In the 1960s, influenced by the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Johns pushed further into questions of language and signification in art. In Map (1961), Johns incorporated a technique he termed “brushmarking,” which entailed placing large brushstrokes like quasi-linguistic elements on the canvas to structure the image, not unlike the “constructive brushstroke” of the Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne.
Why Jasper Johns Is an Icon of 20th-Century Painting
This past fall, the 87-year-old American artist Jasper Johns revealed plans to turn his 170-acre retreat in rural Sharon, Connecticut, into an artists’ residence upon his death. Recognized as one of America’s finest painters and printmakers, Johns intends to create an endowment that will allow the retreat to welcome not only visual artists, but poets, musicians, and dancers for three-month sojourns.
It makes perfect sense that Johns would see the value in fostering multidisciplinary artist communities. In the 1950s and ’60s, when he was living and working in New York City, Johns collaborated with talents like the composer John Cage, the dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham, and his own longtime partner Robert Rauschenberg, a visual artist. Taking cues from Dada master Marcel Duchamp, Johns and Rauschenberg questioned the very nature of art, leading them to be known as Neo-Dada artists—as well as helping to inspire Pop Art via their concern in vernacular imagery, and influencing Conceptual Art through their focus on language and semiotics.
Still active in the arts today, Johns—who in 2011 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award bestowed by the U.S. government—is perhaps best known for reintroducing figurative imagery into American modern art at a moment when abstraction, specifically Abstract Expressionism, reigned supreme. Johns achieved this most famously by covering supports with symbols like flags, targets, and maps that, abstracted and reconsidered, only seemed to have fixed meanings and actually suggested more questions than answers. What, then, can we say about Jasper Johns and the purposefully inscrutable art that made him one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century?
Who is Jasper Johns?
Jasper Johns
Flag, 1967
“The Inaugural Installation” at The Broad, Los Angeles
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Born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930, Johns spent his childhood and adolescence moving around South Carolina as a result of complications from his parents’ divorce. After three semesters at the University of South Carolina, he transferred to the Parsons School of Design in New York City in 1949, taking a leave of absence from 1951–53 to serve in the Korean War, during which he was stationed in Japan.
Settling back in New York in 1953, he met and began his relationship with Rauschenberg, which helped to ground him in the art scene and to put his work in front of the renowned dealer Leo Castelli, who would offer Johns his first one-man show at his gallery in 1958. When MoMA director Alfred Barr, Jr. showed up at the gallery and bought three paintings—an unprecedented purchase from a virtually unknown artist—the artist was officially “discovered.”
What is he known for?
Jasper Johns
Untitled (From the Color Numeral Series), 1969
Burning in Water
Jasper Johns
Figure 7 from Color Numeral Series, 1969
Heis Gallery
Perhaps Johns’s most famous painting, Flag (1954–55) was foremost among those that entered MoMA’s collection. (This was not one of those purchased by Barr, but a later donation from the architect Philip Johnson, after Barr requested he buy it for the museum, fearing that the acquisitions committee would consider him unpatriotic.) The painting is a fairly accurate representation of the American flag, in encaustic on collaged paper and fabric, a favorite medium for Johns. But the artist approached the flag with the gestural hand of Action Painters like Willem de Kooning, eschewing the crisp, clear coloring and delineations of America’s national symbol in favor of rougher edges and a textured, impasto surface.
As such, Flag calls into question its relationship to the American flag: Is Flag, in fact, a flag? Is it a representation of a flag? Is every American flag simply a representation of some predetermined notion of the American flag, a mere reflection of an idea? With Flag, Johns updated the Surrealist artist René Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” conundrum from 1929—in which he juxtaposed a rendering of a pipe with the words, in French, “This is not a pipe.” What the viewer sees—and at first presumes to understand through visual recognition—ultimately evades meaning. There both is and isn’t a flag.
Indeed, through the very act of purchasing or displaying Johns’s works, the meaning of its image is shifted. Such was the case with Castelli’s purchase of the artist’s Target with Plaster Casts (1955). Art critic Robert Hughes said as much in an episode from his 1980 television series The Shock of the New: “Once a target is seen aesthetically, as a unified design, its use is lost. It stops being a sign and becomes an image. We do not know it so clearly. Its obviousness becomes, in some degree, speculative.”
But what of the titular “plaster casts”? Johns placed nine small wooden boxes at the top of the target, containing models of dismembered body parts: face, hand, ear, penis.
