Jasper Johns

In the mid-1950s, a group of young artists living in New York began exhibiting paintings and sculptures that contained everyday imagery and objects. By combining collage and sculpture on the painted surface, they revealed what could be done to forward the ideas pioneered by the Abstract Expressionism movement. One of these artists was Jasper Johns, who had an enormous impact on the subsequent development of Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art in the United States and Europe.

Born into a farming community in Augusta, Georgia, Johns studied at the University of South Carolina before moving to New York to attend Parsons School of Design. He met the painter Robert Rauschenberg, the choreographer Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage, becoming part of a group of radical experimenters keen to develop new ideas in art based on chance and sequences.

The pivotal moment in Johns’ career came in 1955, when the gallery dealer Leo Castelli exhibited his painting Flag. It was a collage of the Stars and Stripes made out of newspapers and pigment suspended in hot wax. It divided the critics both on aesthetic grounds — they were unable to label it a sculpture or a painting — and on political grounds. Some called it unpatriotic, believing the collaged newspaper symbolised the conflicting fictions upon which nations are built.

Johns continued to work using this technique, making paintings of targets, letters, numbers and maps. In 1960, he created a sculpture of two ale cans, part of a series of sculptures that sought to reconstitute the ordinary to highlight the power of the perceptual over the physical world. Johns’s work is often associated with the Neo-Dada and Pop Art movements. He redefines everyday objects and symbols in the Dada tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, paving the way for Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and fine art’s embrace of commodity culture.

Johns continued to work using this technique, making paintings of targets, letters, numbers and maps. In 1960, he created a sculpture of two ale cans, part of a series of sculptures that sought to reconstitute the ordinary in order to highlight the power of the perceptual over the physical world — the beginnings of Pop Art.

Today, Johns is widely regarded as one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. In 2011, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honour, from President Obama. He was the first studio artist to be given the honour since Alexander Calder in 1977.

In 2021, the retrospective Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror presented complementary, simultaneous exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and, 100 miles to the southwest, the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2022, Johns’ early masterpiece Small False Start achieved a record auction price of US$55,350,000 at Christie’s as part of Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection.