Jasper Johns: A Guide to Jasper Johns’s Life and Artworks

Jasper Johns is an American artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and printmaking. His most notable work features everyday objects, like flags, targets, and maps, and often includes pop culture imagery and minimalism. Johns is credited with defining the period between the Abstract Expressionist art movement and the emergence of pop art and conceptual art. His work has also been described as Neo-Dada, an avant-garde art movement from the 1950s that simultaneously celebrated and mocked popular culture due to his use of modern materials and iconoclasm.

Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930. He started drawing at age five, despite the lack of exposure to art at home. Growing up, Johns wanted to pursue a career as an artist because he believed the creative avenue would help him change his living situation. Here is a brief overview of his career:

• Early career: Johns attended the University of South Carolina for a few semesters in the mid-1940s. He was encouraged by his art teachers to move to New York City to pursue his artistic endeavors. He briefly lived in New York before he was drafted to serve in the Korean War for two years, eventually returning to the city in 1954 and continuing his art career.
• Notable friends and influencers: Shortly after coming back to New York, he befriended fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and composer John Cage, who, aside from becoming his friends, also became powerful influences to his artistic development. Marcel Duchamp and his readymades, like The Large Glass (1915–1923), would also become a strong influence for Johns’s contemporary art, which included ordinary objects and cultural imagery.
• Hitting the mainstream: In the late 1950s, gallery owner Leo Castelli discovered Johns’s paintings while visiting Rauschenberg’s studio, and he was subsequently offered his solo exhibition. Johns would also collaborate with notable artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Morris, selling many artworks throughout his prolific career.
• Prolific works: Many of Johns’s works have been on display at the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 2014, the Museum of Modern Art featured Jasper Johns: Regrets, an installation containing 10 drawings, two paintings, and two prints, which Johns created in 18 months. In 2018, The New York Times referred to him as the “foremost living artist” in the United States.

Jasper Johns has an impressive catalog of experimental and symbolic works, including:

1. 1. Flag (1954–55): Johns recreated the image of the American flag using shreds of newspaper dipped in encaustic, a mixture of pigment and hot liquid wax. This method gives the flag a unique texture, mimicking the gestural brushwork of art more often seen in Abstract Expressionism.
2. 2. Target With Four Faces (1955): As the name suggests, this work features a large target with four faces. A colorful bullseye is painted against a red background, with a hinged box along the top containing four plaster casts of the bottom half of a model’s face. Johns uses the same encaustic technique that he did with Flag and includes the plaster molds to introduce an element of three-dimensionality. Like many of his other works, this art emphasizes the ordinary things that we tend to overlook.
3. 3. Three Flags (1958): This work is a tiered arrangement of three canvases, all depicting the American flag, and has been featured in many exhibitions and publications about American art history. Each canvas was crafted from the same approximate colors and proportions as the American flag. In 1980, it was acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York for one million dollars.
4. 4. False Start (1959): This color lithograph represented a shift in subject matter from Johns’s earlier works, including written words instead of pure symbolism. In this piece, explosions of color decorate a canvas, with the names of colors stenciled throughout. However, the names of the colors themselves are written in a different color, creating a disconnect between the traditional associations of the words, effectively turning them back into symbols.
5. 5. Painted Bronze (1960): At one point, Johns heard that artist Willem de Kooning remarked on gallery owner Leo Castelli’s ability to sell anything, even “two beer cans.” This comment gave Johns the inspiration for this sculptural work—two beer cans cast in bronze and hand-painted (which Castelli promptly sold).

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