Summer

"The initial idea for Summer evolved from a work directly tied to specific circumstances of the artist's life, to a series dealing simultaneously with the broader theme of the human condition. The specific images on this fictional canvas - the Mona Lisa, Two Flags, the George Ohr pottery, and the demon from Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (disguised in the background of puzzle-shaped stripes) are taken from painting that immediately precede The Seasons: Racing Thoughts and Ventriloquist. These works for the early 1980s were among the first to reveal more illusionistic and openly self-revealing imagery characteristic of Johns's art of the last decade.

Publication excerpt from Jasper John's The Seasons: Records of Time by Roberta Bernstein, in Jasper Johns: The Seasons, pp. 10-11.