Paper Planes and Map Neo Traditional Drawings

Jasper Johns'south playful, enigmatic paintings interrogate the very ways in which we see and interpret the globe. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Johns deliberately avoided art cutting off from everyday life and made common signs, such as flags and targets, the subject of his work. Riffing on the divergent examples of Dada and Abstruse Expressionism, Johns, along with his Neo-Dada collaborator Robert Rauschenberg, created a nuanced art that spoke to notions of autobiography, irreverence, and philosophical date.

The reverberations of the piece of work of Jasper Johns afflicted nigh every creative movement from the 1950s through the present solar day. Breaking down the boundaries traditionally separating fine fine art and everyday life, he effectively laid the foundation for Pop Art's embrace of commodity culture. Additionally, Johns'due south exploration of semiotics and perception also ready the stage for both Conceptual Art and more postmodern interventions in the 1980s, while his multimedia collaborations with John Cage and Merce Cunningham ushered in the dominance of Performance Art in the 1960s and 1970s.

Biography of Jasper Johns

Childhood

Built-in in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns grew up in rural South Carolina and lived with his paternal grandparents subsequently his parents divorced when he was but a toddler. The paintings of his deceased grandmother hung in his grandfather'due south firm, where he lived until the historic period of nine, and provided his but exposure to art in his childhood. Johns began drawing at a very young age, with a vague intention of wanting to go an artist, merely only pursued an official art education in college. He described his childhood desire to become an creative person, stating, "I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation dissimilar than the one that I was in." Johns moved in with his Aunt Gladys for a few years in his boyhood during which she taught him, and two other students, in a i-room schoolhouse. Eventually Johns reunited with his re-married mother and graduated as the valedictorian of his loftier school class in Sumter, South Carolina.

Early Training

After loftier schoolhouse, Johns spent three semesters at the Academy of S Carolina, starting in 1947. Urged by his teachers to study in New York, he moved n and spent ane semester at the Parsons School of Pattern in 1948. Yet, Parsons was not the ideal fit for Johns, and he left the school, rendering him eligible for the draft. In 1951, he was drafted into the ground forces and spent two years in service during the Korean State of war at Fort Jackson, Due south Carolina, and in Sendai, Nippon.

Upon returning to New York after an honorable discharge from the army in 1953, Johns met the young artist Robert Rauschenberg, who ushered him into the fine art scene. The two artists shared an intense human relationship, both romantic and artistic, from 1954 to 1961. Johns noted that he "learned what an artist was from watching [Rauschenberg]." The two artists eventually lived together, had neighboring studio spaces, and, when non many others were interested in their piece of work, became each other'south audience. Through their abiding contact, they deeply influenced each other'due south artwork, exchanging ideas and techniques that broke from the then-dominant mode of Abstruse Expressionism. Both were interested in collage and subverting the existentialist and psychological rhetoric surrounding the then-ascendant New York School of painting.

It was during this time that Johns began painting his American flag paintings and targets, using a method that combined bits of newspaper and scraps of textile on paper and sail and covered with encaustic paint (pigment mixed with wax). These experiments combined Dadaist gestures and presaged aspects of Minimalism, Pop, and Conceptual Art.

According to Johns, the idea for Flag came to him one night in 1954, when he dreamt nearly painting a big American flag. He brought the dream to life the following day, and somewhen he completed several paintings of the same subject. Johns thrived in creating works that could exist interpretted in multiple means and said "[these works are] no more near a flag than about a brushstroke, or near the physicallity of paint".

Rauschenberg introduced Johns to composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, as well as to the piece of work of European Dadaist Marcel Duchamp. In 1958, Johns and Rauschenberg traveled to encounter the collection of Duchamp's work at the Philadelphia Museum, where the elder Dada artist'south readymades had a profound impact on both of the artists. In 1959, Duchamp himself visited Johns'south studio, forming a direct connection between the earlier 20^th-century advanced and the newest generation of American artists. Through these introductions, Johns's artistic practice expanded as he incorporated new methods into his ain work.

Mature Period

Although he had only exhibited his painting Green Target (1955) in a grouping show at the Jewish Museum in 1957, Johns received his beginning solo exhibition in 1958, after Rauschenberg introduced him to the burgeoning, influential gallerist Leo Castelli. The solo bear witness featured Johns's groundbreaking painting Flag (1954-5), every bit well equally other previously unseen works from the previous few years. The Castelli Gallery show absorbed some, including artist Allan Kaprow, and puzzled other attendees. Though the surfaces of these paintings independent the drip-similar qualities of the gestural canvases of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, the emotional expressionism of those paintings were missing. Despite some reservations, though, Johns'southward outset solo exhibition received monumentally positive critical attending and catapulted Johns into the public center. Alfred Barr, the manager of the The Museum of Modern Art, bought three paintings for the museum, which was essentially unheard of for a young, unknown creative person.

