Jasper Johns

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC# 167)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in December 1963

New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Drawings, May - June 1962
Los Angeles, Everett Ellin Gallery, Jasper Johns Retrospective Exhibition, November - December 1962
Washington, D. C., Gallery of Modern Art, 1963 
New York, The Jewish Museum, Jasper Johns, February – April 1964, cat. no. 129, p. 30, illustrated
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Jasper Johns: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture 1954-1964, December 1964, cat. no. 99
Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum, Jasper Johns Retrospective, January - February 1965, cat. no. 110
Oxford, Museum of Modern Art; Sheffield, Mappin Art Gallery; Coventry, Herbert Art Gallery; Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery; Leeds, City Art Gallery; London, Serpentine Gallery; Jasper Johns Drawings, September 1974 – April 1975, cat. no. 52, p. 56, illustrated
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Cologne, Museum Ludwig; Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou; London, Hayward Gallery; Tokyo, Seibu Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Jasper Johns, October 1977 - December 1978, cat. no. 82, illustrated

Max Kozloff, Jasper Johns, New York, 1968, pl. 132, illustrated
David Shapiro, Jasper Johns: Drawings 1954-1984, New York, 1984, pl. 57, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, The Drawings of Jasper Johns, 1990, fig. no. 42b, p. 174, illustrated 
Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns, New York, 1994, pl. 82, illustrated

Jasper Johns, just like Pablo Picasso, is known for making drawings and works in other mediums that are concerned with the same subject or image depicted in recently completed major paintings on canvas. Both artists are interested in fully exploring particular problems and theories of visual representation generated by the previous paintings. As Nan Rosenthal notes, ``It would be more faithful to Johns’ modus operandi ..to describe his characteristic activity with drawing as a form of deeply serious play, `postplay’ rather than foreplay …’’ (Exh. Cat., Washington, D. C., National Gallery of Art, The Drawings of Jasper Johns, 1990, p. 15). Johns was a virtuosic master of many techniques and medium, and it is one of the infinite pleasures in his oeuvre to observe his genius at executing the same subject in a variety of formal materials. Disappearance II, a 1962 ink on plastic work is a classic and profound example of Johns’ great versatility and determined focus.

In the late 1950s, Johns produced a series of paintings which richly elaborated his revolutionary treatment of figure and ground. Positing that the surface and the painting were one, Johns used his designs of flags, numbers and targets as the field on which he worked, stretching the image to the perimeters of his canvas and using its inherent order to determine his compositions. With the paintings of the late 1950s, Johns went further still, incorporating real objects into his thick encaustic. In each painting, a single object was encased within richly layered strokes of predominantly black, white and shades of gray. Max Kozloff christened this group of object paintings the ``Disappearance’’ canvases, as a tribute to the enigmatic Disappearance I and its companion Disappearance II, both of 1961, which are seen as the climax of a pivotal moment in Johns’ oeuvre. A new emotional tone is introduced in the palette and mood of Johns’ work from 1959 to 1961, reflected in titles of negation, loss and melancholy.

The Disappearance paintings blur the distinction between the paintings and real objects, recalling Johns’ quote that ``if the painting is an object, then the object can be a painting.’’ (Walter Hopps, ``An Interview with Jasper Johns’’, Artforum, March 1965, p. 33). Thus a painting – pigment and binder applied to canvas upon a stretcher – is as much an object as the book in Johns’ painting Book (1956) or the shade drawn down in Shade (1959). In Canvas (1956), Johns explores the full irony of painting’s object-ness by affixing a reversed, stretched canvas to the face of a larger one. Covering both with a unifying layer of gray paint, Johns gave the painting its identity as an object and subverted the traditional role of illusionist painting. The stretcher and canvas as seen from behind are here literally painted over, while the status of the work as representational painting is interrupted by the real object added onto its flat surface.

In the Disappearance paintings, a length of canvas, in this case unstretched, has been covered by Johns’ deliberate, brushy strokes of thick encaustic, seemingly on both front and back, and then folded into place upon a similarly painted ground canvas. Johns once said, ``One of the extreme problems of paintings as objects is the other side – the back. It can’t be solved; it’s in the nature of the work.’’ (Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns, New York, 1994, p. 34). By folding the painted piece of canvas, Johns offers a solution: to see both front and back is to see the canvas in its entirety.

In the 1962 ink drawing on plastic of the same title, Johns extended the enigmatic metaphor of the Disappearance paintings in a new aqueous and sensuous medium. One of the first two works of ink on a plastic support by Johns, along with Device (1962), Disappearance II demonstrates Johns’ masterful control of the liquidity of ink. The plastic support is a non-porous surface so the pigment is not absorbed into the depth of the support as it would in the case of paper.  This plasticity allows for an extensive range of pooling and thinning of the ink, bringing a luminosity and airiness to the composition. Shadows, mists and opacity alternate, playing throughout the image or contour of the diamond-shape of the original encaustic paintings – dematerializing and deconstructing Johns’ chosen compositional element. Perfectly in keeping with the theme of ``Disappearance’’ first noted by Max Kozloff, the subtlety and nuance of the ink and plastic medium enhances the sense of slippage and the tension between image and non-image that is so characteristic of Johns’ aesthetic conceptions. The object-ness of the encaustic paintings is no longer questioned as a physical enigma. In this work, the question is now a perceptual one, following Johns’ practice of challenging our ability to ``see’’ and ``know’’ things from their sign or their name only.