Richmond
Midway through this remarkable exhibition exploring the intersection of the Norwegian symbolist Edvard Munch and American artist Jasper Johns is Munch’s Self-Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed. It depicts the artist approaching 80, gaunt, balding, and unsteady on his feet, in the doorway of his bedroom, a blank-faced case clock to his right, to his left a monastic bed covered in a striped coverlet. The symbolism is obvious: the artist caught between the passage of time and that most intimate of personal furnishings, the bed, site of birth, intimacy, and if one is lucky, death.
Self-Portrait is the key to the entire exhibition. Given the premium that our contemporary society places on emotional “honesty,” one could hardly expect to avoid it in the art museum—especially in a show subtitled “Love, Loss, and the Cycle of Life.” Emotionally, each artist here was a product of his time: Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was formed by 19th-century social progressivism and Freudian concepts of womanhood and sexuality; Jasper Johns, born in 1930, exhibits the anxieties of a gay man turning 50 during the AIDS crisis. Munch was willing to allow psychological states to direct his creativity, while Johns sought to keep emotion under control, neutralizing and distancing it through abstraction or Pop Art sensibility.
Munch was guileless, so lacking in self-consciousness that his depictions of jealousy, desire, and despair are distinctly discomfiting, sometimes even slightly distasteful. Such unabashed representations resulted in lithographs like Madonna (1895-1902), in which Munch depicted a sensuous nude woman framed in spermatic particles and a mummified fetus. Odd and off-putting, the image demonstrates not only Munch’s printmaking prowess but also his willingness to take a decidedly bracing view of physical and moral decay.
Johns would appropriate both Munch’s marginalia and his sexual imagery in Dancers on a Plane (1980), but he is far too reticent an artist to make this a full-blown homage. The sensuousness is so deeply sublimated beneath dense crosshatching that it is virtually impossible to detect anything like what the curators describe as “stylized genitalia.” Where Munch gives us sperm, Johns offers a frame of knives, forks, and spoons cast in bronze. Reinterpreting desire and decay as what Johns has called “ritualized manners” distills one of the unavoidable conclusions of this exhibition: Munch was interested in (as Edward Lucie-Smith puts it) “the resonance of feeling . . . not only the bell-stroke, but its reverberation.” Johns, however, prefers to allow things to cool off, to push away feeling until it has almost dissipated, leaving an inert image mediated by a labored surface.
Johns first encountered Munch’s art in a Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 1950. Within a few years, he would make many of the works for which he is best known, neutralized images of maps, flags, and targets often embellished with stenciled letters and numbers—”things the mind already knows,” as Johns has described it. By the 1970s, Johns had been tagged as an abstract expressionist, Dadaist, and Pop Art practitioner. He also became a master printmaker, taking part in the mid-20th-century American printmaking movement alongside Robert Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock.
Printmaking is, by definition, based on iteration and transformation—creating impressions by ink, acid, or needle on stone, wood, or metal plate for transference to paper or another medium in a process surprisingly open to chance. Munch explored this medium in lithograph, woodcut, and etching, readily grasping the theatrical possibilities of dense black and bleak white (areas left untouched by ink) for self-portraits ranging from elegiac to elusive. The lithograph of The Scream (1895) is arresting, a work of such harrowing intensity that it reinvigorates the ubiquitous color version. The three woodcut versions of Munch’s Kiss (1898, 1902, 1943) demonstrate his technical expertise as well as his innovative incorporation of wood grain into the image itself. Here, pattern and the assertiveness of the medium transform the conventional idea of love into a complex set of ideas and forces: technique, creativity, vanitas, and absence. The artist’s hand—and the intractable wood and the jigsaw used to shape it—is vitally present, manipulating the image into an artifact of energy and emotion.
The artist’s hand is also apparent in Johns’s prints, but all too often the result is enervated, the repetitions and transformations serving to vitiate an already-lifeless image. In the 1970s, Johns began a series of prints, drawings, and paintings based on Painted Bronze (1960), a sculpture of the Savarin coffee can in which he soaked paint brushes in his studio. Again, Johns returned to a quotidian object, this time one intimately connected to his identity as an artist. The bronze object, ultra-realistic even down to his fingerprints on the brush handles, proved so durable that it became, in a moment of Pop Art serendipity, something of a brand for Johns, especially after the print version became the poster of his 1977 Whitney Museum exhibition.
A significant portion of the works on view are Johns’s crosshatching pieces from the 1970s. Inspired by a passing car covered in hash marks, this motif appealed to Johns (as he described it) for their “literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning.” As a printmaker, he would have known of crosshatching as a technique to create shadow and volume. The curators see this technique as a link to Johns’s repertoire of other found object motifs. These marks also contain an inherent neutrality, a pictorial technique that allowed the artist to build up an argument, as it were, without the prejudice of knowledge, presupposition, or evidence. The tendency to abstraction is reinforced by a limited palette and an all-over pattern that gives these works the aspect of a code or puzzle.
This is compelling, from an analytic perspective. But it is only when we reach the gallery that houses Johns’s crosshatching finale—Between the Clock and the Bed (1981-83)—that everything falls into place. Up to this point, Johns has deployed crosshatching in a number of ways: as a background to the Savarin can, as a depiction of “highly stylized Tantric sexual images,” as lyrical monochromatic encaustics. The three monumental canvases here shimmer and vibrate, the crosshatching achieving an almost architectural scale—and a most unexpected sense of vibrancy and dynamism. Nearby hangs Munch’s Self-Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed, and next to it is the actual coverlet depicted in the painting, a modest cotton quilt with a geometric pattern in red and black appliquéd strips. Johns would have seen this painting in the 1950 and 1978 Munch exhibits he visited, as well as on a postcard sent by a friend in which the coverlet pattern was expressly pointed out as similar to Johns’s own.
Whether Johns picked up the quilt pattern consciously or subliminally is probably irrelevant—after all, he credited inspiration for the crosshatching motif to a passing car—but what he retains from the Munch painting is neither the cliché of the clock nor ponderous associations of the bed as a “site of passage” but the “third thing”: that the quilt pattern suggests a figure, that in its system of marks one could comprehend articulations and associations indelibly linked to an individual—or more to the point, to the artist. Johns reimagines these marks, as Rosalind Krauss has pointed out, with a “negative certainty,” making his attacks on conventional picture-making about performance, gesture, and irony.
For Jasper Johns, making art is about presentation, not representation, about surface engagement rather than engagement with what is pitiless and ineffable about human existence. A complete lack of meaning is something that Johns sees as inevitable, even desirable, often an end in itself. For Edvard Munch, meaninglessness has no place in existence, much less art. An exploration of what is mysterious about who we are, especially in the depth of the human psyche, yields glimmers of meaning and even hope. To Munch, the very fact of our existence shows that it’s worth making the effort.
Leann Davis Alspaugh is managing editor of the Hedgehog Review.
