拍品專文
During the 1980s, Jasper Johns created a group of pictures which took the form of a mock trompe-loeil image showing the wall of his own bathroom in Stony Point, NY. Untitled, executed in 1988, is one of the drawings from this group, as is indicated by the taps shown in the lower right corner, yet presents a unique variation because of the presence of the newspaper clipping. This work was created to be sold to raise funds for St. Vincents Hospital, making the reference to AIDS in the newspaper headline both apt and poignant.
In these works, Johns used the idea of the wall covered in pinned and taped images and artefacts, tapping into the legacy of the legendary American still life painter John F. Peto. However, the interchangeable elements which appeared in these works were very much grounded in Johns own life. In Untitled, various imagery is shown which refers both to his own oeuvre and to those of other artists: two different versions of the American flag, which he had appropriated as subject matter to such revolutionary effect from the 1950s, are shown, one from before Hawaii and Alaska were added as states, one from after; in front of them is a commemorative vase from his own collection, marking the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom, showing her face and that of Prince Philip in negative profile; also featured are a multi-lingual Swiss warning about falling ice, the newspaper cutting, Johns variation of a 1938 Picasso portrait and a cross-hatching section recalling his own earlier work.
This particular cross-hatching pattern appeared in several of these bathroom works. While looking like an arbitrary wallpaper decoration at first glance, the sections reveal themselves to be based on the figure of a diseased demon from the celebrated early sixteenth-century Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald. Johns had adopted the pattern originally in 1981 by tracing a grisaille reproduction from a book on the altarpiece given to him by Wolfgang Wittrock; here, it is upside down. It reinforces the pictures reference to illness and mortality, allowing Johns to add to the tradition of the memento mori not least with the wry inclusion of the skull and crossbones of the warning poster.
While Johns is acknowledging the history of art, he is also playing with concepts of illusion. In his bathroom pictures, Johns began to introduce a sense of perspectival space that he had hitherto avoided; yet he did so in a deliberately hand-made manner, meaning the taps, the vase and the shadow of the pin are emphatically artificial. There is a tension between these modes of representation, between the Isenheim-gone-abstract, the exaggerated Picasso, the Flags and the reference to the Rubin Vase illusion - which Johns himself had adopted as a device using Picasso's profile over a decade earlier. Untitled invokes all these different figurative traditions, from advertising to design to St. Anthony's visions to optical illusions to Picasso and to Johns himself, resulting in a gloriously dense weave of Johns-ian interrelationships and self-referentiality.
In these works, Johns used the idea of the wall covered in pinned and taped images and artefacts, tapping into the legacy of the legendary American still life painter John F. Peto. However, the interchangeable elements which appeared in these works were very much grounded in Johns own life. In Untitled, various imagery is shown which refers both to his own oeuvre and to those of other artists: two different versions of the American flag, which he had appropriated as subject matter to such revolutionary effect from the 1950s, are shown, one from before Hawaii and Alaska were added as states, one from after; in front of them is a commemorative vase from his own collection, marking the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom, showing her face and that of Prince Philip in negative profile; also featured are a multi-lingual Swiss warning about falling ice, the newspaper cutting, Johns variation of a 1938 Picasso portrait and a cross-hatching section recalling his own earlier work.
This particular cross-hatching pattern appeared in several of these bathroom works. While looking like an arbitrary wallpaper decoration at first glance, the sections reveal themselves to be based on the figure of a diseased demon from the celebrated early sixteenth-century Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald. Johns had adopted the pattern originally in 1981 by tracing a grisaille reproduction from a book on the altarpiece given to him by Wolfgang Wittrock; here, it is upside down. It reinforces the pictures reference to illness and mortality, allowing Johns to add to the tradition of the memento mori not least with the wry inclusion of the skull and crossbones of the warning poster.
While Johns is acknowledging the history of art, he is also playing with concepts of illusion. In his bathroom pictures, Johns began to introduce a sense of perspectival space that he had hitherto avoided; yet he did so in a deliberately hand-made manner, meaning the taps, the vase and the shadow of the pin are emphatically artificial. There is a tension between these modes of representation, between the Isenheim-gone-abstract, the exaggerated Picasso, the Flags and the reference to the Rubin Vase illusion - which Johns himself had adopted as a device using Picasso's profile over a decade earlier. Untitled invokes all these different figurative traditions, from advertising to design to St. Anthony's visions to optical illusions to Picasso and to Johns himself, resulting in a gloriously dense weave of Johns-ian interrelationships and self-referentiality.