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Lot Essay
Executed in 1973, Flags I is a flawless embodiment of Jasper Johns’ most iconic subject—the American flag. Meticulously crafted using a series of thirty-one silkscreens in five different stages, this brilliantly-colored masterwork is a lavish demonstration of Johns’s printmaking skills. Rendered in vibrant red, white and blue across a large sheet filled with lively and spirited brushstrokes, Flags I is a glorious ode to Old Glory, the central theme of Johns’ career and one of the most cherished images in contemporary art. The ravishing coloration of Flags I stems from Johns’s groundbreaking multi-screen process. An underlayer of orange, green and black adds an enervating counterpoint to the red, white and blue of the flag, while energetic brushstrokes lend a palpable immediacy as the colors seep out from their prescribed borders and drip down the sheet. As vigorous and dynamic as the day it was created, Flags I stands as a tour-de-force of Johns’s prolific 60-year career as a printmaker.
With the original encaustic Flag of 1954-1955, Jasper Johns hit upon a flashpoint in his art, making the flag a quintessential subject that he returned to regularly over the course of his career, exhausting nearly every media imaginable, from painting, drawing and printmaking to sculpmetal and bronze. In 1973, he turned to silkscreen, a medium heretofore avoided for its lack of technical precision, when he was introduced to the master printer Hiroshi Kawanishi at Simca Artist Prints, Inc. Developing a multi-stage process that incorporated a staggering series of thirty-one screens, Johns created an unparalleled richness and depth previously unimaginable. “The stinging colors of the silkscreen Flags I, printed from thirty-one screens, took full advantage of the skills of the Simca printers. In these heavily layered works, in which the inks were occasionally mixed with varnish to quote the differing surfaces of the painting and change the flat character of the printing, the immediate impression is of painting on paper. ... It is a painstaking bit of trickery, whereby Johns produces an intricately fashioned surface" (R. Castleman, Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986, p. 39).
The technical expertise of the Simca master printers allowed Johns to convey certain subtle complexities and painterly nuances that were out of reach even for his hand-painted compositions. Executed in a range of different painterly marks—from short, rough gestures to layered hues and lush drips of pigment—Flag I grabs the viewer with a powerful visual jolt. The two flags are placed side-by-side with a stark graphic authority that is belied by the expressiveness of Johns’s painterly strokes, which seep beyond their borders and drip down the sheet. The diptych—a recurring motif in Johns’ oeuvre—makes clear the obvious similarities of the two flags while also pointing out their variations. An underlayer of secondary colors in orange, green and black further complicates the reading of Johns’ flag, which Richard S. Field described in his catalogue raisonné, "Uniquely expressive of Johns' need to embrace the opposite of any given activity was his habit of contrasting primary and secondary colors… Johns went to great pains to conceal his use of opposites, almost to the point of relying on the viewers’ knowledge rather than his/her powers of observation. In Flags I and II of 1973, two substrates of complementary flags underlie the final, primary images: one a perfectly flat, unmodulated layer of green, black and orange; the second, a painterly deposit of brush marks in the same hues. Only the most careful observation reveals their presence beneath the impasto layers of red, white and blue" (R. S. Field, The Prints of Jasper Johns, 1960-1993: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1994, n.p.).
Considered by many critics and scholars as one of America’s greatest living artists, Johns pursued printmaking as a natural consequence to his own penchant for interrogating established imagery across a wide variety of media. Through replication, repetition and reinvestigation, Johns continued his life-long exploration of the flag in Flag I, making it the perfect visual embodiment of his oft-quoted phrase, in which he remarked: "I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between the two" (J. Johns, quoted in C. Geelhaar, Jasper Johns: Working Proofs, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, 1979, p. 39). Indeed, both the literal and symbolic layering at play in Flag I make it the perfect vehicle for Johns’s process, in which what we see is many things at once—a flag, a painting of a flag and a two-dimensional print of a painted flag—so that the viewer is engaged in a carefully-calibrated game that calls into question the nature of verisimilitude and pictorial illusion.
