Jasper Johns

Donated by the artist

This painting is in excellent condition. Under ultraviolet light there are no apparent restorations. The canvas is framed in a blonde wood frame with a small float. Please note the artist for this lot has requested that the purchaser of the lot be disclosed to the artist. By bidding on this lot, the successful purchaser consents to the disclosure.
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Jasper Johns’s singular importance to American art was recognized immediately after the first one-person show of his work opened at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. The early works—exquisitely rendered variations on such mundane objects as American flags, targets, numerals, and letters of the alphabet—ushered the way out from under the weighty heroics of Abstract Expressionism and helped pave the way for Pop, Minimalism, and subsequent practices to emerge. Despite the iconic status of these breakthrough works, for more than half a century Johns has continued to pursue his artistic instincts wherever they have led him, employing a variety of mediums, from oil and encaustic to lithography or etching, and a range of successive styles across painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Whether in the melancholy, monochromatic paintings and drawings of the early to mid-1960s, the patterned hatch mark and flagstone pieces of the 1970s, or the art historical or biographical works of subsequent years, a consummate mastery of craft and a persistent intellectual engagement with the possibilities of the visual have continued to predominate.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has collected and exhibited Johns’s work throughout this long and varied career. It was included in the museum’s Annual Exhibitions each year from 1959 through 1963, and an important survey of the artist’s work it organized in 1977 traveled to Cologne, Paris, London, Tokyo, and San Francisco. In all, five solo and more than thirty-seven group exhibitions at the museum have featured Johns’s work. The significant paintings White Target (1957), Three Flags (1958), 0 Through 9 (1961), Double White Map (1965), Studio II (1966), Racing Thoughts (1983), and Untitled (1996) are held in the Whitney’s permanent collection, along with some 150 prints and drawings, including lithographs such as Savarin (1977–81) and the drawings Usuyaki (1979) and Catenary (1999).

Untitled is an oil on canvas from 2012 that incorporates both figurative and abstract elements. The vibrantly colored composition, strongly related to Johns’s five-canvas work 5 Postcards (2011), suggests the studio of the artist. Two large blue circular forms, one in flat paint and one with a more textured surface, predominate against a field of black, which dissipates toward the white space below and abuts a plane of bright red at the upper left. Recurring elements from earlier works are present, such as the trompe-l’oeil effects of the nail from which a yellow cloth hangs and the white vase that creates double-profile figures from its curved outline. Johns continuously works from a lexicon of images that recur throughout his oeuvre. The vase and its profiles appear in a number of works: in the Whitney’s 1983 painting Racing Thoughts, along with the hanging yellow cloth; as an element in the artist’s Seasons series of paintings and prints, together with the shadowy gray figures and ladder that are present here; and in several recent works, such as the 2001 linocut on paper, Flag and Vase. With its dabs of spectral color placed as if on a palette along the painting’s bottom edge, the work provides a richly open-ended meditation on the artist’s career-long enterprise.