Jasper Johns
Target with Plaster Casts, 1979-1980
Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art
Jasper Johns
Watchman, 1964
“The Inaugural Installation” at The Broad, Los Angeles
One hypothesis lies in the fact that the artist was named after an American military hero and served in the army himself. Could Flag be autobiographical, owing to his namesake or Johns’s personal tour of duty? Is Target? What would these symbols mean to Johns versus someone from Japan after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Korea after the conflict? Are the plaster casts seen in Target the disembodied mutilations of the front lines? Of oppression and surveillance at home?
Or might they speak to the home front, where McCarthyism ran rampant in the decade following World War II, targeting both Communists and—in greater numbers but in a quieter capacity—homosexuals? In 1953, Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, barring gays from working in the federal government. Given Johns’s sexuality—something of an open secret—do these bodies recall the silent and closeted desires for which he could become a target?
To paraphrase Hughes: Like the target itself, the obviousness of the human figure in Target becomes largely speculative. We don’t totally recognize our own form. Fittingly, a version of Flag (reproduced by the artist Sturtevant) had technically been shown before, incorporated into Rauschenberg’s collaged artwork Short Circuit (1955), where it was revealed by opening a cabinet door—partly hidden as one symbol in a composition of many elements, further obscuring any possible message.
Artist reveals painting of our American flag in ‘the greatest country in the world’
Visual artist Steve Penley saluted the American flag in a stunning new Independence Day painting — one that will last far beyond the holiday last weekend.
Penley revealed the work of art earlier this week on “Fox & Friends.”
He called in from Atlanta, Georgia, and shared how he painted the piece throughout that morning.
Penley commented that the American flag is not only the “best looking” in the world, but also serves as a reminder of our privilege.
Artist Steve Penley revealed his Fourth of July artwork on “Fox and Friends” on July 4, 2022. (Fox News)
“It is the greatest country in the world,” he said.
“And every day we live here, we’re living in paradise.”
The massive painting, depicting a sprawling and waving flag surrounded by multicolored fireworks, is a “celebration of the country we live in,” the artist explained.
Visual artist Steve Penley stands in front of his Independence Day painting revealed on “Fox and Friends,” on July 4, 2022. (Fox News)
Penley’s work is best known for its vibrant style.
It’s distinguished by his use of large brush strokes and bright colors.
The artist often creates patriotic pieces.
His work includes portraits of former U.S. presidents and sketches of the Statue of Liberty and the American flag in different artistic styles.
White Flag
During the 1950s and 1960s Johns frequently appropriated well-known images such as targets, maps, and flags—in his words, “things the mind already knows.” White Flag is part of Johns’s famous flag series, which he began in 1954. In this rendering, he drains this iconic subject of its characteristic red, white, and blue coloration, leaving it to loom, ghostlike. The painting’s bleached appearance and composite, layered form make the familiar image strange. By challenging our understanding of what constitutes a national symbol and complicating our relationship to this highly charged American image, it speaks powerfully, if ambiguously, to the issue of national identity.
to experts illuminate this artwork’s story
#2020. Modern & Contemporary Art: White Flag
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Artwork Details
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Title: White Flag
Artist: Jasper Johns (American, born Augusta, Georgia, 1930)
Medium: Encaustic, oil, newsprint, and charcoal on canvas
Dimensions: 78 5/16 in. × 10 ft. 3/4 in. (198.9 × 306.7 cm)
Credit Line: Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Reba and Dave Williams, Stephen and Nan Swid, Roy R. and Marie S. Neuberger Foundation Inc., Louis and Bessie Adler Foundation Inc., Paula Cussi, Maria-Gaetana Matisse, The Barnett Newman Foundation, Jane and Robert Carroll, Eliot and Wilson Nolen, Mr. and Mrs. Derald H. Ruttenberg, Ruth and Seymour Klein Foundation Inc., Andrew N. Schiff, The Cowles Charitable Trust, The Merrill G. and Emita E. Hastings Foundation, John J. Roche, Molly and Walter Bareiss, Linda and Morton Janklow, Aaron I. Fleischman, and Linford L. Lougheed Gifts, and gifts from friends of the Museum; Kathryn E. Hurd, Denise and Andrew Saul, George A. Hearn, Arthur Hoppock Hearn, Joseph H. Hazen Foundation Purchase, and Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky Funds; Mayer Fund; Florene M. Schoenborn Bequest; Gifts of Professor and Mrs. Zevi Scharfstein and Himan Brown, and other gifts, bequests, and funds from various donors, by exchange, 1998
Accession Number: 1998.329
Rights and Reproduction: Art ©Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
the artist (1955–98; on longterm loan to Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, December 1972–August 1985; on longterm loan to Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, September 1985–October 1991; on longterm loan to National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 1991–September 1996; sold through Leo Castelli Gallery, New York to MMA)
New York. Leo Castelli Gallery. “Jasper Johns: Paintings,” January 20–February 8, 1958, no catalogue?
