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

Art in America, April, 1997 by Roni Feinstein

From this point on, Johns's paintings become overtly autobiographical, filled with references to his family and to childhood events and traumas. These works are remarkable not merely because a hitherto private and even reclusive artist chose to reveal in them memories of his early childhood, but because they constitute a virtual self-psychoanalysis in public view.

It is here that certain details of Johns's biography become relevant. His mother left his father, who was an alcoholic, when Johns was about a year old, taking him with her. As she lacked the resources to support herself and a child, Johns was soon left in the care of his paternal grandfather and his second wife, Montez; his mother moved from Allendale, South Carolina, to another town, where she remarried and had more children.(27) After his grandfathers death (when Johns was nine), the boy resided briefly with his mother and her new family, then went to live with his father,s sister. At various points, he lived with other aunts and uncles on his father,s side; he apparently saw his father sporadically. (It is his fathers family that is pictured in the family photograph that appears in a number of Johns's prints and drawings of the '90s; the photo shows Johns's father sitting on his father's knee.) Johns lived with his mother once again for one year during high school.

Memories of childhood play a part in Untitled (A Dream), 1985, a tellingly titled work, as a dream holds content we cannot repress or censor. This work introduces a new motif to Johns,s art -- the image of a face originally inspired by Picasso's Woman in a Straw Hat (1936). Although many of Johns's subsequent paintings directly appropriate the "boomerang"-shaped woman' face from Picasso's painting, in Johns's personal variation on the motif, the face is inscribed on a flat rectangular field with cartoonishly drawn eyes and lips relegated to its framing edges; a loopy representation of nostrils floats on the pale flesh-colored field. "Nailed" on the center of the field in Untitled (A Dream) is the traced image of Grunewald's plague victim, rendered in a brightly colored hatching stroke pattern. A watch is also hung on the "face." While referring on one level to the passage of time, the watch has also been seen as a reference to a story Johns has recounted from his childhood: his father owned a watch that he told Johns would be his when he grew up; at some point Johns, deciding he was grown up, took it; his father took it back.(28) The eye at the upper left appears to shed some tears.

The "face" appears as a fleshy, textural field (through the use of sand and screen textures) in the remarkable painting Montez Singing (1989). The eyes and eyelashes recall biological diagrams of sperm seeking the egg; the lips are heavily rouged. Wispy hair and circle imprints (suggesting breasts as well as eyes) are found on the painted frame. A small illustration of a sailboat, water and a setting sun is hung from a "nail" at the center of the face, referring to Johns's reminiscence of Montez Johns, his youthful step-grandmother, singing "Red Sails in the Sunset." It is a painting of sexual attraction in which Johns memorializes his Oedipal feelings.