Jasper Johns

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC #333)
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1991)
Christie's, New York, November 20, 1996, Lot 41
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago; and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jasper Johns: Gray, November 2007 - May 2008, n.p., no. 124, illustrated in color

This painting is in excellent condition. Under ultraviolet light there are no apparent restorations. The canvas is framed in a wood frame painted black with a small float.
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“When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.” (Jasper Johns quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “The Changing Picture: A Retrospective Reveals Jasper Johns,” The New Yorker, November 11, 1996, 124)

“I got tired of people talking about things that I didn’t think they could see in my work… It interested me that people would discuss something that I didn’t believe they could see until after they were told to see it… And when I decided to work with this new configuration, I decided I wasn’t going to say what it was or where it had come from. One of the things that interested me was that I knew I couldn’t see it without seeing it, seeing that, because I knew, and I knew that someone else wouldn’t know and wouldn’t see, and I wondered what the difference was in the way we would see it. And, of course, I’ll never know…” (Jasper Johns quoted in Exh. Cat., Minneapolis, Walker Art Center (and travelling), Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns since 1983, 2003, p. 28)

In the early 1960s, Johns famously instructed himself: “Take an object, do something to it, do something else to it.” Evoking the Duchampian spirit of borrowing, reconfiguring, and recontextualizing given forms, Johns’ seminal Untitled from 1991 marks a critical revelation in the trajectory of the artist’s incisive, piercingly intelligent career. While Johns long used the appropriation and citation of art historical motifs, he turned to the strategy with renewed concentration during the 1980s and 1990s as a way to further remove his personality and subjectivity from his paintings. During this period, Johns began incorporating schematic outlines of famous works by Matthias Grünewald, Hans Holbein, and Pablo Picasso. Untitled is a pivotal example from this period of Johns’ production that depicts one of Johns’ most enigmatic, surrealist representations: an icon that he termed Green Angel. The Green Angel is the source that Johns has infamously kept secret, withholding the image’s provenance subject to much scholarly speculation. Johns first initiated use of the shape in a group of untitled drawings sketched on April Fool’s Day, 1990, in his studio in St. Martin. Interested in excavating the abstract quality and patterning from the figurative meaning of his art historical appropriations, Johns aimed to uncover another source of meaning: one unhindered by the psychological baggage that viewers bring to the recognition of any cited reference.

Just as Johns harnessed the potent, ubiquitous symbols of flags, targets, numbers, and alphabets in his earliest bodies of work, the historical quotations gave Johns a subject that had a pre-ordained design and format: images that already exist prior to any artistic invention or intervention. Joan Ruthfuss noted, “This variation on the student practice of making copies ‘after the masters’ has offered Johns the chance to explore what happens when a highly expressive figurative image is emptied of its content and its ‘shell’ is reused as an image on its own. Does other content move in to fill it? Or does the shell itself somehow steer the viewer toward the original content?” (Joan Ruthfuss in Exh. Cat., Minneapolis, Walker Art Center (and travelling), Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns since 1983, 2003, p. 11) Johns evades legibility, instead privileging the puzzle viewers encounter when faced with the unknown. Johns forces the viewer to have an entirely new experience with the image; one starkly different from his own, and one that absorbs a peculiar representation of something in the face of total unfamiliarity with its referent. While the Green Angel appears to hint at figuration in the seemingly discernible facial features and vividly colored eyes around its perimeter—as well as the background that implies a traditional figure-ground relationship—Johns drains the image of any specificity. In his signature and beloved gray, Johns further empties the tracing of any of its associative power, focusing primarily on its formal qualities. Johns states that he is interested in “the degree to which [things] can be changed in some way and yet remain what they are.” (the artist quoted in Ibid., p. 34) With its isolated outline and bold geometric contours, the Green Angel remains an index of its source, yet is thrillingly ambiguous in the shape that it signifies. With this image, Johns pushes further toward abstraction than he ever had in his entire output: abstract thought and the non-illusionistic image utterly subvert comprehensibility.

