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Explore the paintings of Jasper Johns, an American painter, sculptor and printmaker associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art. See his famous works such as Flag, Target with Four Faces, and Three Flags.
- American
- May 15, 1930
- Augusta, Georgia, United States
- Childhood
- Early Training
- Mature Period
- Late Period
- The Legacy of Jasper Johns
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Born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns grew up in rural South Carolina and lived with his paternal grandparents after his parents divorced when he was only a toddler. The paintings of his deceased grandmother hung in his grandfather's house, where he lived until the age of nine, and provided his only exposure to art in his childhood. Johns ...
After high school, Johns spent three semesters at the University of South Carolina, starting in 1947. Urged by his teachers to study in New York, he moved north and spent one semester at the Parsons School of Design in 1948. However, Parsons was not the ideal fit for Johns, and he left the school, rendering him eligible for the draft. In 1951, he w...
Although he had only exhibited his painting Green Target (1955) in a group show at the Jewish Museum in 1957, Johns received his first solo exhibition in 1958, after Rauschenberg introduced him to the burgeoning, influential gallerist Leo Castelli. The solo show featured Johns's groundbreaking painting Flag (1954-5), as well as other previously uns...
After his Edisto Island studio burned down in 1968, Johns split his time between New York City, the Caribbean island of St. Martin, and Stony Point, New York, on Long Island; he bought studios at the latter two sites in the early 1970s. During this period, Johns introduced the use of the motif of crosshatching, or line clusters, into his repertoire...
As part of the Neo-Dada movement, Johns bridged the aesthetic gap between Abstract Expressionism and Pop 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 ...
Learn about Jasper Johns, an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker who made common signs, such as flags and targets, the subject of his work. Explore his Neo-Dada, Pop Art, and Conceptual influences and see his important paintings.
- American
- May 15, 1930
- Augusta, Georgia
- Flag, 1958. Jasper Johns first painted the American flag in 1954–1955 aged 24, and it's been a frequently recurring motif in his practice ever since. For Johns, “using the flag took care of a great deal for me because I didn't have to design it.
- Target, 1961. Along with flags, targets are another of Johns's striking motifs from his early career. Associated with repetition – reciting the national anthem, practicing firing skills – these commonplace items were ingrained in mid-century American life.
- Painted Bronze, 1960. With Johns's early shows at Leo Castelli's gallery proving very commercially successful, it’s claimed fellow artist Willem de Kooning quipped of the gallerist: “you could give that son of a bitch two beer cans and he could sell them”.
- Painting with Two Balls, 1960. “At once, Johns extinguished speculation about the meaning of individual paintings and directed attention to them as objects among other objects”, wrote the critic Harold Rosenberg.
This image illustrates Johns's early technique of painting with encaustic over a collage made from found materials such as newspaper. Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930) is an American painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker.
- Flag, 1954–55. During the ’50s, Abstract Expressionism was still considered the paragon of art in New York. Going gallery to gallery, one might see numerous exhibitions featuring all-over abstractions, each with a particular style that corresponded to a certain artist (drips of paint for Jackson Pollock, heavy black forms for Franz Kline, fields of saturated color for Mark Rothko, and so on).
- Target with Four Faces, 1955. This painting pairs a target with a sculptural element at its top: four niches, each with a hinged door that can be opened and closed, each containing an identical cast of the same model’s face, from just below the eyes down.
- Map, 1961. In the early part of his career, Johns made a habit of introducing ready-made patterns and images—targets and flags, for example—into art. They were “things the mind already knows,” as Johns was fond of saying—the implication being that one need not look particularly hard in order to understand what’s being portrayed.
- Usuyuki, 1982. Starting in the ’70s, Johns began making use of two mystifying patterns that had highly specific reference points. One, featuring an array of interlocking forms with slight points in places, alluded to flagstones he had spotted on a wall while passing through Harlem in a car.
May 11, 2024 · Jasper Johns, American painter and graphic artist who is generally associated with the Pop art movement. Johns’s paintings often depict commonplace two-dimensional subjects such as flags, targets, maps, numbers, and letters of the alphabet, all readily recognizable and painted in simple colors.
Learn about Jasper Johns, an iconic American artist who blended Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in his paintings. Explore his famous works, such as Flag, and his awards, collections, and influences.
