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Lot Essay
One of three Cicada canvases which the artist painted in 1979 (another example is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), Jasper Johns’s iconic crosshatched motif acts as a pertinent reminder that—despite revolutionizing the art world with his Flags, Maps, and Targets—the artist was still capable of sending seismic shocks through the contemporary art world. Two decades later, Johns embarked on this series of abstract paintings featuring dramatic crosshatchings, dynamic streaks of vibrant color that are woven together across the surface of the canvas. This new motif would form the basis of some of the artist’s most celebrated mid-career paintings including Dancers on a Plane (1980; Tate Gallery, London), Between the Clock and he Bed (1981; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), and Perilous Nights (1982; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). First owned by Johns’s assistant, the British artist Mark Lancaster, the present work has been in the present collection for nearly twenty-five years.
Cicada is comprised of a dazzling patchwork of hatched marks that covers the surface of the canvas. Short, deliberate brushstrokes of red, blue, green, orange, magenta, and white pigment are laid down in studied fashion. These colored brushstrokes are separated by white counterparts, which in turn are painted over earlier colored marks. They are then grouped together in "bundles" of five or six; varying in length, they produce irregular fields of alternating colored and white gestures which take on different dimensions; the result is a complex kaleidoscope of colored marks. This bewildering effect continues along the lower edge where Johns stencils his name, along with the title and date of the painting, but being Johns, not in a straightforward way, instead breaking it up the words so they read: “OHNS 1979 CICADA JASPER JO.”
What, at first glance, might seem to be an arbitrary arrangement of colored marks is in fact carefully thought out and pre-determined. Beginning in the center with a series of marks in the primary colors, by the time they progress out towards the edge of the canvas they have become secondary colors of green, orange, and magenta. A remarkable drawing from 1978 (The Broad, Los Angeles) explains Johns’s thinking as he writes in the margin of this preparatory work such notes as “Central Vertical of Primaries Reversing to Secondaries” and “Left and Right Edges Occupy the Same Line in Formation.” He also notes potential titles including "Cicada," "Locust," and "Husk." As noted in the artist’s catalogue raisonné of drawings, the words "Cicada" and "Locust" refer to the insect known for its loud buzzing call, while "Husk" alludes to the exoskeleton that splits open as the insect emerges from its prolonged period spent developing underground. The cross hatching then represents the insect's form, and if joined (either physically or conceptually), the clusters of parallel lines meet their corresponding color, unifying the design across a continuous surface.
These enigmatic markings first appeared in Johns’s work in the early 1970s, in a painting called Scent (1973; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen). The artist himself has spoken extensively on his inspiration for this new motif, attributing it to a chance sighting of a car in motion on the highway. “I only saw it for a second, but I knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me—literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning with the possibilities of gesture and the nuances that characterize the material—color, thickness, thinning—a range of shadings that become emotionally interesting” (quoted in S. Kent, "Jasper Johns: Strokes of Genius," in K. Varnedoe, ed., Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, New York, 1996, pp. 258-259). From these innocuous beginnings Johns developed a highly versatile language that could be inserted into almost any painting as it was versatile enough to be adapted to convey a multitude of meanings. It evoked the frenzied choreography of Johns’s friend, Merce Cunningham, in Dancers on a Plane, at the same time as paying homage to Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed, which, too, features a thinly laid bedspread patterned in similar fashion to Johns’s signature crosshatching trademark.
At the end of the 1970s, the turn of the decade marked a clear shift in Johns’s output as he began to trade the familiarity of his Maps, Flags, and Targets for a more unfamiliar painterly language, one defined by repetition, a lack of obvious context, and unusual visual depth. Johns would repeat this pattern of hatching in various different media over the course of the next critical decade, asserting both the artist’s technical prowess and the importance of this visual iconography. This is a composition that displays great versatility, potential and universality, one that agreed perfectly with the artist’s working methods. During the time of the present example’s conception, Johns was confidentially executing this pattern in both prints and traditional paintings, both mediums musing off of one another. Indeed, the Cicada crosshatchings would come to be one of the artist’s most enduring motifs.
Throughout his career, Johns was fundamentally interested in issues of representation. Bridging the gap between abstraction and Pop, Johns sought inspiration in the forms and images that he saw around him. Yet he differed from other artists of his generation in that his interest in the iconography of his chosen subject matter is based on their formal associations and how that changes (or not) in the context of their use in art. Of Johns’s work, the Johns scholar Roberta Bernstein noted “Their subjects were not drawn from the topical mass media but were intrinsic to culture and deeply ingrained in human consciousness. Their uncertain status, hovering between art work and the thing itself, focused attention on the process of perception, how reality is represented through visual signs, and how the viewer interprets those signs. In this, they did not so much reject abstraction and subjectivity as forge a new way to integrate abstraction with representation and make more apparent the viewer’s role in investing the art work with meaning” (“Jasper Johns’s Numbers: Uncertain Signs,” in R. Bernstein and C. E. Foster, eds., Jasper Johns: Numbers, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art, 2003, p. 12). The crosshatching exemplified by Cicada peers into underlying structure of the very world that supported his practice. With works such as this, Johns gives rise to new inquiries into the nature of art, and—in the process—produced some of the most celebrated works of our time.