While the palette of Untitled epitomizes the central importance of the monochrome gray in Johns’ oeuvre, what is most evocative in this canvas are the vivid colors that punctuate the surface. Reds, greens, purples, and yellows emerge from beneath and around the gray encaustic, summoning the very complexity of the color spectrum that invigorates Johns’ work. Oscillating between abstraction and representation, the nuanced negotiation between the predominant gray and the colors it envelops only serves to heighten the compelling conceptual depth of the picture: “Green Angel references illusion only to subvert it, but it cannot be considered an abstraction either, although it effectively functions as one. Compare it, for example, to Ellsworth Kelly’s work: his abstractions are based on the world of objects, but the sources are subjected to a process of distillation that buries them deeply within the finished compositions. In a way, Green Angel is an image about this transformation; as its sections shift or fade in and out of view, its contours become more or less detailed, and it gains or loses coloration. One might almost imagine that one is watching a physical struggle as the motif attempts to achieve some kind of clarity.” (Joan Ruthfuss in Ibid., p. 38)

The significance and intricacy of the color gray was crystallized in the 2007-2008 exhibition Jasper Johns: Gray at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in which Untitled was notably included. Throughout the early part of his career, Johns explored the artistic possibilities presented by the trinity of red, yellow and blue, complemented by glorious works that resound in one color; the fusion of both ends of the chromatic spectrum – gray. Gray emerged as a protagonist in Johns’ exploration of neutral, self-contained abstractions with his first Flags, Targets, Alphabets, and Numbers between 1956 and 1959. What gray offered was a nonillusionistic uniformity—rendering the everyday consumer objects of a stretched canvas, a coat hanger and drawers in some of his first encaustic paintings advanced the literal quality of the works above all emotional provocations associated with color. Divested of color, the marks Johns made in his encaustic surface become even more profound, contrasting only in subtle tonal differences brought about by the variances in reflected light that catch the polished ground.

The dominance of the color gray in Untitled’s depiction of the Green Angel further dematerializes the image, draining the illusionism of color in place of an amplified monochromatic abstraction. Rondeau described the pre-eminence of Johns’ gray versions of his historical appropriations: “If the initial re-creation or appropriation of an emblem from the larger culture into painting—whether an early target or later tracing—is an act of displacement of an already elusive image or object, gray painting, like a black-and-white photograph, compounds the act by not providing a full record of the real… In gray, touch becomes both form and image.” (James Rondeau in Exh. Cat., Art Institute of Chicago (and travelling), Jasper Johns: Gray, 2007, p. 33) With the grisaille palette, Johns emphasizes the tactility of the encaustic surface and the objecthood of the painting, focusing the viewer’s attention toward the painting’s physicality rather than the hegemony of the image: color is here integral to the literalness that Johns aims to achieve. If the appeal of the Green Angel for Johns lies in its ambiguity, then gray provides the ideal vehicle for his conceptual goal; as Rondeau continued, “Mediating between the extremes of black and white, gray connotes ambiguity, a purposive indeterminacy of meaning.” (Ibid.)

Forever concerned with the tension between seeing and knowing, Johns’ painting threatens traditional modes of reading and interpreting pictures. Johns diverts the traditional desire for understanding to provoke increased looking. With the labyrinthine Untitled, the artist promotes an evaluation of the importance of the image itself, freed from information about its source.  As Joan Ruthfuss praised of the Green Angel series, “This body of work is one of the most curious Johns has yet produced: despite that many cues that encourage us to see the motif as more than just a random arrangement of line and color, Green Angel resists positive identification as anything in particular. Instead, it hovers enigmatically between illusion and abstraction.” (Joan Ruthfuss in Exh. Cat., Minneapolis, Walker Art Center (and travelling), Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns since 1983, 2003, p. 28)