12/5/2023 0 Comments 3 flags jasper johnsThis particular Usuyuki isn’t in our show, but look out for a painted version of the same name. In this work, Johns shows a technical flair learnt over decades of printmaking, using 12 screens to produce delicate gradations of colour and layers. This screenprint’s title translates from Japanese as “light snow” – the artist spent many extended stays working and exhibiting in Tokyo during the 1960s and ‘70s. Despite the avowed “lack of meaning”, the journalist Deborah Solomon recalled how critics “had a field day interpreting the ‘hatches’” some claimed they conveyed a secret code known only to Johns and his close companions. The artist worked with this motif almost exclusively from 1972 to 1983, because “it had all the qualities that interest me – literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of complete lack of meaning”. This crosshatch pattern (historically used by artists to create shadowing) has been part of Johns’s work since the 1970s, when he saw the pattern on a passing car driving on the Long Island Expressway. Both convey, in Johns’s words, “things connected by tubing which is sending energy” – a vitalising bridge between two people, or even aspects of one person. The artist was also thinking about Frida Kahlo’s double self-portrait, Las Dos Fridas, which shows two Fridas sitting next to each other, their exposed hearts connected by a blood vessel. While making the work he referred to a photograph published in the New York Times the previous year, showing a catenary formed by the tube of an IV fluid bag held up by a Rwandan mother for her seated daughter. Likening the curve to the soaring cables on suspension bridges, he chose the work’s title because it suggests “connections of thought” and “connections among all the various ideas we have of space” (spot the silkscreened print of a galaxy and the Big Dipper constellation at the top of the canvas). In the 1990s Johns began a series named after and exploring the shape, which included this Bridge painting, among 60 other works. In this role he brought many other artists together to create collaborative works: Andy Warhol filled the stage with helium balloons for Rainforest (1986), Frank Stella built a rainbow-coloured pyramid with matching dancers’ leotards in Scramble (1967), and Bruce Nauman placed ten huge electric fans between stage and audience for Tread (1970).Ī “catenary” is the shape formed by a chain hanging from two points – as demonstrated by the string attached to the canvas in this painting. Johns stencilled the imagery from the work onto clear vinyl sheets stretched over metal frames to make a stage set for Cunningham’s choreography.Īlthough you won’t find this work in our show, it’s an important milestone as the beginning of his 13 years as Artistic Advisor to Merce Cunningham Dance Company – a relationship you can see reflected in the imprint of Cunningham’s foot in Johns’s 2007 Numbers work, on display in the exhibition. The Large Glass is a transparent, window-like sculpture almost three metres tall, incorporating shapes made from lead foil, fuse wire and dust. Duchamp voiced an immediate concern: “who’s going to do all the work?”, but was pleased with the idea once it was established that it wouldn’t be him. Over dinner at Marcel Duchamp’s New York home, Johns suggested to his friend – the choreographer Merce Cunningham – that they make a dance piece incorporating an artwork by their host, The Large Glass. Puzzling over Johns’s early work, the experimental composer (and friend of the artist) John Cage suggested that “looking closely helps, though the paint is applied so sensually there is the danger of falling in love”. The paint sets very fast, allowing him to work quickly and preserve the textured surfaces. Throughout his career Johns has used the ancient method of encaustic: heating beeswax, tree sap and pigment and layering it onto the canvas, “as evenly as one would frost a cake”, according to Johns expert Barbara Rose. He was still in his twenties when he painted this particular flag in 1958, but already had a solo show at the taste-making Leo Castelli Gallery and his work added to the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. He approached the flag as an object, rather than a symbol – this painting “is no more about a flag than it is about a brushstroke or about a colour or about the physicality of the paint”, as he said in 1965. That gave me room to work on other levels". For Johns, “using the flag took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. Jasper Johns first painted the American flag in 1954–1955 aged 24, and it’s been a frequently recurring motif in his practice ever since.
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