![]() Breaking down the boundaries traditionally separating fine art and everyday life, he effectively laid the foundation for Pop Art's embrace of commodity culture. The reverberations of the work of Jasper Johns affected nearly every artistic movement from the 1950s through the present day. Riffing on the divergent examples of Dada and Abstract Expressionism, Johns, along with his Neo-Dada collaborator Robert Rauschenberg, created a nuanced art that spoke to notions of autobiography, irreverence, and philosophical engagement. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Johns deliberately avoided art cut off from everyday life and made common signs, such as flags and targets, the subject of his work. In both Flag (1994) and Flags (1965-1966), by compromising the coloration we expect from a flag, Johns makes strange something universally familiar, emphatically demonstrating the inherent metaphysical slippage between what we see and what we know.Jasper Johns's playful, enigmatic paintings interrogate the very ways in which we see and interpret the world. Rather than the artist, it is the viewer who “paints” the flag in its traditional red, white and blue.īearing a nearly identical compositional format to the renowned painting also entitled Flags from 1965, which resides in the collection of the artist and has been on long-term loan to the Walker Art Center since 1988, this watercolor actually postdates the larger oil paint on canvas composition, rendering it the ultimate realization and crystallization of this visionary pictorial motif. Upon staring at the green, black and orange flag and then immediately shifting attention to the monochromatic gray flag beneath it, one’s brain will unconsciously superimpose a complementary after-image of red, white and blue onto the gray flag, magnificently exemplifying Johns’s unending fascination with the malleability of representation. The upper flag is rendered in green, black and orange – complementary colors to red, white, and blue – and the lower example in varying hues of gray. Property from the Collections of Michael Asher and Betty Asher | Sold to Benefit The Michael Asher Foundationįlags features two stacked flags laid against a monochromatic gray background. Included amongst these, Flags was chosen for inclusion in Henry Geldzahler’s legendary exhibition Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, as well as Johns’s historic retrospective of his drawings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. This work is further distinguished by its pristine provenance and exceptional exhibition history, having remained in the esteemed Asher family collection since first acquired in 1971, and having been displayed at numerous prestigious institutions around the world. Despite the unforgiving nature of watercolor, Johns achieves the precision of each discrete stroke, just as he does with his oil and encaustic on canvas paintings, demonstrating his incredible technical mastery. Brilliantly rendered in watercolor and graphite on handmade paper, Flagsreveals Johns’s inquisitive propensity to examine the same image through a diversity of mediums. Others reside in esteemed collections such as the Menil Collection, Houston and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Estimate $4,500,000–6,500,000.Įxecuted in 1965-1966, the impressively scaled Flags emerges from the earliest decades of Johns’s exhaustive exploration into the eponymous motif, and is one of only a very small number of large works on paper featuring the flag. ![]() In a manner reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s iconic 'Blackboard' paintings, frenetic bursts of graphite lines squiggle along the horizontal stripes of the flag, their frenzied energy disrupting the structuring forms to emphasize the process of mark-making. First rendered in the customary red, white and blue, then veiled by the ethereal monochrome of Johns’s favored grayscale palette, the nuanced coloration and multidimensional complexity of this 1994 Flag is amongst the most exquisite of Johns’ iconic motif. Executed four decades after Johns first confronted the image of the American flag as a subject worthy of visual interrogation, the sumptuously rendered surface of Flag serves as testament to Johns’s prestigious prowess and relentless curiosity at the apex of his mature creative powers. Estimate $12,000,000–18,000,000.Ī triumph of painterly and conceptual rigor, Flag from 1994 stands amongst the most elegantly resolved embodiments of the fascination with sign and meaning that defines the core of Johns’s practice.
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