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.
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.
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
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
