Imagine this curatorial nightmare. You persuade a collector to loan a modern masterpiece, purchased in 1988 for a record-breaking $17 million, for a blockbuster exhibition. Then, just weeks before opening day, the showpiece changes hands – for $80 million. What if the new owner refuses to loan that newly acquired prize possession?
Talk about false starts. …
Actually, we are talking about a “False Start” — the 1959 color-fest by Jasper Johns that helped germinate the pop art movement. Fortunately, the painting’s title didn’t foreshadow the outcome of this curatorial challenge. That’s why you’ll have the rare opportunity to view “False Start” — free — along with 83 other seminal works when the National Gallery of Art premieres Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965 this Sunday.
The allegory? Says exhibition curator Jeffrey Weiss, “Painting about painting.”
Rather than a retrospective, this show zooms in on four early-career motifs that Johns used to reinvent painting through quasi-mechanical means: the target symbol, the pivoting, paint-scraping “device,” the stenciled naming of colors, and the direct imprint of the body, mainly the artist’s face and hands. On view are works painted with brushes, drawn with graphite, festooned with objects from tools to beer cans, and smeared with his own skin.
A forerunner whose influence leaped beyond the art world into architecture, graphic design and advertising, Johns has been anointed with that lofty sobriquet, “living legend.”
Johns, said Weiss, worked “between the categories of abstraction and representation,” approaching a painting as a hybrid of image and object. The curator recalled some curious from the modernist master: “A painting should be looked at the way we look at a radiator.”
His 1955 “Target with Plaster Casts,” tops a canvas of encaustic wax painting and collage on canvas with a frieze-like display of plaster casts made of body parts. Look closely at the disembodied foot, nose, penis and other components each a different candy-like color. As you gaze at the piece, the target field below seems to pulse, breathe, sweat, even bleed. Besides stirring up a cauldron of contemplations, this image that likely launched a thousand package designs and legions of logos. By the way, guess what company sponsored the exhibition?
Implanting a cross-sensory illusion of spinning and scraping, one black-and-white oil/collage target aptly illustrates the artist’s quasi-mechanical procedure. Stripping away an object’s layers, he exposes an inner, almost primeval core that plays with and preys on the senses. Linger before “White Target” (1958) and that surface might reveal stone ready to give way to a subterranean force.
A stenciled word piece might dust off memories of eponymously stamped fast food napkins; selections such as the “Fool’s House” broom assemblage, “Watchman” with its thrusting upended chair and roughly detached leg, and a happy-hued handprint may incite claims that “my child could do that!” Ah, but not like Jasper Johns. He influenced the course of pop art, abetted the minimalism that transformed the design disciplines, and helped inspire marketing’s embrace of iconography. And he can still set off a dealer-collector stampedes by picking up a brush.
The target is an apt subject for Johns. Born 1930 in Augusta, Ga., he moved to Manhattan at 19, studied commercial art, did a stint in the Army that took him to Japan. He was still a young man when he destroyed his earliest works to embark on his new concept of art. Ambition often makes the difference between starving artist and superstar.
Over a long career of commercial and critical success, Johns has proved that enduring, alluring works don’t need to look fussy or finished or beautiful. The stripped-down, the unsettled and the unsettling, can burn lasting impressions on mind and senses.
Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965
On view through April 29
» Venue: National Gallery of Art, East Building
» Info: 202-737-4215; nga.gov
