In 1954, when he was 24, Jasper Johns made “Flag”, one of the icons of American painting. It was immediately recognised as a key piece in the emergence of what became known as pop art.
Johns is 74 now, and still working. Past Things and Present, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, shows what he has been doing for the past two decades. Many of the hundred or so drawings, prints and paintings here include images copied from the work of other artists, from old masters such as Holbein to more recent figures such as Picasso. And in 1983 Johns copied himself. The flag, absent from his work for nearly 30 years, reappears, shown first in the painting “Ventriloquist”, in the form of two reproductions of his own work, taped to his studio wall. It features again most prominently in the “Untitled” series of a dozen intaglio prints he made in 2001. In these, the flag's contrasting stripes, shown vertically and with the stars concealed, form a bold, abstract counterpoint to a holographic image of a family group in period dress, which also features in every print. Johns appears to be weaving his work into the story of art and his life into the story of America, using the symbolic image of his country.
Reusing images was, and remains, central to Johns. He first chose to work with the flag, he said, “because I didn't have to design it”. The flag was already there, “seen but not looked at”. By taking a real flag, mounting it on a board and working over it in encaustic a form of wax and oil paint Johns first made the flag into an object, then represented it as a beautiful surface, reconfigured in delicate strokes of paint. He used the same technique with targets, then with stencils of numbers, building up a vocabulary of everyday things that, when represented as paintings, acquired a new significance. These were an immediate success. By 1958, he had had his first show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, from which the Museum of Modern Art bought three works. The self-taught artist from South Carolina had made it, and made it big.
Johns' achievement is even more remarkable in that when he had his first solo exhibition, abstract expressionism was the dominant movement in American art. Although its greatest exponent, Jackson Pollock, had died in 1956, his work, and that of a second generation of abstract expressionist painters, was being hailed as the first truly American school of painting. Within this context, Johns' flags and targets had a profound impact. They functioned almost like road signs, signalling that painting could go another way. That other way, also taken by Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol among others, was given the name of pop art.
What Johns did was to restore to painting the primacy of the object. For him, a painting was a thing not, crucially, a vehicle for the agonised self-expression Pollock had achieved at such cost. Johns kept himself out of the paintings. What they offered him seemed to be a means of thinking, first about seeing and then about perception in its deepest sense.
The self-educated Johns had several important mentors. He studied the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and includes words and plays on words in many of his works. He admired Marcel Duchamp, whose cool, cerebral and witty approach to art-making suited his own need for detachment. He was close to John Cage, the composer, and to Merce Cunningham, the dancer, becoming artistic director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1967.
Cage and Cunningham, too, were developing ways of working that permitted accidental, everyday events to become part of music and choreography. And in 1960 Tatyana Grosman, founder of Universal Limited Art Editions, delivered a lithographic stone to him. In this suitably fortuitous way, Johns began to make prints. He has been making them ever since. Print-making, fiddly, difficult, unquestionably actual, imposed a discipline that Johns seemed to enjoy, and finding subjects for his print-making allowed him to rework, again and again, the images used in his paintings.
This has remained the fulcrum of his artistic practice for nearly half a century. As the Edinburgh exhibition shows, a composition such as “Ventriloquist” (1983) may be explored first as a painting on canvas, then as a drawing in ink on plastic, then as a lithograph on paper. In the process, objects may be included or excluded, as if adjusting a viewfinder in a camera to see things more closely, and colours may be changed. The cumulative effect of this repetition suggests that Johns simply has to paint or draw in order to see, or to believe what he sees. He cannot get enough of looking, and of thinking about looking. While some of the work may seem laboured the famous “Green Angel” series, in particular, based on a tracing of an image that Johns has always refused to identify, does not transcend the endless variations on the first painting of 1990 some is sublime. The watercolours, for example, in which a wristwatch appears to be nailed to the picture surface, a washy plane of colour, at the opposite edges of which two eyes float, quizzical, fixing time with their unblinking gaze. The eyes crop up again in some paintings that reference Picasso, who himself so famously broke with conventional ways of seeing, and whose example here seems to allow Johns to use particularly rich and sensuous colour.
In the “Seasons” series, begun in 1989, Johns finally seems to put himself into the picture. Each of the works includes a male figure, suggested by an outline or a dark shadow, set at a gentle angle across what become increasingly complex compositions. The first and one of the most beautiful statements of the theme was made in 1985. In “Summer”, a charcoal and chalk drawing, the male figure, a black outline heightened with white chalk, framed against a patterned rectangle, occupies the centre of the page, surrounded by what appear to be references to the artist's studio: table tops, ladders and the primary shapes the circle, square and rectangle that Cézanne famously identified as the building blocks of painting. This first, simple statement is constantly reworked in different media, becoming encrusted with references both to art, signalled by a recurring image of the “Mona Lisa”, and to the natural world, patterned with snowflakes for winter, for example. What becomes clear in Edinburgh is that Johns' development as an artist is not in terms of technique his painterly and graphic skill was with him from the beginning or even of subject matter. If anything, his subjects, once so direct, have become diffuse, referring not to the everyday world but to the interior world of the artist and his reference points, the great artists who have gone before him.
When he made “Flag”, Johns changed the course of American art. But he made it as a young man, unformed, aware of nothing but that what he was doing felt right. His task ever since has been to grapple with how that unconscious insight, which let him “see” the self-evident in a new way, could have come about. His journey of discovery has taken him to the heart of the history of art, where he seems certain not only to have secured but alsoto have accepted a place ofhis own.
‘Past Things and Present: Jasper Johns since 1983', until September 19. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh EH4 3DR. Tel 0131 624 6200