As the Pop Art motility grew around him, Johns left behind the colorful paintings filled with familiar gestures and images and turned to a darker palette. Some critics attribute the shift away from color and toward the grays, blacks, and whites that dominate many of his canvases from the early 1960s to the rocky end of his relationship with Rauschenberg. Although they did not motion out of their New York studio spaces until 1961, their relationship was already strained by 1959. That year Rauschenberg caused a studio space in Florida, and 2 years later, Johns took a studio on Edisto Island in South Carolina. Although they still spent some time together in New York, both increasingly went their separate means.

The end of such an influential and formative relationship had a huge emotional impact on Johns, and he immersed himself in his work equally well as the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the poetry of Hart Crane. In 1963, he noted that he "had the sense of arriving at a indicate where there was no place to stand up." Despite his unsureness, he continued to expand the focus and ambiguous meanings of his works. During this time, he was involved with the Merce Cunningham Trip the light fantastic toe Company and served as the artistic director from 1967 through 1980. In 1968, Johns designed the gear up decor for Walkaround Time, taking cues from Duchamp'due south The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare past Her Bachelors, Fifty-fifty) (1915-23). Starting in 1960, he began a long-lasting, working relationship with Tatyana Grosman at Universal Express Art Editions (ULAE), where he created over 120 prints over the decade. Many of his prints echoed the subjects of his paintings, while others expanded his visual repertoire, merely all formed a disquisitional dialogue with the residual of his oeuvre. During the 1960s, he also began to further integrate physical, sculptural elements into his paintings, a practice inherited from Duchamp's readymades and Rauschenberg's combines.

Belatedly Period

After his Edisto Island studio burned downwardly in 1968, Johns split his time betwixt New York Urban center, the Caribbean island of St. Martin, and Stony Betoken, New York, on Long Island; he bought studios at the latter two sites in the early on 1970s. During this period, Johns introduced the use of the motif of crosshatching, or line clusters, into his repertoire, and this style dominated his output through the early 1980s. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Johns's work took a more introspective turn as he included specifically autobiographical content in his work. Although, as Johns slyly pointed out, "At that place is a period in which I began to use images from my life, simply everything you use is from your life," suggesting that there had always been an autobiographical element to his work.

Johns became increasingly more reclusive in the decades subsequently his break from Rauschenberg, almost never giving interviews, and maintaining a very tranquility public persona; however, he connected to have close contact with a select few of the art world's insiders. Builder Philip Johnson designed the entertainment center that frames a wall in Johns'due south St. Martin studio, while the old Senior Consultant for Modernistic and Gimmicky Fine art at the Metropolitan Museum, Nan Rosenthal helped Johns name his Catenary serial (1999) when she and her husband visited Johns in that same tropical studio in the late 1990s. He created his well-nigh recent serial of prints with ULAE in 2011, still experimenting with many recurring motifs in varying mediums.

Johns made headlines again in Baronial 2013, subsequently his studio assistant from 1988 to 2012, James Meyer, was charged with the theft of six-and-a-half-million dollars worth of art from a folder of unfinished works that Johns had prohibited from being sold. Meyer absconded with the 22 works from Johns's studio in Sharon, Connecticut, to sell them through an unidentified gallery in New York, claiming they were gifts from Johns. Johns did not comment on the theft, just he did burn down Meyer shortly after discovering the missing works. Johns currently splits his fourth dimension between his studios in Sharon, Connecticut, where he moved in the 1990s, and St. Martin, and is presently represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.

The Legacy of Jasper Johns

As part of the Neo-Dada movement, Johns bridged the aesthetic gap between Abstract Expressionism and Popular Fine art during the late 1950s, but to this day, he continues to expand his subjects, materials, and styles. Pop artists, like Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, benefitted from Johns's groundbreaking turn to the realm of culture, presenting everyday objects and mass-produced goods as an acceptable subject area matter for art. Through his exploration of the mutable meanings of images and symbols, Johns also paved the way for Conceptual Art in the 1960s. In his collaborations with performance artists like Merce Cunningham and Allan Kaprow, Johns'southward expanded creative exercise helped conductor in movements and groups like Fluxus, Body Art, and the Operation Art of the 1960s and 1970s. While Popular artists directly inherited Johns'southward representation of the outside earth, postmodernism's aesthetic of bricolage is heir to his interest in appropriation, the multiplicity of meanings, and semiotic play. Ultimately, Johns and his Neo-Dada contemporaries shifted the focus of the American avant-garde, heralding the experimentation and viewer interaction that would come to boss the art of the latter half of the twentieth century.

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/johns-jasper/

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