“My work is largely concerned with relations between seeing and knowing, seeing and saying, seeing and believing. Preconceptions which are a sort of ‘knowing’ may be placed in doubt or may be affirmed by seeing.”
A psychologically complex investigation into the paradoxical nature of representation, Evian stands as an early manifesto of Jasper Johns’ defining conceptual project. The rich, nearly six-foot composition of Evian brings together a range of pictorial elements from previous works that connect it to monumental masterpieces from the same year, such as According to What and Watchman, the latter of which belongs to The Broad, Los Angeles. Executed in 1964, Evian dates to one of the most pivotal years in Johns’ career—that year, the Jewish Museum in New York presented a major retrospective of the first ten years of his artistic practice, bringing him international recognition and widespread critical acclaim.
Further testament to Evian’s significance within Johns' oeuvre, paintings from the early 1960s that share motifs with the present work are held in prestigious institutional collections, among them The Broad, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Menil Collection, Houston; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Evian has been held in the same family collection for the last six decades – having been acquired in 1966 from Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Paris – during which time it has been exhibited widely at a number of significant institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul de Vence; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Here, the interplay between found objects, referential signifiers, and a rich painterly surface unites Johns’ early Pop vocabulary with a gestural commentary on Abstract Expressionism, encapsulating his foundational conceptual considerations that have cemented Johns’ place among the foremost American artists of the twentieth century.
Significant Related Paintings from the 1950s-60s
Evian emerges from a formative period of Johns’ artist practice, during which time he moved away from the flags, targets, numbers, and maps of the 1950s in favor of a more conceptual interrogation. In 1964, Johns had just returned from his sojourn in Japan, with the present work among the first paintings completed upon his return to New York. Befittingly, its title pays homage to a bar he frequented while in Tokyo: the work was initially spelled Evion but was later corrected after Johns realized he had misremembered the name. Here, readymade objects are collaged against a painterly backdrop alongside imprints of a liquor bottle, evoking the Duchampian spirit of borrowing, reconfiguring, and recontextualizing forms.
“In choosing to articulate gray versions of nearly every key pictorial theme, Johns encourages comparisons across, not just within, related bodies of work. Gray allows the artist to pose allied questions within disparate fields of inquiry, to see something and then to resee it differently. If painting is a language, as Johns descended from [Ludwig] Wittgenstein, has often suggested, then gray can be inflected much like a noun, verb or adjective. More accurately, gray is all pervasive, like syntax. Gray exists in Johns’ work not just as color, but also as idea, condition, and material – a thing in and of itself.”
In the upper left, a trash can lid extends the circular motif found in works from Johns’ Diver group beyond the canvas’ edge. The trash can lid and its imprint assumes the role of one of Johns’ “devices”: a mark-making tool that ultimately becomes embedded into the work itself. The spoked impression of the lid echoes the semi-circles scraped by rulers and stretcher bars in works such as Device from 1962, speaking to Johns’ interest in recording the physical effect his chosen objects have on time and space. Evian also sees Johns experiment with motifs that recur throughout his oeuvre, with significant alterations: he bends the coat hanger from his eponymous 1959 painting and traces its shadow in pencil, and a piece of twine, suspended from one section, emphasizes the space the coat hanger occupies in front of the canvas and echoes the drips of pink paint above it. This amalgamation of pictorial elements catalogue the varieties of representation—shadows of objects, real objects, impressions of objects, and painted images—and in doing so, Johns challenges the viewer’s preconceptions with an aesthetic object, forcing a reconsideration of medium and form.
“The canvas is object, the paint is object, and object is object.’’
Johns’ restrained color palette of shadowy grays and the diffused passages of primary hues represents the convergence of two of his most important visual idioms. Widely known to be Johns’ favorite color, gray has dominated the full scope of the artist’s oeuvre, from the mid-1950s to his output today. For Johns, grayscale represents ambiguity and impartiality, allowing the artist to forgo the connotative trappings of color. In reducing the majority of his surfaces to a tonal range, he instead emphasizes the tactile marks of the brush and the undulations of pictorial value. “If painting is a language,” curator James Rondeau observed, “then gray can be inflected much like a noun, verb, or adjective. More accurately, gray is all pervasive, like syntax. Gray exists in Johns’s work not just as a color, but also as idea, condition, and material – a thing in and of itself.” (James Rondeau quoted in: Exh. Cat., Art Institute of Chicago (and traveling), Jasper Johns: Gray, 2007, p. 28)
Jasper Johns, Land’s End, 1963
oil on canvas with objects
66 ⅞ by 48 ⅛ in.