Museum of Modern Art, New York. “Sixteen Americans,” December 16, 1959–February 17, 1960, unnumbered cat. (p. 25; as “Large White Flag,” lent by the artist).
Moderna Museet, Stockholm. “4 Amerikanare: Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Stankiewicz,” March 17–May 6, 1962, no. 1 (as “The Large White Flag”).
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. “4 Amerikanen: Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Stankiewicz,” May 18–June 18, 1962, not in catalogue.
Kunsthalle Bern. “4 Amerikaner: Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Stankiewicz,” July 7–September 2, 1962, not in catalogue.
Paris. Galerie Marcelle Dupuis. “Jasper Johns,” November 15–December 31, 1962, no catalogue.
Jewish Museum, New York. “Jasper Johns,” February 16–April 12, 1964, no. 6 (as “Large White Flag”, lent by the artist).
London. Whitechapel Gallery. “Jasper Johns: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, 1954–1964,” December 2–31, 1964, no. 2 (as “Large White Flag,” lent by the artist).
Pasadena Art Museum. “Jasper Johns,” January 26–February 28, 1965, no catalogue.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Three Centuries of American Painting,” April 9–October 17, 1965, unnum. checklist (lent by the artist).
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. “Two Decades of American Painting,” October 15–November 27, 1966, unnumbered cat. (p. 67; lent by the artist).
National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. “Two Decades of American Painting,” December 10, 1966–January 22, 1967, unnumbered cat.
New Delhi. Lalit Kala Gallery. “Two Decades of American Painting,” March 28–April 16, 1967, no. 32.
Melbourne. National Gallery of Victoria. “Two Decades of American Painting,” June 6–July 9, 1967, no. 32 (lent by the artist).
Sydney. Art Gallery of New South Wales. “Two Decades of American Painting,” July 26–August 20, 1967, no. 32.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970,” October 18, 1969–February 8, 1970, no. 131 (lent by the artist).
New York. Whitney Museum of American Art. “Jasper Johns,” October 17, 1977–January 22, 1978, no. 3 (lent by the artist).
Museum of Modern Art, New York. “Jasper Johns: A Retrospective,” October 20, 1996–January 21, 1997, no. 11 (lent by the artist).
Cologne. Museum Ludwig. “Jasper Johns: Retrospektive,” March 8–June 1, 1997, no. 12 (lent by the artist).
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. “Jasper Johns: A Retrospective,” June 28–August 17, 1997, no. 011 (lent by the artist).
Basel. Fondation Beyeler. “Jasper Johns: Werke aus dem Besitz des Künsterls / Loans from the Artist,” October 21, 1997–February 15, 1998, no. 2.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions,” October 24, 2008–February 1, 2009, online catalogue.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art [The Met Breuer]. “Home Is a Foreign Place: Recent Acquisitions in Context,” April 9, 2019–March 12, 2020 [intended closing date June 21, 2020], no catalogue.
New York. Whitney Museum of American Art. “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” September 29, 2021–February 13, 2022, no. 4 (“Flags and Maps” section).
R[obert]. R[osenblum]. “Jasper Johns.” Arts 32 (January 1958), pp. 54–55.
S[tuart]. P[reston]. “Haseltine Views of Italy at Cooper Union.” New York Times (January 25, 1958), p. 15, mentions “a number of pictures” of the American flag in Exh. New York 1958.
John Ashbery. “American Art Shows Flood Paris.” New York Herald Tribune (Paris) (November 21, 1962), p. 6.
John Russell. “How to Hang Out the Flag.” Sunday Times (London) (December 6, 1964), p. 25.
Irving Sandler. “In the Art Galleries.” New York Post Magazine (March 1, 1964), p. 14.
