Jasper Johns: the examined life - Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York - Cover Story

Art in America, April, 1997 by Roni Feinstein

The Jasper Johns retrospective recently held at the Museum of Modern Art about one of America's most widely exhibited artists (Johns's full exhibition history is so extensive that it is being supplied, together with a biliography, on CD-ROM), the MOMA retrospective arrived at an opportune moment. There is now a sufficient amount of production since the juncture that occurred in Johns's art in 1982 to evaluate this controversial body of work and understand its relationship to Johns's earlier output. In 1984, Johns described the change in his art as follows: "In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological stak, my emotions. This was partly to do with my feelings about myself and partly to do with my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for a while, but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally, one must simply drop the reserve.(1)

The exhibition "Jasper Johns: Work Since 1974," held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989 (and first presented at the 1988 Venice Biennale), recorded the transition from the abstract, allover fields of the crosshatch paintings to the illusionistic representations of the "bathtub" and Seasons pictures, works in which this famously impersonal artist first ventured into the relm of autobiography. In the exhibition catalogue, Mark Rosenthal noted the presence in these paintings of tracings after Matthias Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece as well as Johns's attraction to Christian themes. The exhibition concluded, however, before Johns moved from investigations of his adult world -- his art, possessions and artistic career -- to examinations of his childhood experience. The same can be said of Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective," which appeared at MOMA in 1986. A number of the more recent confessional, works were included in the exhibition "The Drawings of Jasper Johns,, held at the National Gallery in Washington in 1990, but for Johns, drawing, like printmaking, is primarily a medium for revisiting and recycling motifs introduced m painting, his primarily means of expression and the medium in which he typically develops and advances new ideas. In 1993, a small retrospective consisting of 14 well-chosen paintings spanning Johns's career was held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in Soho. Titled "Jasper Johns -- 35 Years -- Leo Castelli," it documented the changes that have occurred in Johns's art over time, but on a limited scale.

Two print exhibitions were presented in New York in late October in conjunction with the current show. "Jasper Johns: Process and Printmaking," which revealed Johns's thought and decision-making processes in working proofs dating from the early '60s to the mid-'90s was held in MOMM's galleries. At Castelli, "Technique and Collaboration in the Prints of Jasper Johns, focused on the artist's technical innovations in printmaking. Earlier in 1996, "Jasper Johns: The Sculptures" was presented both at the Menil Collection, Houston, and at the Leeds City Art Gallery., it examined a small but significant aspect of Johns's production that lasted for a brief moment, for the most part from 1958 to 1961. A number of the same sculptures were represented at MOMA. "Jasper Johns Flags 1955-1994" appeared at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, in June 1996.

The MOMA retrospective, organized by Kirk Varnedoe, presented a comprehensive overview of Johns's artistic career via 225 works occupying two floors of the museum. The installation offered a chronological unfolding of Johns's development, with works grouped according to theme and coloration (gray and black-and-white paintings were hung together to brilliant effect). While focusing on painting, the show included Johns's full range of mediums. Drawings and prints were occasionally interspersed with the paintings, but were most often displayed in separate rooms or alcoves, due in part to requirements for lower lighting but also because Johns's works on paper generally look back to motifs developed in earlier work and would have disrupted the "narrative line," set forth by the paintings. As was appropriate, sculpture was confined to two vitrines in a relatively early section of the exhibition.

The retrospective provided the viewer with the opportunity to witness not only the unfolding of Johns's work as he moved through a succession of periods, styles, manners and techniques, but the unveilinq of Johns himself. Johns's art has long been understood as one in which the artist reconsidered the fundamental elements of picture-making -- structure, color, surface, texture, objecthood -- as web as how form is described, and how images are perceived. Viewing the retrospective, one was able to see that Johns's art has also been engaged in a struggle with fundamental questions of existence of sexuality, mortality, spirituality -- with the experience of what it is to be in and of this world. That Johns's work since the early '80s has been preoccupied with such issues is well known. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, the expressive qualities of the early work come into focus as never before. Although the various movements that the early work helped foster -- Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art -- emphasized the detached, impersonal qualities of his art, a good portion of the power and brilliance of these works, as has been noted, derives from their denials and negations, from the struggles with self embodied within them. Johns is himself responsible for the myth of impersonality that surrounds his art: with rare exceptions, in statements about his work to the present day, he has focused upon matters of intellect and form.