Cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts, Jasper Johns, 2017, p. As in in the artist’s Targets, Maps, and Numbers, Johns use of the American flag as a founding motif harnesses the image’s inherent invisibility: by virtue of its familiarity, it becomes something ‘seen and not looked at, not examined…things the mind already knows.’ (The artist, cited in Exh. Amongst the most iconic painterly series of the Twentieth Century, the Flag-initiated by the artist in the predetermined, 1950s-era format of forty-eight stars and thirteen alternating red and white stripes in 1954-became a vehicle through which Johns could explore the shifting meanings inherent to the most basic of images, all the while investigating how the use of medium and method can manipulate, frustrate, or amplify the effect of the image in question. A masterstroke at the intersection of the two primary, equally vital lines of artistic inquiry at the heart of Johns's practice, Flag constitutes the ultimate summation of his signature concern: the reworking of familiar images to engage, explore, and expose the ways in which art creates meaning within the mind’s eye.Īt once intimate and uncanny, mysterious and matter-of-fact, Flag exemplifies that tautly thrilling ambiguity which marks the very best examples of the artist’s output standing before the present work, the image we see is both a flag and a painting of a flag, destabilizing traditional borders between the painted image and that which it represents. Directly acquired from Leo Castelli Gallery two years after its execution, Flag has been held in the same distinguished American collection for over two decades, and has been included in a number of major exhibitions of the artist’s work, including Jasper Johns: Gray, an exhibition centered upon the essential importance of ‘gray’ as a color and motif within Johns’ practice and organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2007-2008. With each bar, a flurry of graphite scrawls and deliberately exaggerated strokes of paint punctuate the color field, resulting in an image that explodes with gestural fervor. Delicately daubed and spread upon the canvas, the shimmering gray pigment reveals a hushed accumulation of gestures, as each precise stroke is articulated with breathtaking specificity from within their silvery shroud, the once saturated colors of the flag flicker with insistent presence, the two distinct renderings fusing to articulate the acute cognitive dissonance of a familiar image made uncanny. First rendered in the customary red, white, and blue of the familiar American emblem, then veiled by the ethereal monochrome of Johns’ most favored grayscale palette, the nuanced coloration and multidimensional complexity of the present Flag is, even within this revered series, amongst the most exquisite and virtuosic embodiments of Johns’ iconic motif. Executed four decades after Johns first confronted the image of the American flag as a subject worthy of protracted visual interrogation, the sumptuously rendered surface of Flag serves as singular testament to prestigious prowess and relentless curiosity of an artist at the apex of his mature creative powers. In his painstaking rendering of such familiar images as targets, flags, and maps, Johns unravels the uncertain distinction between signifier and signified-between that which is seen and that which is implied-bringing to the fore the viewer’s own agency in perceiving and constructing the world around us. A triumph of painterly and conceptual rigor alike, Flag from 1994 stands amongst the most elegantly resolved embodiments of the fascination with sign and meaning that defines the core of Johns’ practice. 13)įor over six decades, Johns has pursued an unprecedented painterly interrogation of image-making that, in its virtuosic ingenuity and unswerving resolve, constitutes one of the greatest artistic achievements of the Twentieth Century. ![]() ![]() ![]() Cat., Oxford, Museum of Modern Art (and travelling), Jasper Johns Drawings, 1974, p. “Say, the painting of a flag is always about a flag, but it is no more about a flag than it is about a brush-stroke or about a color or about the physicality of the paint, I think.” A flicker of grace occurs when the senses are awakened and new ways of experiencing the world, even ordinary objects in the world, provide a glimpse of that truth.” (Roberta Bernstein and Edith Devaney, “Something Resembling Truth,” in Exh. “Fixed habits of seeing, feeling, and thinking render truth invisible.
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