Henry Geldzahler. American Painting in the Twentieth Century. New York, 1965, pp. 204–5, ill., calls it “White Flag” in the caption and “Large White Flag” in the text.
Joseph Lelyveld. “Modern U.S. Art Stirs New Delhi: New York School, Pop and Op Get Mixed Reactions.” New York Times (April 10, 1967), p. 32.
Max Kozloff. Jasper Johns. New York, [1968], pp. 17–18, colorpl. 10.
Leo Steinberg. Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. New York, 1972, pp. 87–88.
Alan Shestack. “Director’s Report for 1972.” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 34 (June 1973), p. 2, fig. 3.
Richard S. Field. “Jasper Johns’ Flags.” Print Collector’s Newsletter 7 (July–August 1976), pp. 69–73, 76, ill. (color).
Robert Hughes. “Art: Pictures at an Inhibition: Jasper Johns’ New York Retrospective.” Time 110 (October 31, 1977), p. 84.
Carter Ratcliff. “New York Letter.” Art International (December 1977).
John Russell. “Art: Jasper Johns Packs Them In.” New York Times (October 21, 1977), p. 73.
Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. “Collecting American Art for Yale, 1968–1976: A Curatorial Report.” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 36 (Spring 1977), p. 14, ill.
Barbara Rose. “The Sixties.” American Painting from the Colonial Period to the Present. 2nd ed. (1st ed., 1969). New York, 1977, ill. p. 229.
David Sweet. “Meaning, Value and the Tradition of Paintedness.” Artscribe no. 7 (July 1977), pp. 19–22, ill., calls it “Large White Flag”.
Janet Hobhouse. “Jasper Johns: The Passionless Subject Passionately Painted.” Art News 76 (December 1977), p. 47.
Irving Sandler. The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties. New York, 1978, p. 191.
Alan Shestack. “Jasper Johns: Reflections.” Print Collector’s Newsletter 8 (January–February 1978), p. 173, fig. 1 (color).
Richard Francis. Jasper Johns. New York, 1984, p. 28, colorpl. 18.
Roberta Bernstein. Jasper Johns’ Paintings and Sculptures 1954–1974. Ann Arbor, 1985, pp. 9–11, 43, 73, 219 n. 55.
Deborah Solomon. “The Unflagging Artistry of Jasper Johns.” New York Times (June 19, 1988), p. SM63.
Alfred Pacquement. Frank Stella. Paris, 1988, pp. 20, 186, ill.
Georges Boudaille. Jasper Johns. New York, 1989, pp. 10, 12, 126, fig. 5 (color).
Jean-Emile Verdier. “Le Modèle du moulage dans la fabrication de l’oeuvre de Jasper Johns.” Artstudio no. 12 (Spring 1989), pp. 58, 63–64, 66–67, ill. p. 61 (color).
Nan Rosenthal. The Drawings of Jasper Johns. Exh. cat., National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 1990, p. 96.
Jean-Pierre Naugrette. “La peau de la peinture: ‘Three Flags’ de Jasper Johns.” Revue française d’études américaines no. 46 (November 1990), pp. 247–48.
Philip Fisher. “Jasper Johns: Strategies for Making and Effacing Art.” Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990), pp. 320–21.
Paul Taylor. “Jasper Johns.” Interview 20 (July 1990), p. 100.
Fred Orton. Figuring Jasper Johns. Cambridge, 1994.
Kirk Varnedoe. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective. Exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art. New York, 1996, pp. 15, 102.
David Sylvester. Jasper Johns, Flags: 1955–1994. Exh. cat., Anthony d’Offay Gallery. London, 1996, p. 73, ill. p. 74.
Robert Hughes. The Shock of the New: The Hundred–Year History of Modern Art–Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall. New York, 1996, p. 337, colorpl. 226.
Carter Ratcliff. The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art. New York, 1996, pp. 131–32, relates that this painting was one of only two that remained unsold after Exh. New York 1958.
Lilian Tone in Kirk Varnedoe. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective. Exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art. New York, 1996, pp. 124, 127–28, 166, 198, 229, ill. pp. 116 (color detail), 128 (installation photo, Exh. New York 1958), colorpl. 11.
Jean-Philippe Domecq. “Jasper Johns ou l’Art sur l’art.” Esprit no. 219 (March 1996), p. 123.
