![]() The retrospective provided the viewer with the opportunity to witness not only the unfolding of Johns’s work as he moved through a succession of periods, styles, manners and techniques, but the unveiling of Johns himself. Jasper Johns, Periscope (Hart Crane), 1963 As was appropriate, sculpture was confined to two vitrines in a relatively early section of the exhibition. ![]() Drawings and prints were occasionally interspersed with the paintings, but were most often displayed in separate rooms or alcoves, due in part to requirements for lower lighting, but also because Johns’s works on paper generally look back to motifs developed in earlier work and would have disrupted the “narrative line” set forth by the paintings. While focusing on painting, the show included Johns’s full range of mediums. The installation offered a chronological unfolding of Johns’s development, with works grouped according to theme and coloration (gray and black-and-white paintings were hung together to brilliant effect). The MOMA retrospective, organized by Kirk Varnedoe, presented a comprehensive overview of Johns’s artistic career via 225 works occupying two floors of the museum. “Jasper Johns Flags 1955-1994” appeared at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, in June 1996. A number of the same sculptures were re-presented at MOMA. Earlier in 1996, “Jasper Johns: The Sculptures” was presented both at the Menil Collection, Houston, and at the Leeds City Art Gallery it examined a small but significant aspect of Johns’s production that lasted for a brief moment, for the most part from 1958 to 1961. At Castelli, “Technique and Collaboration in the Prints of Jasper Johns” focused on the artist’s technical innovations in printmaking. “Jasper Johns: Process and Printmaking,” which revealed Johns’s thought and decision-making processes in working proofs dating from the early ’60s to the mid-’90s, was held in MOMA’s print galleries. Two print exhibitions were presented in New York in late October in conjunction with the current show. Titled “Jasper Johns-35 Years-Leo Castelli,” it documented the changes that have occurred in Johns’s art over time, but on a limited scale. In 1993, a small retrospective consisting of 14 well-chosen paintings spanning Johns’s career was held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in SoHo. A number of the more recent “confessional” works were included in the exhibition “The Drawings of Jasper Johns,” held at the National Gallery in Washington in 1990, but for Johns, drawing, like printmaking, is primarily a medium for revisiting and recycling motifs introduced in painting, his primary means of expression and the medium in which he typically develops and advances new ideas. The same can be said of “Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective,” which appeared at MOMA in 1986. The exhibition concluded, however, before Johns moved from investigations of his adult world-his art, possessions and artistic career-to examinations of his childhood experience. In the exhibition catalogue, Mark Rosenthal noted the presence in these paintings of tracings after Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece as well as Johns’s attraction to Christian themes. The exhibition “Jasper Johns: Work Since 1974,” held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989 (and first presented at the 1988 Venice Biennale), recorded the transition from the abstract, allover fields of the Crosshatch paintings to the illusionistic representations of the “bathtub” and Seasons pictures, works in which this famously impersonal artist first ventured into the realm of autobiography. Finally, one must simply drop the reserve.” 1 I sort of stuck to my guns for a while, but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. This was partly to do with my feelings about myself and partly to do with my feelings about painting at the time. In 1984, Johns described the change in his art as follows: “In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. There is now a sufficient amount of production since the juncture that occurred in Johns’s art in 1982 to evaluate this controversial body of work and understand its relationship to Johns’s earlier output. Although this might seem an odd comment to make about one of America’s most widely exhibited artists (Johns’s full exhibition history is so extensive that it is being supplied, together with a bibliography, on CD-ROM), the MOMA retrospective arrived at an opportune moment. ![]() ![]() The Jasper Johns retrospective recently held at the Museum of Modem Art was extremely timely. Published Art In America, April 1997 Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955 A major traveling retrospective, organized by MOMA and currently on view at Cologne’s Ludwig Museum, traces Jasper Johns’s 45-year odyssey from esthetic impersonality to deeply affecting-though still formally encrypted-self-revelation. ![]()
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