San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtThe segmented design of the circular form in Evian’s upper left recalls the scraped half circles that appear in Johns’ “device” paintings, which refer to a mark-making tool that ultimately becomes embedded into the work itself. Half of a vinyl trash can lid protrudes from the canvas, completing the circumference of its mirror imprint in a witty examination of the tension between appropriation and mark-making. The inclusion of the found object concretizes an extension of the painting beyond the canvas edge that is only alluded to in works from Johns' Diver group, while recalling Duchamp’s use of readymades.
Jasper Johns, Coat Hanger, 1959
encaustic on canvas with objects
27 ⅞ by 21 ¼ in.
Private CollectionHere, Johns reintroduces the coat hanger from his 1959 painting, Coat Hanger, with significant alterations. Rather than replicate its straightforward appearance, Johns laid the coathanger on the canvas and bent one end, then used a pencil to outline its original position, creating a shadow-like effect. A piece of twine, suspended from one section, emphasizes the space the coat hanger occupies in front of the canvas and echoes the drips of pink paint above it. A similar coat hanger assemblage appears in the monumental According to What, which was executed directly following Evian and which effectively serves as a retrospective painting, summarizing significant themes and motifs from Johns' previous works.
Jasper Johns, Arrive/Depart, 1963-1964
oil on canvas
68 by 51 ½ in.
Sammlung Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Moderne, MunichNear the bottom left, a ghostly imprint of a skull references Arrive/Depart, which was executed from 1963-64. Marked by an orange cross – as if seen from a scope of a rifle – and partially obscured by a gray brushstroke, the vanitas image speaks to Johns' preoccupation with transience and death at the time and evokes the art historical tradition of allegorical memento mori painting.
Robert Rauschenberg, Coca-Cola Plan, 1958
graphite on paper, oil on three Coca-Cola bottles, wood newel cap, and cat metal wings on wood structure
26 ¾ by 25 ¼ by 4 ¾ in.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesAt the top edge, Johns introduces a new motif in the form of an imprinted liquor bottle. Evian is the first time the iconography of a liquor bottle appears in Johns’ oeuvre, and relates the composition to the environment of its namesake, the Japanese bar that Johns frequented during his time in Tokyo. Its titled placement at the edge of the canvas, alongside the other idiosyncratic elements, contribute to Evian’s disorienting and evocative emotional tone.
Jasper Johns, Watchman, 1964
oil on canvas with objects, in two parts
85 by 60 ¼ in.
The Broad, Los AngelesThe block-like sequence of primary colors in Evian recur throughout Johns’ works from the early 1960s, most notably in Watchman (1964), which was executed during Johns’ stay in Japan. This motif is intimately linked in concept to Johns’ repeated usage of the words “red,” “yellow,” and “blue,” which are in turn often painted in gray or non-congruent colors. In a witty nod to Surrealist master René Magritte’s revolutionary statement, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” Johns acknowledges the treachery of representation by dismantling the inherent truth to color and gesture that his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries took for granted. In Evian, the primary color palette and grayscale color scheme that makes up the rest of the composition form the building blocks of painterly representation, yet Johns subverts their supposed chromatic purity through his intentional dripping, streaking, and blending of paint.
“In a Johns, marks of varying tempo, weight and direction caress and bruise and elaborate and disrupt and erode the familiar forms of everyday objects."
Flares of red, yellow, and blue spike the variegated field of gray along the bottom register of the canvas—three colors which, when combined, create the gray that foreground the present work. This trifecta of red, yellow, and blue first emerged in Johns’ oeuvre by way of his targets from the mid-1950s but quickly took on a semiotic life of their own: the block-like sequence of primary colors seen in Evian recurs throughout Johns’ paintings from the early 1960s, most notably in Watchman from 1964. These colors reference his repeated inclusion of the words “red,” “yellow,” and “blue,” which often appear in his works written in gray or incongruous colors. In a witty nod to Surrealist master René Magritte’s revolutionary statement, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” Johns acknowledges the treachery of representation by dismantling the inherent truth to color and gesture that his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries took to be truth. By invoking the primary color spectrum in Evian, Johns transforms the universal color scheme into a self-referential motif that evinces the fiction of depiction.
Evian sees the artist’s conceptual project reach its apogee, retaining an early Pop sensibility through his means of appropriation while inciting a heightened investigation into “things the mind already knows.” A seminal and ambitious masterpiece, Evian exemplifies the conceptual rigor of Johns' early period, not only summarizing Johns’ artistic concerns to that point, but those that would guide the rest of his seven-decade long career: the modification of familiar images to engage, explore, and expose the ways in which art creates meaning within the mind’s eye.