Werner Schmalenbach. Die Lust auf das Bild: Ein Leben mit der Kunst. Berlin, 1996, pp. 326–28, ill.
Robert Rosenblum. Jasper Johns: Werke aus dem Besitz des Künstlers / Loans from the Artist. Exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler. Basel, 1997, pp. 19, 30, 32, no. 2, ill. pp. 22–23 (color).
David Sylvester. “Shots at a Moving Target.” Art in America 85 (April 1997), pp. 90–91, ill. (color).
Carol Vogel. “Met Buys Its First Painting by Jasper Johns.” New York Times (October 29, 1998), pp E1, E6, ill.
Nan Rosenthal in “Recent Acquisitions. A Selection: 1998–1999.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 57 (Fall 1999), pp. 66–67, ill. (color).
Stella Paul. Twentieth-Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Resource for Educators. New York, 1999, pp. 102–5, ill. (color and bw), and ill. (color) front cover (detail), back cover.
Philippe de Montebello. “Director’s Note.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 57 (Fall 1999), p. 5.
Lilly Wei. “Complexity and Contradiction.” Art News 98 (December 1999), p. 140, ill. (color), dates it 1954 in the text and 1955 in the caption.
Milton Esterow. “‘Always a Gentleman’: Remembering Leo Castelli and His Devotion to the Art of Our Time.” Art News 98 (October 1999), p. 53.
Katie Clifford. “What Makes a Great Painting Great?” Art News 99 (September 2000), pp. 137–38, ill. (color).
Thomas Crow in Stephanie Barron and Lynn Zelevansky. Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections. Exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles, 2001, pp. 58, 60–61.
Kelly Devine Thomas. “The 10 Most Expensive Living Artists.” Art News 103 (May 2004), p. 120.
Joachim Pissarro. Cézanne/Pissarro, Johns/Rauschenberg: Comparative Studies on Intersubjectivity in Modern Art. New York, 2006, p. 158, fig. 24.
John Yau. “Jasper Johns’ Preoccupation.” American Poetry Review 35 (January/February 2006), pp. 44, 50.
Robert Morris. Have I Reasons: Work and Writings, 1993–2007. Ed. Nena Tsouti-Schillinger. Durham, 2008, pp. 230, 247, fig. 120.
Holland Cotter. “A Banquet of World Art, 30 Years in the Making.” New York Times (October 24, 2008), p. C33.
Stefan Neuner. Maskierung der Malerei: Jasper Johns nach Willem de Kooning. Munich, 2008, pp. 193–94, figs. 70 (installation photo, Exh. New York 1958), 73.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide. New York, 2012, p. 424, ill. (color).
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. “Painting as Diagram: Five Notes on Frank Stella’s Early Paintings, 1958–1959.” October 143 (Winter 2013), pp. 138–39, ill.
Margalit Fox. “Nan Rosenthal, 76, Advocate of 20th-Century Artworks.” New York Times (May 2, 2014), p. B10.
Calvin Tomkins. “Onward and Upward with the Arts: The Met and the Now.” New Yorker (January 25, 2016), p. 33.
John Onians. “Art History and Memory, From the Couch to the Scanner: On How the New Art History Woke Up to a Neural Future.” Art History 40 (September 2017), pp. 718–19, colorpl. 9.
Roberta Bernstein et al. Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture. Vol. 2, Painting, 1954–1970. New York, 2017, pp. 14–15, no. P7, ill. (color).
Roberta Bernstein et al. Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture. Vol. 5, Reference. 2017, pp. 8–9, 44, 46–48, 50–53, 56, 60, 74–75, 82, 94–95, fig. 15 (installation photo, Exh. New York 1958), ill. p. 94 (color).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide. New York, 2019, p. 424, ill. (color).
Max Hollein. Modern and Contemporary Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2019, ill. p. 112 (color).
Emily Sun. “Decolonizing Western Narratives of Modern Art.” hyperallergic.com. September 26, 2019.
Hannah Yohalem in Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf. Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror. Exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Philadelphia and New York, 2021, p. 108.
Ralph Lemon in Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf. Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror. Exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Philadelphia and New York, 2021, pp. 59, 142, no. 4 (“Flags and Maps” section), ill. (color) inside jacket cover and p. 64.
Jason Farago. “Close Read: How a Gray Painting Can Break Your Heart.” nytimes.com. January 16, 2022, ill. (color).
