As a familiar icon, the image of the American flag functioned as a 'found object' in his work. One of the most well known of Jasper Johns' flags is Flag (1954–1955), where his idiosyncratic approach to subject and material is visible. In 1954, dedicating himself to an ethos of original art, Johns destroyed all his previous drawings and paintings and began some of his early signature series, including his famous flags and targets. This approach later earned their work the successive labels of 'Neo-Dada' and 'Proto-Pop'. Together, Johns and Rauschenberg would topple the dominant legacy of Abstract Expressionism, applying Duchamp's notion of the ready-made to their work, through the inclusion of banal everyday imagery and materials. There, while briefly attending Hunter College, he became friends with another Southern artist, Robert Rauschenberg, as well as modernist composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, all of whom would have a profound influence on the artist's career. Army for service in the Korean War.Īfter two years in the army, he returned to New York in 1953. Doing so in late 1948, he attended countless exhibitions and studied at the Parsons School of Design in Greenwich Village for a semester before he was inducted into the U.S. His art teachers at the University of South Carolina's Columbia campus, where he spent three semesters between 19, urged him to move to New York, which was fast becoming a capital of modern art. Just look at it.A contemporary of the post-war Abstract Expressionist movement and a compatriot of Neo-Dada, Jasper Johns' paintings, prints, and sculptures, which uniquely depict popular and banal subject matter, became antecedents for the American pop art movement.īorn in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930 and raised in South Carolina, Johns developed artistic aspirations from an early age. Maybe Johns is asking you to consider the question, what is a painting? His answer: it’s a visual object, something in itself. It almost seems like a sculpture, or maybe a tapestry, hanging on the wall. The smallest painting, closest to you, is sticking out 5 inches above the largest painting beneath it. And Johns laid it on so thick that the painting is 5 inches deep. The result is a thick surface on the canvas that you can easily see. Instead he used encaustic, also called hot wax painting, a technique in which an artist mixes beeswax with color pigments. To make that point clearer, here’s a bit more verbal description of the painting Three Flags. Maybe he wanted you to look at the painting as a painting. But maybe Johns didn’t care what meaning you give to the flags. For instance, everyone who looks at a painting of the American flag will find their own meaning, depending on things like your age, your politics, your nationality, the times in which you live. But their meaning could be just as elusive as an Abstract Expressionist painting. His work seemed partly a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, an art movement of the time whose paintings had no recognizable content all.Įveryone could recognize the American flags. Three Flags is an example of how Johns often used images and techniques from popular mass culture, things like advertising, comic books, and as Johns once said, “things the mind already knows.” Like the American flag. MUSIC ENDS ABRUPTLY AS NEEDLE SCRATCH ACROSS RECORD Maybe.Īnd maybe the painting Three Flags is about something else. Some critics suggest that Jasper Johns painted American flags because he was named after a military hero in the Revolutionary War, Sergeant William Jasper. So Three Flags seems at first glance to be a patriotic painting celebrating the nation’s symbol. Remember, Johns painted this in 1958, before Alaska and Hawaii became states. The flags are in the traditional colors, thirteen horizontal stripes alternating red and white, and a rectangle of blue in the upper left corner holding six rows of white stars for a total of 48. For the last two, you can only see parts of the flags, around their edges. There’s a small one closest to you that you see completely, a slightly larger one behind that, and the largest flag is behind both of them. Three Flags is basically a painting of three American flags, displayed flat and unfolded, lying one on top of another. To understand why, let’s look at one of his most famous paintings titled Three Flags. Jasper Johns is one of most important and influential American painters of the twentieth century. Listen to an audio introduction and a verbal description In the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art ABS | Art History Through Touch and Sound | American Art
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