Flags I has been praised as the most painterly and vivid of all Johns’ silkscreen works and its charm is felt world-wide. Editions are owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, along with preeminent private collections around the world. As a series, Flags I relates to the oil and encaustic painting Two Flags (in Six Parts) that Johns painted that same year, along with Flags II, a silkscreen in black and white. Thoughtful, bold and technically complex, Flags I is a brilliant iteration of Johns’ most celebrated subject.
With the original encaustic Flag of 1954-1955, Jasper Johns hit upon a flashpoint in his art, making the flag a quintessential subject that he returned to regularly over the course of his career, exhausting nearly every media imaginable, from painting, drawing and printmaking to sculpmetal and bronze. In 1973, he turned to silkscreen, a medium heretofore avoided for its lack of technical precision, when he was introduced to the master printer Hiroshi Kawanishi at Simca Artist Prints, Inc. Developing a multi-stage process that incorporated a staggering series of thirty-one screens, Johns created an unparalleled richness and depth previously unimaginable. “The stinging colors of the silkscreen Flags I, printed from thirty-one screens, took full advantage of the skills of the Simca printers. In these heavily layered works, in which the inks were occasionally mixed with varnish to quote the differing surfaces of the painting and change the flat character of the printing, the immediate impression is of painting on paper. ... It is a painstaking bit of trickery, whereby Johns produces an intricately fashioned surface" (R. Castleman, Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986, p. 39).
The technical expertise of the Simca master printers allowed Johns to convey certain subtle complexities and painterly nuances that were out of reach even for his hand-painted compositions. Executed in a range of different painterly marks—from short, rough gestures to layered hues and lush drips of pigment—Flag I grabs the viewer with a powerful visual jolt. The two flags are placed side-by-side with a stark graphic authority that is belied by the expressiveness of Johns’s painterly strokes, which seep beyond their borders and drip down the sheet. The diptych—a recurring motif in Johns’ oeuvre—makes clear the obvious similarities of the two flags while also pointing out their variations. An underlayer of secondary colors in orange, green and black further complicates the reading of Johns’ flag, which Richard S. Field described in his catalogue raisonné, "Uniquely expressive of Johns' need to embrace the opposite of any given activity was his habit of contrasting primary and secondary colors… Johns went to great pains to conceal his use of opposites, almost to the point of relying on the viewers’ knowledge rather than his/her powers of observation. In Flags I and II of 1973, two substrates of complementary flags underlie the final, primary images: one a perfectly flat, unmodulated layer of green, black and orange; the second, a painterly deposit of brush marks in the same hues. Only the most careful observation reveals their presence beneath the impasto layers of red, white and blue" (R. S. Field, The Prints of Jasper Johns, 1960-1993: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1994, n.p.).
Considered by many critics and scholars as one of America’s greatest living artists, Johns pursued printmaking as a natural consequence to his own penchant for interrogating established imagery across a wide variety of media. Through replication, repetition and reinvestigation, Johns continued his life-long exploration of the flag in Flag I, making it the perfect visual embodiment of his oft-quoted phrase, in which he remarked: "I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between the two" (J. Johns, quoted in C. Geelhaar, Jasper Johns: Working Proofs, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, 1979, p. 39). Indeed, both the literal and symbolic layering at play in Flag I make it the perfect vehicle for Johns’s process, in which what we see is many things at once—a flag, a painting of a flag and a two-dimensional print of a painted flag—so that the viewer is engaged in a carefully-calibrated game that calls into question the nature of verisimilitude and pictorial illusion.
Flags I has been praised as the most painterly and vivid of all Johns’ silkscreen works and its charm is felt world-wide. Editions are owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, along with preeminent private collections around the world. As a series, Flags I relates to the oil and encaustic painting Two Flags (in Six Parts) that Johns painted that same year, along with Flags II, a silkscreen in black and white. Thoughtful, bold and technically complex, Flags I is a brilliant iteration of Johns’ most celebrated subject.