The artist who invented contemporary art also changed my life.
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He seemed to be doing the same thing.
Both of us were in our own worlds.
After a while, he turned at me and said, Hello, Jerry.
I looked at him blankly.
After a pause, I said, I am sorry.
What is your name?
He said, My name is Jasper Johns.
It was a perfect picture of my unchecked egoism and his imperturbability, modesty, and honesty.
And he answered exactly what I asked.
It felt like proof that by then, Johns was being seen as an outmoded artist from another era.
He was only 56.
This is why Ed Ruscha called Johns the atomic bomb of my education.
I decided to stop becoming, and to be an artist, he said.
The wordhelplessis a key to his work.
The next morning, I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.
The result isFlag,the most iconic, transgressive object/amulet in late-20th-century American art.
Artist Mel Bochner talked about the dark side of Eros in Johnss work.
This is where it lies.
In Johnss surfaces, you glean every mark, touch, over- and underpainting, decision, and erasure.
The medium marbleizes and congeals as you look at it, seemingly retracing and preserving his moves.
You are almost in his body, witnessing the morphological development of a work of art.
Johns becomes a scribe incising clay, making his own abstract cuneiform tablets.
Johns is helping us to see time.
Johns remarked thatFlagtook a long time to paint.
He has also called it a very rotten painting physically.
What he meant is that the different paints were applied to an unstable surface.
The writing visible through the translucent encaustic has no significance to me, Johns said.
ViewFlagas a paradox: something in which contradictory truths are revealed.
I think Johnss dream was partly inspired by the first person I knew who was a real artist.
This was Robert Rauschenberg, whom he met in 1954.
The two became lovers.
It is no exaggeration to say this circle totally remade American culture at its very mid-century peak.
By 1954, that war no longer mattered to an upcoming generation.
Of course, they were still extremely white.
Johns has always acknowledged Rauschenberg as the nuclear furnace of it all.
I learned more about painting from Bob than I learned from any other artist or teacher.
Indeed, Rauschenberg is the American Picasso.
Or at least our Gertrude Stein which would make Johns, effectively, Hemingway.
It was like they were renaming all the animals.
The two immigrants were about to become the deans of a new American avant-garde.
They already loved Rauschenbergs work.
(This was JohnssGreen Target.)
Rauschenberg told them that the artist lived downstairs.
I must meet him, said Castelli.
Rauschenberg returned with Johns a few minutes later.
The two dealers went to Johnss studio.
In the studio, they saw different flags, targets, numbers, letters, and more.
Sonnabend boughtFigure I,a numbers painting, on the spot.
I saw evidence of the most incredible genius.
He said it was like wanting to get married.
Castelli offered Johns a show at his new 4 East 77th Street gallery.
Rauschenberg seemed excited for Johns.
His exhibition was scheduled for two months after Johnss.
American art history was about to jump the tracks.
This was unheard of at the time.
On Monday, January 20, 1958, Johnss debut solo show opened at Castellis gallery.
It was a sellout show.
By contrast, Rauschenbergs show saw just two sales, one of which was returned.
I hear echoes of Wallace Stevenss Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
But by 1968 he had changed his work several times, each time radically.
Its Pop Art before it existed, WarholsBrillo Boxesyears before the fact.
The simple geometric seriality and oneness of this sculpture also triggers minimalism, not to say conceptualism.
It is an American version of Meret Oppenheims fur-lined teacup.
Soon Johns had attached a broom, a tin can, and a spoon to different works.
Johns has always worked alone, and keeps changing, taking steps forward and back.
His career too is a paradox.
He got off the art-historical train of isms.
This expanded his art, for me.
For the art world, however, the hull integrity of his artistic wholeness collapsed.
He was seen as an eccentric or lost.
The show shines fornotbeing your parents Jasper Johns show.
I advise viewers to surrender to it.
It sounds like an evasion, and maybe it is.
(I left the show thinking,He is.
)Yet, his critical reception hasnt been a walk in the park.
Mark Rothko complained, We worked for years to get rid of all that.
He meant representation, unserious things and objects from the world.
(Johnss art was not drawn from the existential self and dark nights of the artistic soul.)
We see the impact Johns had on peers when Serra observed, He presented a new model.
There was an abrupt shift.
It was sort of like the Beatles kicking out Elvis.
While this dumbness etc.
echoes Warhol, in Johns it comes from a more eccentric, personal, unknown, unknowable place.
