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

Art in America, April, 1997 by Roni Feinstein

By late 1954, Rauschenberg's Red paintings became splashy and extroverted, the underlying collage materials increasingly revealed on the surface and exploited as aspects of content -- a content devoted largely to sell. The surfaces of many of these paintings suggested walls in homey interiors. They were collaged with materials that referred to his family and childhood in Port Arthur, Texas, as well as to his current status of living and working as an artist in New York. Among the materials found in Charlene, for example, are lengths of lacy and flowered fabric.. wooden molding, a letter from his mother, a map of Texas, a newspaper headline that reads "Enjoy Growing Up Phases," a scarf issued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with fine art reproductions, and a picture postcard of the Statue of Liberty.(7) Odalisk (1995) and other Combines that followed continued in this autobiographical vein.

It might be said that Johns formulated his mature personal esthetic, as it was to emerge in his Flags, Targets and Numbers paintings, in direct opposition to Hauschenberg's work. As against the latter's art of polycentric imagery, multipart structures and diversified attention, Johns posited an art of isolated images, iconic structures and focused attention. As against Rauschenberg's focus on self, Johns posited an art of impersonality. Target with Four Faces (1955), one of the first paintings Johns admitted into his oeuvre, is extremely revealing in this regard. Here, a target made of newspaper collage and encaustic forms the central image@ above, a hinged wooden panel opens to reveal four plaster casts of eyeless faces. Visible below a transparent veil of encaustic to the upper right in the target panel is a newspaper heading which reads, "History and Biography." As Joan Carpenter pointed out in a 1977 article which examined the content of the collage materials revealed by infrared photographs, the target also incorporates a tom letter, an illustration of a bird on a perch (often used as the symbol of Johns's home state, South Carolina) and a bank receipt, among other things. Carpenter wrote, "Since one of Johns's early patrons was an astrologer, a newspaper horoscope and article on astrology, and a page from a book concerning a similar subject may conceivably have autobiographical overtones. At any rate, astrological material seems appropriate in a collage design of wheels whirling within wheels which suggests the paths traced by the planets of the solar system. My interpretation in this regard is strengthened by the identity of the cut-out figure at the lower left who witnesses this celestial vision -- Jasper Johns recently revealed it is a photograph of Billy Graham."(8)

That Graham, like Johns a South Carolina native and Southern Baptist, should be seen contemplating the cosmos looks ahead to Johns's art of the '90s in which personal history and the transcendental become primary concerns. Literally buried by paint in this work of 1955, these issues were not to surface in Johns's painting for almost 30 years.