What follows is not a "review" of the massive Jasper Johns retrospective divided between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum, nor is it an essay or formal critical evaluation. While walking through the Philadelphia portion of the retrospective, I made notes on my cellphone with an eye toward later writing something formal.
I never wrote the formal piece. Instead, months passed as I let the experience percolate. I had gone to the exhibition a doubter, suspect of Johns' reputation and largely unmoved by the random works I'd seen over the years. I left the show a believer. The exhibition accomplished what I always hoped would happen when going to a retrospective, an opportunity to deepen my understanding, confirm my preconceptions or, as was the case in this instance, to completely alter my perceptions.
Here are some of those notes:
The sheer size of the exhibition overwhelmed me at first. Could there really be a companion show of entirely different works running concurrently in New York? Such prodigious output. Did he ever sleep?
The encaustics are so juicy and luscious. You can lose yourself in their surfaces. The oil paintings push back rather than draw me in like the encaustics.
Up front, let me get out of the way what many would consider utter exaggeration and hyperbole: Jasper Johns is the most important artist since Picasso and as equally protean as the great figure. If Johns can be considered at all flashy, it is essentially in the sense of wearing his existential angst on his sleeve like the Abstract Expressionists. He is generally regarded as the transitional figure from AE to Pop to Minimalism but the work resists such pat categorizations. For instance, even though the flags are loaded icons, he isn't cynical or mordant like so much Pop. As for Minimalism, no matter how reductive some of Johns' work may appear at first glance, many of the painted surfaces are far too worked and reworked to fit that niche.
The Ballentine cans, as famous as the target and flag paintings, are one of Johns' momentary and fleeting lapses or nods to Pop Art, but as with his two dimensional work, these make no pretense toward direct displacement; they, too, are reworked rather than simply appropriated. Unlike Picasso, Johns only dabbled in sculpture though his combines were clearly three dimensional. Still, they said more about painting and the surface of two dimensional works and Johns preoccupation with exploring both the process and meaning of what constituted a painting. Working closely with his lover Robert Rauschenberg, Johns pushed out from the surface not into it, an unmistakable legacy of Picasso and Cubism. Johns would later move on intellectually and aesthetically, while Rauschenberg didn't, as he explored every 2D medium he could get his hands on.
He is always questioning what is art or at least how it comes to be (the form) and since he is forever doubting the answer sufficiently, he must keep asking. The section entitled "Trials and Proofs" underscores this interest in the how and process and question of what is art.
He is forever breaking up the surface of the paintings while dazzling the eye. He can be playful and somber, especially in the Japanese themed images. The late work, as one might expect, meditates on mortality.
By the '80's there are many references to friends, the self, objects collected. He is profoundly self-referential, not in the narcissistic way of Picasso but as an artist who is compelled to learn from himself as he goes along building and incorporating what he has just done. Not since Monet with his haystacks, cathedral facades, etc. has an artist looked at the same thing or object over and over, endlessly seeing it anew and fresh.
Another way Picasso comes to mind is this: walking through the huge Picasso exhibition at MOMA many years ago I had the feeling as the exhibition unfolded chronologically that Picasso would look at, say, Manet, and when doing so he would fully grasped his importance and incorporate his lessons into his own art. Then, the next year, he would move on to Cezanne and do the same thing and then on to the next touchstone until he became the touchstone. He was that facile and inventive. And he refused to be seen strictly as a painter, or a sculptor or even a ceramicist. Johns seems to have done the same thing, less flamboyantly, less facilely, but in his way just as convincingly.
Johns does not see targets, flags, numbers or letters as popular icons. He sees them as signs so ubiquitous they almost disappear in their quotidian ever-presence until he calls our attention to them. And as such, he can explore their appearance not for meaning but for appearance sake, and this is what really matters to him, for the ways they can become art objects. The greatness of Johns is that he takes common, ordinary, familiar symbols and signs and plumbs their visual possibilities in ways we've never experienced them before. He investigates them endlessly, ad nauseam even, always discovering something about them, something that is so unfamiliar about the familiar. And isn't that one of the things we most admire about artists?!