Cicada is comprised of a dazzling patchwork of hatched marks that covers the surface of the canvas. Short, deliberate brushstrokes of red, blue, green, orange, magenta, and white pigment are laid down in studied fashion. These colored brushstrokes are separated by white counterparts, which in turn are painted over earlier colored marks. They are then grouped together in "bundles" of five or six; varying in length, they produce irregular fields of alternating colored and white gestures which take on different dimensions; the result is a complex kaleidoscope of colored marks. This bewildering effect continues along the lower edge where Johns stencils his name, along with the title and date of the painting, but being Johns, not in a straightforward way, instead breaking it up the words so they read: “OHNS 1979 CICADA JASPER JO.”
What, at first glance, might seem to be an arbitrary arrangement of colored marks is in fact carefully thought out and pre-determined. Beginning in the center with a series of marks in the primary colors, by the time they progress out towards the edge of the canvas they have become secondary colors of green, orange, and magenta. A remarkable drawing from 1978 (The Broad, Los Angeles) explains Johns’s thinking as he writes in the margin of this preparatory work such notes as “Central Vertical of Primaries Reversing to Secondaries” and “Left and Right Edges Occupy the Same Line in Formation.” He also notes potential titles including "Cicada," "Locust," and "Husk." As noted in the artist’s catalogue raisonné of drawings, the words "Cicada" and "Locust" refer to the insect known for its loud buzzing call, while "Husk" alludes to the exoskeleton that splits open as the insect emerges from its prolonged period spent developing underground. The cross hatching then represents the insect's form, and if joined (either physically or conceptually), the clusters of parallel lines meet their corresponding color, unifying the design across a continuous surface.
These enigmatic markings first appeared in Johns’s work in the early 1970s, in a painting called Scent (1973; Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen). The artist himself has spoken extensively on his inspiration for this new motif, attributing it to a chance sighting of a car in motion on the highway. “I only saw it for a second, but I knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me—literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning with the possibilities of gesture and the nuances that characterize the material—color, thickness, thinning—a range of shadings that become emotionally interesting” (quoted in S. Kent, "Jasper Johns: Strokes of Genius," in K. Varnedoe, ed., Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, New York, 1996, pp. 258-259). From these innocuous beginnings Johns developed a highly versatile language that could be inserted into almost any painting as it was versatile enough to be adapted to convey a multitude of meanings. It evoked the frenzied choreography of Johns’s friend, Merce Cunningham, in Dancers on a Plane, at the same time as paying homage to Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed, which, too, features a thinly laid bedspread patterned in similar fashion to Johns’s signature crosshatching trademark.
At the end of the 1970s, the turn of the decade marked a clear shift in Johns’s output as he began to trade the familiarity of his Maps, Flags, and Targets for a more unfamiliar painterly language, one defined by repetition, a lack of obvious context, and unusual visual depth. Johns would repeat this pattern of hatching in various different media over the course of the next critical decade, asserting both the artist’s technical prowess and the importance of this visual iconography. This is a composition that displays great versatility, potential and universality, one that agreed perfectly with the artist’s working methods. During the time of the present example’s conception, Johns was confidentially executing this pattern in both prints and traditional paintings, both mediums musing off of one another. Indeed, the Cicada crosshatchings would come to be one of the artist’s most enduring motifs.
Throughout his career, Johns was fundamentally interested in issues of representation. Bridging the gap between abstraction and Pop, Johns sought inspiration in the forms and images that he saw around him. Yet he differed from other artists of his generation in that his interest in the iconography of his chosen subject matter is based on their formal associations and how that changes (or not) in the context of their use in art. Of Johns’s work, the Johns scholar Roberta Bernstein noted “Their subjects were not drawn from the topical mass media but were intrinsic to culture and deeply ingrained in human consciousness. Their uncertain status, hovering between art work and the thing itself, focused attention on the process of perception, how reality is represented through visual signs, and how the viewer interprets those signs. In this, they did not so much reject abstraction and subjectivity as forge a new way to integrate abstraction with representation and make more apparent the viewer’s role in investing the art work with meaning” (“Jasper Johns’s Numbers: Uncertain Signs,” in R. Bernstein and C. E. Foster, eds., Jasper Johns: Numbers, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art, 2003, p. 12). The crosshatching exemplified by Cicada peers into underlying structure of the very world that supported his practice. With works such as this, Johns gives rise to new inquiries into the nature of art, and—in the process—produced some of the most celebrated works of our time.