Jasper Johns
Photograph by swanksaloton Flickr.
His work is often described as johns a Neo-Dadaist, as opposed to pop art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture. Johns treatment of the surface is often lush and painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media as encaustic and plaster relief in his paintings.
Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography. Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. In the episode Mom and Pop Art , Homer Simpson is hailed as an outsider artist after an art dealer discovers Homer s mangled brick barbecue grill, and Johns attends one of his exhibitions.
While the Met would not disclose how much was paid, experts estimate The National Gallery of Art acquired about 1,700 of Johns proofs in 2007. The firm’s index of the 1,000 most valuable works of art sold at auction - Skate’s Top 1000 - contains 7 works by Johns. In 1999, Jasper Johns guest-starred in the animated television series The Simpsons, as himself.
Johns Flag, for instance, is primarily a visual object, divorced from its symbolic connotations and reduced to something in-itself. In 1990, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City, and in the spring 2008, a ten-year retrospective of Johns drawings was mounted there. In 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought Johns White Flag.
Johns neutralized the subject, so that something like a pure painted surface could declare itself. Since the 1980s, Johns produces paintings at four to five a year, sometimes not at all during a year.
In contrast, Neo-Dadaists like Johns and Rauschenberg seemed preoccupied with a lessening of the reliance of their art on indexical qualities, seeking instead to create meaning solely through the use of conventional symbols. Jasper Johns, Jr.
(born May 15, 1930) is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking. Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents marriage failed. This made the Gallery home to the largest number of Johns works held by a single institution.
Some have interpreted this as a rejection of the hallowed individualism of the Abstract Expressionists. The exhibition showed works from many points in Johns career, including recent proofs of his prints.
Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, it could be argued that in the end, they had simply changed subjects. His large scale paintings are much favored by collectors and due to their rarity, it is known that Johns works are extremely difficult to acquire. Skate’s Art Market Research (Skate Press, Ltd.), a New York based advisory firm servicing private and institutional investors in the art market, has ranked Jasper Johns as the 30th most valuable artist.
He completed high school in Sumter, South Carolina, where he once again lived with his mother. Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948, a total of three semesters. In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered Johns while visiting Rauschenberg s studio. Johns currently lives in Sharon, Connecticut and the Island of Saint Martin. He is best known for his painting Flag (1954-55), which he painted after having a dream of the American flag. Johns is portrayed as a kleptomaniac, constantly stealing food items, lightbulbs, a motorboat, and Marge s painting of the flooded town. Ralph Erskine (1983/4) · Fumihiko Maki / Giancarlo De Carlo (1988) · Frank Gehry / Jørn Utzon / Denys Lasdun (1992) · Frei Otto / Aldo van Eyck (1996/7) · Álvaro Siza Vieira (2001) · Jean Nouvel (2005) Vladimir Horowitz / Olivier Messiaen / Josef Tal (1982) · Isaac Stern / Krzysztof Penderecki (1987) · Yehudi Menuhin / Luciano Berio (1991) · Zubin Mehta / György Ligeti (1995/6) · Pierre Boulez / Riccardo Muti (2000) · Mstislav Rostropovich / Daniel Barenboim (2004) · Giya Kancheli / Claudio Abbado (2008) Marc Chagall / Antoni Tàpies (1981) · Jasper Johns (1986) · Anselm Kiefer (1990) · Gerhard Richter (1994/5) · Louise Bourgeois (2002/3) · Michelangelo Pistoletto (2006/7) Eduardo Chillida (1984/5) · Claes Oldenburg (1989) · Bruce Nauman (1993) · James Turrell (1998) · Louise Bourgeois (2002/3) · Michelangelo Pistoletto (2006/7) .
For twenty years after Johns painted Flag, the surface could suffice - for example, in Andy Warhol s silkscreens, or in Robert Irwin s illuminated ambient works. Abstract Expressionist figures like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning ascribed to the concept of a macho artist hero , and their paintings are indexical in that they stand effectively as a signature on canvas. Johns also produces intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs. Johns breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of familiar associations to answer the need for subject.
He then spent a year living with his mother in Columbia, South Carolina and thereafter he spent several years living with his aunt Gladys in Lake Murray, South Carolina, twenty-two miles from Columbia.
