Jasper Johns
Flags and targets.
Jasper Johns painted American flags, targets and numbers in encaustic. He turned the familiar into an artistic problem.
Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and grew up in South Carolina, partly with relatives. He studied briefly at the university there and then moved to New York. He did military service during the Korean War and was stationed in Japan for a time.
In 1954 he destroyed most of his earlier work and painted his first American flag. He has said that the idea came to him in a dream. Flag of 1954–55 is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He painted it in encaustic, that is, pigment in molten wax, over scraps of newspaper, giving the surface a lively, layered quality. At the same time he began painting targets, numbers and letters. These were flat, familiar motifs that everyone recognises, which allows one to concentrate on how the picture is made and what it really is: a flag or a painting.
In 1958 he had his first solo exhibition with the gallerist Leo Castelli, and the Museum of Modern Art bought several works. During these years he lived with Robert Rauschenberg, and together their work is considered to have paved the way for Pop Art and Minimalism. In 1960 he made a sculpture of two beer cans in painted bronze. According to a well-known story, it was a response to Willem de Kooning’s remark that Castelli could sell anything, even two beer cans.
Johns has since worked with maps, crosshatch patterns and increasingly personal and enigmatic images about memory, death and time. He is also a major printmaker. In 2011 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States.
Johns is regarded as one of the most influential American artists of the post-war era. His flag paintings have sold for some of the highest sums ever paid for works by a living artist.