critical discussion of Jasper Johns’ work since the beginning: Is it an upside down flag painting or a painting of an upside down flag?

But this is not the moment for glib rhetorical dualities. Right now an upside down flag does not have to be either “a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property” or a political protest. With active attacks on democratic institutions and the rule of law under the US Constitution, it can be and must be, unfortunately, both.

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

Jasper Johns’ Little Guys: Origins

I have reviewed the chronology of Jasper Johns’ stick figures, and it is long, and the literature, and it is sparse. The most extensive discussion I’ve found of them is from July 2020, when art historian Isabelle Loring Wallace explored figures and faces in Johns’ prints at the Walker Art Center. [The Walker has a complete run of Johns’ print works, which the artist has been topping up with gifts since 1987.]

Pablo Picasso, *The Fall of Icarus*, 1958, acrylic on 40 wood panels, 910 x 1060 cm, image: UNESCO/J.-C. Bernath via Walker Art Center

Loring calls them both “A motif of unknown origin” and “a crudely rendered Picasso-inspired trio,” seeing a similarity to the figure in Picasso’s 1958 UNESCO mural, The Fall of Icarus. I don’t see it, but sure. Except while other Picasso references appear in Johns’ work sooner, this so-called Icarus doesn’t turn up in Johns’ work until 1992, a full decade after the stick figure trio.