Jasper Johns

In the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns began making paintings of recognizable objects and images, including the American flag, targets, and numbers. As the artist explained, these subjects are “things the mind already knows,” things that are “seen but not looked at, not examined.” In 1954, Johns had a dream that he painted the American flag. He carried out the idea for the first time a year later, and in 1958 he completed Three Flags, arranging three canvases in a concentric stack. He used encaustic, a fast-drying mixture of pigment suspended in warm wax, to accumulate brushstrokes and achieve an agitated, textured surface. Projecting almost five inches from the wall, the work signals, as Johns asserted, that “the painting of a flag is . . . no more about a flag than about a brushstroke, or about the physicality of paint,” or, he might have added, about the painting’s physicality as an object.

Johns often reworks motifs in various mediums—a prime example of this is a paintbrush-filled Savarin coffee can from his studio. An image of the can was used by Johns in a lithograph announcing his 1977 retrospective at the Whitney, and then in 1981 he adjusted the composition to invoke a haunting self-portrait by Edvard Munch in which Munch depicted his face and shoulders hovering above a skeletal arm. Johns added the initials E. M., incorporated an imprint of an arm, likely his own, and deployed the brush-filled can as his visage. Eleven of the impressions rejected from the 1981 edition were then used by Johns as the basis for a new series of monotypes—among them, the Whitney’s Savarin.

In the early 1980s Johns started to render perspectival space in his paintings. For Racing Thoughts, Johns used trompe-l’oeil illusionism to “tack” and “tape” personal mementos, both depicted and actual, to the painting’s surface. The complex layering of imagery is set in the bathroom at his former home (note the faucet at bottom right and the khaki pants hanging at left). Like the flags and numbers, these new motifs—Johns calls them “fragments of thoughts”—such as a lithograph by Barnett Newman, a pot by the ceramicist George Ohr, and a jigsaw puzzle portrait of his dealer Leo Castelli, would recur in subsequent works.

Dana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, Handbook of the Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 194–195.