So what exactly is Jasper Johns' "private experience" of the public symbol that is the American flag? This is of course a question the artist has never really answered, but one nevertheless that a number of his paintings with their recurring stars-and-stripes motif poses. His party-line response when asked about his fascination with the flag is to say that the imagery comes from "things the mind already knows." A New York Times piece on his 2018 retrospective at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles describes Johns' style as one that "claim public symbols for the realm of inwardness and private experience." Why the flag? Johns is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to the interpretation of his work. Among Johns' favorite subjects, the American flag. Some suggest that his younger work pays homage to this school while also nodding to the emergent pop art scene - he pulls off a curious, thought-provoking blend of the quotidian and authentic gestural self-expression. Johns' early artistic rise coincided with the waning of the "ab ex" movement. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko were some of the more notable artists creating "cathedrals … out of their own feelings." Johns, one could argue, took this concept and turned it on its head with his own unique style. ![]() A Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, the painter came of age around the time abstract expressionism had taken hold in the New York art world. ![]() Both the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art have collaborated to present the 91-year-old artist's most comprehensive exhibit yet, "Mind/Mirror." Jasper Johns' work will be on display in two of the country's most famous art museums concurrently, through Feb. For example, the lithographic stones and plates that Johns used to print Color Numerals had been reworked from those used to produce Black Numerals, a series made the previous year at Gemini.Marlowe is a freelance writer, essayist, former English professor and LGBTQ+ activist who splits her time between Rochester, NY and Baltimore, MD. Johns has taken advantage of the opportunity offered by printmaking to test multiple options, and pursue different avenues of exploration in his repetitive, measured transformation of the numerical subject. His exploration of numeric figures began in 1955 and grew in intensity until about 1970 it is the motif to which he has returned most often, exploring it in paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. Do something else to it”- reveal the overarching serial logic of his creative approach. Johns’s basic instructions to himself, penned in a sketchbook-“Take an object. Johns’s series draws renewed attention to the fact that counting, something the mind already knows but overlooks, involves eye, mind, and body. The subject of Johns’s series, therefore, is the 10 base digits of the decimal system, derived centuries ago from humans’ 10 fingers. ![]() While Johns’s numerical sequence could in theory extend indefinitely, Color Numerals demarcates a terminal arithmetic progression, its finality reinforced by the heavy white outline of Figure 9. This succession is color-coded by Johns’s signatures, which match the topmost hue in each print. Seen in sequence, each print functions as a point on a continuum, with color transitioning from primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) in Figure 0 to secondary colors (orange, green, and purple) in Figure 9. The meaning of any series is to be found not just in its individual parts, but also in the spaces between them. This is wittily underscored by the Mona Lisa (printed in reverse) in Figure 7, a pun on the multiple definitions of “figure.” Counteracting over-familiarity, each of the Color Numerals prints elevates a number, its form derived from a commercial stencil, to a striking, rainbow-hued portrait. Johns favors subjects that “the mind already knows” but overlooks due to constant exposure. Since the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns (American, born 1930) has reworked key motifs-flags, targets, maps, the alphabet, and numbers-in a serial fashion, exploring the impact of changes in color, scale, sequence, and medium.
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