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

Art in America, April, 1997 by Roni Feinstein

Although the "face" had its source in the Picasso, Johns's adaptation apparently reminded him (after the fact) of an illustration he had seen in an article in the early '50s (some 40 years before) by a girl who had developed schizophrenia after losing both her parents.(29) In 1991, Johns recovered this image, "The Baby Drinking the Mother's Milk from the Breast" (complete with its fingerprinted frame), from the original Scientific American article by Bruno Bettelheim and "nailed" it in the center of three "face" paintings, which were hung sequentially at MOMA at one end of a large gallery. In each painting the cartoonish eyes also resemble breasts; the circle imprints at the paintigs' bottom edges clearly refer to the same. The first painting in the series is white -- the color of mother's milk -- and exudes a feeling of purity and calm. The second is ocher and has a scumbled, textured surface; a tear spills from the baby's eye. In the third (dated 1991-94), which is painted a jarring purple tone, the girl's drawing is superimposed upon a field which contains both the "face" and Griinewald's demon/plague victim. It does not take a degree in psychology to understand that Johns is reflecting upon the mother who abandoned him in infancy, leaving him as an adult feeling damaged, scarred and self-identified with Grunewald's plague victim. It is a sad picture, expressive of a longing for nurturing and maternal care. His mother died in 1992.

Thus in these works, Johns explores the continued impact of childhood (and even infantile) experiences on his adult life. Some of the works, when understood (and their codes are not difficult to crack), are shocking in their confessional nature: a 60-year-old man permits us to watch him imagine himself returning to his mother's breast. Johns lays bare feelings that are painful and raw in a profoundly human quest to understand himself.

In painting after painting displayed in the same gallery as the trio of "mother's milk, pictures, Grunewald's "demon" confronts Johns's various incarnations of "woman" -- the "face," the wife/mother-in-law motif, and the image of Picasso's Woman in a Straw Hat -- representations, it would appear, of women in Johns's life.(30) At the opposite end of the gallery were two paintings of 1990 which Johns juxtaposed yet another traced image mapped out in puzzle-piece segments with the "face" motif: it represents a horizontal form, often white, supported by a larger, more fragmented, generally multicolored, vertical form. Although the artist has declined to reveal its identity, from the time the image first appeared observers have sensed that it portrays a scene of nurturing -- a mother and infant or, more specifically the Madonna and Child. It has even been suggested, and I am inclined to agree, that Johns did not go very far afield to find this image; its source may reside in the Virgin and Child with Angels panel of the Isenheim Alterpiece.(31)

That Johns had returned yet again to intimations of traditional Christian iconography is reinforced by his print The Seasons (1990), in which abridged and somewhat altered versions of each of the Seasons paintings are united in the form of a cross. The image of the child from Spring is at its center. A strongly defined ladder, absent from the original painting, extends into the "heavens" above him, the painting's stars now taking the forms of spiraling galaxies. Seen in tandem with Johns's shadow and the duck/rabbit image, the Trinity -- the Father, Son, Holy Ghost -- is suggested. In the representation of the Fall panel below, Johns's shadow is overlapped by a stick figure image -- Icarus -- derived from Picasso's mural The Fam of Icarus (1958).(32) In the Picasso, Icarus is shown upside down, falling, his hopes defeated; in the Johns, the figure is right-side up, internalized, his human failings and shattered hopes a part of the self.