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拍品专文
Painted in 2006, Jasper Johns’s Untitled belongs to an important series of works on paper in which the artist revisited past themes, yielding an exciting cross-fertilization where the iconography of some of his best works co-exist within a compelling pictorial framework. Related to a similar canvas, also from 2006 and currently in the collection of the artist, this large-scale example demonstrates the finesse of Johns as a master draftsman, as it features the paving-stone motif that he first developed in 1967, which is now rendered in a variety of bright primary colors. Ever the pictorial illusionist, Johns has depicted all the elements of the painting in realistic trompe l’oeil detail. His preference for ‘things the mind already knows’ is herein expanded and revitalized, to take on even his own past paintings, presenting a multiplicity of ideas and motifs.
In what is essentially a painting of a painting, Johns pays homage to many of his most important motifs. The depiction of vertical wooden slats is a device first used in the Catenary paintings of the late 1990s. In the present work, two wooden slats flank the edges of the painting, while two others are placed in a v-shape in the center, from which a single piece of illusionary string is attached. The paving-stone motif, first used in the 1967 painting Harlem Light (Seattle Art Museum), has now been painted with lush, dappled coloration, with sparkling passages of white, from the empty paper ground, shining through. Herein the artist’s sparing use of watercolor—itself a notoriously tricky medium—reveals his ongoing mastery of his technique.
Johns further expands upon the visual humor of trompe l’oeil tradition in Untitled, especially in his depiction of the faux bois texture of the wooden slats, and the striking three dimensionality of the piece of string that hangs from the top end, like a carpenter’s plumb line gone slack. Further looking reveals that things are not quite as they seem. The patterning of the paving-stones appears to be fairly straightforward, but, as the right and left sections of the painting come together in the middle, the edges don’t entirely match up. The painted stick along the left edge actually seems to present a mirrored reflection of the imagery at its right. The other wooden slats gradually change color from plain wood to either blue, red or white. In this, and throughout his long and stored career, Johns seems to be aware of the very nature of art itself, which is essentially to trick or deceive the eye in its attempt to replicate a “real” thing that exists in the world as we know it.
With his Flags and Targets in the mid-1950s, Johns discovered that using a preexisting image as his subject matter freed him up to explore the particularities of painting itself. Almost like a poet might work within a sonnet form, Johns’s prescribed imagery allowed him the independence to experiment with his medium and take it to new and exciting places. The paving-stone motif has proven itself to be endlessly fascinating to the artist, appearing in several paintings made around the same time as the present work, including Beckett (2005; Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Within, initially begun in 1983 and finalized in 2005 (Glenstone, Potomac), as well as the colorful Nines (2006; Philadelphia Museum of Art). The paving-stone motif was based on a remembered image that Johns had first encountered at a glance and never seen again. “The flagstone motif came from a painted wall I saw in Harlem,” he explained. “I was on my way to the airport, and once I saw it I said, ‘Let's put that in my next painting.’ But when I came to try to find it, I couldn't…It wasn't there. So I had to remember or reinvent it” (J. Johns, quoted in Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1997, p. 233).
Johns came of age in the mid-1950s alongside artists like Robert Rauschenberg, the composer John Cage, and the dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham. Despite his Pop Art predilection for real-world objects, however, Johns is more philosophically connected to artists working in the Dadaist tradition, like Marcel Duchamp, who embraced ideas like chance and the absurd in their work. So, too, does Johns continually engage with the entire tradition of Western Art History, so that the faux bois patterning on the wooden yardsticks in the Catenary paintings call up the Cubist’s use of faux bois, which in turn referred back to the nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil painters. Continuing this motif, the patterning of the paving-stones evokes the natural organic curvature of real-world rock paths, but also the industrial technique used to replicate them as they would be found in nature. Johns’s embrace of vivid coloration in the paving-stone paintings in the past twenty years points to yet further encoded allusions, to span a wide variety of sources from the jazzy patterning of Picasso’s harlequin paintings to the patterning of a giraffe’s skin. Like a set of nesting dolls, Johns’s imagery continues to yield newer and more exciting surprises, the deeper one continues to look.
In what is essentially a painting of a painting, Johns pays homage to many of his most important motifs. The depiction of vertical wooden slats is a device first used in the Catenary paintings of the late 1990s. In the present work, two wooden slats flank the edges of the painting, while two others are placed in a v-shape in the center, from which a single piece of illusionary string is attached. The paving-stone motif, first used in the 1967 painting Harlem Light (Seattle Art Museum), has now been painted with lush, dappled coloration, with sparkling passages of white, from the empty paper ground, shining through. Herein the artist’s sparing use of watercolor—itself a notoriously tricky medium—reveals his ongoing mastery of his technique.
Johns further expands upon the visual humor of trompe l’oeil tradition in Untitled, especially in his depiction of the faux bois texture of the wooden slats, and the striking three dimensionality of the piece of string that hangs from the top end, like a carpenter’s plumb line gone slack. Further looking reveals that things are not quite as they seem. The patterning of the paving-stones appears to be fairly straightforward, but, as the right and left sections of the painting come together in the middle, the edges don’t entirely match up. The painted stick along the left edge actually seems to present a mirrored reflection of the imagery at its right. The other wooden slats gradually change color from plain wood to either blue, red or white. In this, and throughout his long and stored career, Johns seems to be aware of the very nature of art itself, which is essentially to trick or deceive the eye in its attempt to replicate a “real” thing that exists in the world as we know it.
With his Flags and Targets in the mid-1950s, Johns discovered that using a preexisting image as his subject matter freed him up to explore the particularities of painting itself. Almost like a poet might work within a sonnet form, Johns’s prescribed imagery allowed him the independence to experiment with his medium and take it to new and exciting places. The paving-stone motif has proven itself to be endlessly fascinating to the artist, appearing in several paintings made around the same time as the present work, including Beckett (2005; Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Within, initially begun in 1983 and finalized in 2005 (Glenstone, Potomac), as well as the colorful Nines (2006; Philadelphia Museum of Art). The paving-stone motif was based on a remembered image that Johns had first encountered at a glance and never seen again. “The flagstone motif came from a painted wall I saw in Harlem,” he explained. “I was on my way to the airport, and once I saw it I said, ‘Let's put that in my next painting.’ But when I came to try to find it, I couldn't…It wasn't there. So I had to remember or reinvent it” (J. Johns, quoted in Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1997, p. 233).
Johns came of age in the mid-1950s alongside artists like Robert Rauschenberg, the composer John Cage, and the dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham. Despite his Pop Art predilection for real-world objects, however, Johns is more philosophically connected to artists working in the Dadaist tradition, like Marcel Duchamp, who embraced ideas like chance and the absurd in their work. So, too, does Johns continually engage with the entire tradition of Western Art History, so that the faux bois patterning on the wooden yardsticks in the Catenary paintings call up the Cubist’s use of faux bois, which in turn referred back to the nineteenth-century trompe l’oeil painters. Continuing this motif, the patterning of the paving-stones evokes the natural organic curvature of real-world rock paths, but also the industrial technique used to replicate them as they would be found in nature. Johns’s embrace of vivid coloration in the paving-stone paintings in the past twenty years points to yet further encoded allusions, to span a wide variety of sources from the jazzy patterning of Picasso’s harlequin paintings to the patterning of a giraffe’s skin. Like a set of nesting dolls, Johns’s imagery continues to yield newer and more exciting surprises, the deeper one continues to look.