![]() Remember that De Kooning was the celebrated leading artist of Abstract Expressionism back then while Johns and Rauschenberg were aspiring artists in their twenties. In the name of art, Rauschenberg asked De Kooning for one of his drawings and proceeded to erase it. Jasper Johns, Painting With Two Balls, 1960, The Broad, Los AngelesĪnother story illustrating this beautifully is how Jasper Johns and his partner in crime Robert Rauschenberg took on abstraction head on. Yet for young artist Jasper Johns back then, these monumental Abstract Expressionists and their giant canvases were casting a very long shadow. The quietly loud of Mark Rothko’s color fields, the rhythmic organized chaos of Jackson Pollock’s drips or the gestural compositions of De Kooning were all radically new immersive experiences which still resonate to this day. Their monumental canvases were literally in your face, for all to see, hear and project their own turmoil and reflect on the new state of the world. Through action painting and abstraction, an almost nihilist approach was found: no figuration, just pure painterly emotions. You can twist this one many ways and that is where you start to understand why Jasper Johns is an artist of such importance and how immensely clever his art can be.Īs such, his retrospective at the Broad Museum is an unprecedented opportunity to see the breadth of his career, one theme per room at a time.īut first, maybe you are wondering where his questioning interest came from, so let’s rewind to the 1950’s to add a bit of art historical context.īack then the horrors of WWII made figurative art almost preposterous: providing a graphic illusion of reality was just not appealing anymore for artists.Ībstract Expressionist artists imposed themselves because they found different ways to express both the current mood and their very personal emotions. “Not only that, but I do a lot of studio visits, and I very quickly learned that the slightest scratch of a conversation will lead you to how much Johns meant to so many artists here … Ed Moses, Joe Goode and, of course, Ed Ruscha would all say they owe him a great deal.Jasper Johns, False Start, 1959, The Broad, Los Angeles Though Johns won’t be coming to L.A., he maintains a longstanding relationship with L.A.-based printmakers Gemini G.E.L., Schad says. James Meyer was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2015. Johns was caught up in a scandal of his own a few years prior, when a longtime former assistant stole dozens of paintings from his studio over 25 years, and sold them at a gallery. Security and Exchange Commission with failure to stop insider trading at his firm in 2013. His works have gone for $80 million in 2006 - sold by David Geffen to collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin - and a reported $110 million in 2010 - sold by Christophe Castelli (son of famed art dealer Leo Castelli) to embattled hedge fund manager Steven A. Johns is known for being the current highest-valued living artist, by far. I’m still trying to catch up to some of the changes he made.” He just stood over the model, and made some tiny revisions. “We sent a wooden model to his studio,” says Schad of his brief interactions with Johns, “and took a drive up from Manhattan, and over the course of the morning worked out all the details. (He did only one brief interview for the show - with his biographer, Deborah Solomon - for The New York Times.) He’s there, still painting, still elusive. Many of his peers - Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham - are gone. Still, it’s comforting to know he’s in Sharon, probably keeping tabs on things from afar. Perhaps part of Johns’ mystique is that the subject matter is so loaded, but the context is just out of reach. These are paintings and sculptures that Johns, who was bestowed with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2011, has denied to explain through the decades. 7 preview of the exhibition, “but they also keep the viewer’s mind spinning.” “His works are sensuous and reward the eye,” said Heyler in opening remarks at a Feb. It is from this series “Untitled” (1975) that Eli and Edythe Broad first purchased a work by Johns they would go on to purchase more than 40 others, including “Flag” (1967) and “Watchman” (1964), a painting upon which Johns affixed a plaster cast of his friend’s leg on half a chair, upside down sticking out of the painting like it had just crossed over from another dimension. ![]() Other sections of the show include “In the Studio,” “Words and Voices” (which includes a collaborative book project with Samuel Beckett), “Fragments and Faces,” and “Time and Transience,” which includes Johns’ crosshatch series, inspired by a pattern the artist glimpsed once on a passing car. ![]()
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