As an art lover, you are likely familiar with the work of Jasper Johns, one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century. Throughout his prolific six-decade career, Johns has produced diverse paintings, drawings, and prints that have ushered in new critical dialogues about meaning and interpretation in art.
While his early paintings of familiar objects like flags, targets, and numbers brought him to prominence as a leader of the Neo-Dada movement, Johns’ art has encompassed a variety of styles, subjects, and media. His lifelong exploration of the complex relationship between art and the natural world has made him a pivotal figure in contemporary art.
This article provides an overview of Johns’s life, artistic development, significant themes in his work, and lasting impact on art in America and beyond. Trace the evolution of this revolutionary artist who helped reshape the landscape of modern and contemporary art.
Jasper Johns BIOGRAPHY
Early Life and Inspiration: Jasper Johns’ Upbringing in the South
Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1930. His early life in the South shaped his future art. Johns grew up in a household that valued creativity – his paternal grandfather was a professional painter. However, John’s interest in art only emerged later.
Johns attended the University of South Carolina for three semesters before moving to New York City in 1948 to pursue art. He was inspired by the city’s vibrant culture and art scene. The abstract expressionists particularly captivated him with their dynamic and gestural style.
Why was Jasper Johns important?
After struggling to find his artistic voice, Johns had a pivotal breakthrough in 1954. While making a painting depicting numbers, Johns spontaneously added familiar objects like letters and flags. This experimentation with unconventional subjects and materials ignited Johns’ signature style.
Johns’s’s childhood also influenced this new direction. Ordinary symbols from his Southern upbringing, like numbers, letters, and flags, held personal meaning. By painting these familiar yet overlooked subjects, Johns sought to make viewers see commonplace objects in a new light.
Johns’s early life and surroundings in the South inspired his painting subjects and style. His ability to infuse deeper meaning into familiar American icons created a new artistic vocabulary that shaped Pop Art and established Johns as a contemporary master. By turning ordinary into extraordinary, Johns revealed the creative potential in the everyday world.
What is Jasper Johns known for?
Jasper Johns is one of the most dominant artists of the 20th century. His seminal paintings of familiar objects like flags, targets, numbers, and letters established him as a Pop art pioneer and helped shift the art world away from Abstract Expressionism. Johns’ paintings incorporated recognizable icons and a painting technique that emphasized the canvas’s flatness. His work inspired countless other artists and helped spawn the Pop art movement.
Through his minimalistic and conceptual approach, Johns explored identity, memory, and meaning-making themes. His work is characterized by layers of ideas and interpretations, demonstrating a lifelong dedication to investigating visual perception and the relationship between art and the everyday world.
Career highlights
Flag 1955: What is Jasper John’s Most Famous Piece?
Johns’ most famous series featured paintings of the American flag. In his groundbreaking Flag series, Johns painted the American flag in a way that elicited patriotism and skepticism. The paintings’ enigmatic nature transformed this ubiquitous symbol into a compelling work of art. The series established Johns as a pioneer of Pop Art and secured his prominence in the art world at just 24 years old.
Target with Four Faces 1955
Johns fragmented the target shape within the frame, forcing the viewer to reassemble it mentally. Through his masterful treatment of quotidian subjects, Johns demonstrated that any image, no matter how ordinary, could be a vehicle for meaning and a catalyst for emotion. This revelation was instrumental in changing the direction of contemporary art.
What is Jasper Johns’s Art Style?
Modern Art
Pop Art
Abstract Expressionism
Neo-Dada
Jasper Johns List of Work
Artistic Style and Techniques: What Techniques Did Jasper John Use?
In the mid-1950s, Johns began experimenting with familiar images and objects, such as the American flag. His first Flag painting featured a life-size representation of the flag made of thick encaustic, with each of its 50 stars painstakingly rendered.
Around the same time, Johns started painting Targets, another mundane yet visually striking subject. Like the Flags, the Target paintings played with perception and the physicality of paint. However, the Targets lacked the patriotic symbolism of the Flags.
Johns’ Use of Encaustic
Encaustic painting involves use of heated beeswax to which coloured pigments have been added. Johns appreciated the way encaustic allowed him to build up texture and depth. The wax could be scraped, brushed, and layered, producing a smooth, polished finish.
Encaustic also allowed Johns to embed objects into the wax, like newspaper clippings. Some of his most famous encaustic paintings are his Flag series from the 1950s and 1960s.
Johns’ Use of Sculpture
In addition to painting, Johns created conceptual sculptures using everyday objects.
“Painted Bronze” | This sculptures from the 1960s incorporated cast bronze sculptures of mundane items like flashlights, lightbulbs, and paintbrushes which he then painted to resemble the original objects. |
Johns’ innovative use of encaustic painting and sculpture broke from the dominant Abstract Expressionist style of the time. His paintings and sculptures challenged what constitutes a work of art. Johns helped pioneer an artistic movement known as Neo-Dada, which incorporated everyday images and objects into art. His masterful techniques and thought-provoking subject matter have cemented his status as one of the most essential American postwar artists.
Major Exhibitions
Johns’ paintings are exhibited in major museums around the world, including:
Museum of Modern Art in New York
Tate Modern in London
Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland
Significant Themes and Subject Matter: What symbols did Jasper Johns use in his artwork?
Jasper Johns is renowned for painting familiar yet complex everyday objects and signs. Several themes have dominated his work over the decades:
Maps
Johns incorporated maps into his work to represent physical space and geography. His map paintings from the 1960s experiment with cartography and challenge the idea of maps as objective representations of the world. Johns’s map works are semi-abstract, focusing on the map as a symbolic and physical entity.
Numbers
Numbers and counting were also essential themes for Johns.
“Gray Numbers”
“0 Through 9”
These works explore numbers as visual symbols and incorporate stencilling and repetition. Johns was fascinated with the symbolic and physical constructs of numbers.
Other Familiar Objects
Beyond flags, maps and numbers, Johns painted many familiar objects and signs, including targets, alphabets, clocks, flashlights, ale cans, and the Savarin coffee can. Johns elevates mundane things into poetic subjects for his art. His paintings of commonplace items explore representation, metaphor, and the physicality of things.
Legacy and Impact: Influencing Pop Art and Generations of Artists
Johns’ paintings of familiar flags, targets, letters and numbers in the 1950s rejected the prevailing Abstract Expressionism. Instead, they embraced recognizable icons and a painting technique that emphasized the two-dimensionality of the canvas.
His work inspired a generation of Pop artists, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg, who also incorporated popular and mass-produced images into their art.
Johns’ revolutionary and thought-provoking paintings established him as a pioneer and visionary who not only helped shift the direction of contemporary art but also influenced decades of artists. His masterful use of visual language and painting techniques inspired countless other creators.