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?
![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](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/johns-untitled-little-guys-1992-wac-1024x853.jpeg)