The embrace of these more feral artistic values opened a huge window for me.
But by the early 80s artists used Warhol, Richter, and Judd as starting points, not Johns.
Theory-heavy postmodernism ruled the art roost.
(I didnt understand this stuff either and am still playing catch-up.)
Meanwhile, Johns was almost embalmed in pious writing that could find no wrong in him.
In the 1990s, the critical roof fell in.
His imagery was multiplying as he recycled and branched out at the same time.
The art critic Clement Greenberg oncewrote, my experience of Johns contains nothing that justifies the term major.
These works are no longer even about majorness.
They are personal workings, explorations, platforms for ideas, occasions for experience, fleeting, silent.
I see silence as a force and take comfort in John Currin saying, Major genius is inaccessible.
I hear a pitch of viciousness and grievance in the criticism.
Or maybe Im just a prig keeper of the Johns flame.
I know Johns a bit, mostly secondhand, through friends.
My wife, Roberta Smith, and I have dined with Johns twice in his Connecticut home.
Both lunches were cooked by him and were fantastic.
I spent much of my time noodling around, studying what art he owned.
(This attribution, once debated, is now officially recognized.)
Ive had scores of small dinners with him in other peoples homes.
Each time Im around him, I feel a kind of tidal force.
He is much taller, larger than you might imagine.
I dont think that I have ever heard him swear.
He turned to me and simply said, yo, Jerry.
He exudes dignity, magnanimity, poise, circumspection, and inwardness, and he doesnt bear fools well.
Hes often described as cryptic, difficult, taciturn, or distant.
Ive seen very little proof of this.
Some say he can be sharp.
Many claim hes this cloistered Scrooge-sphinx whos spent the last 30 years living hermitlike in Sharon, Connecticut.
This is flat-out wrong.
Its like an eruption of joy released.
Betrayal, for him, seems to elicit powerful feelings.
He is the most precise speaker I have ever heard.
Any question put to him, no matter how trivial, vain, or bizarre, elicits a pause.
In these pauses, Ive seen the air go out of dinner parties as the table falls silent.
Ive heard my own heart pounding in those silences.
Then he always answers with a short, very specific, direct response.
How a question is worded will change his answer altogether.
Someone I know slightly told me he once rang Johnss Connecticut buzzer and asked Is this Jasper Johnss home?
May I come in?
Without missing a beat, Johns replied, Yes, it is, and no, you may not.
Recently, I asked, How are your knees?
After a moment of thinking, he said, Much as they were yesterday.
This isnt to say that sometimes he doesnt come off as a perverse Zen master.
Then, too, Ive seen him withdraw at a dinner, disappear for long moments.
To leave, he simply will stand up and say, Thank you.
c’mon dont get up.
It is time for me to leave.
He never fails to thank his host.
He has about the best manners I have ever seen.
Why did you paint this?
What does so-and-so mean?
Where does this image come from?
Can you talk about being gay?
How did you come to paintFlag?
Tell me about your breakup with Rauschenberg.
Whats that green-angel shape in all those paintings?
I have a few Johns anecdotes.
The first is the worst.
I asked one of thoseFlagquestions.
Im still mortified by it.
There, stenciled, are the words United States in the star field.
I went home, studied other flag paintings and prints.
Sure enough, the same words or outlined shape are there every time.
I couldnt wait to see him again.
I waited for a chance to get him alone.
He stopped for a moment.
I thought I gleaned a look in his eyes that said, Jerry!
Then he said, Well, those words must have been there, so I left them there.
These were the manufacturers stitched or printed letters that were on the flag.
Obviously, hed rendered what was there, no more and no less.
Johnss work makes you come to terms with your own lazy angels.
I have never seen anyone look at art as closely as he does.
He didnt see me.
We were alone in the gallery.
I thought,I wont disturb him.
I moved slower than I ever had before in my life.
I never glanced back at him.
After an hour, I made it all the way around the gallery.
It was mystifying, stupendous.
I have seen him look at things this way many times.
All the original furnishings were still in place.
The mildewed rugs, wainscot walls with paper pasted on them to keep out the cold.
Even the tasteful wildflower bouquets I placed nonchalantly about the house.
Rather than the usual ten-minute house-proud tour, this one took two hours.
I handed him off to Roberta.
The two joined the rest of us for lunch long after we began eating.
No one batted an eye.
All had seen him do this before.
Much later, a friend told me he thought Johns returned alone when we werent there.
Of his childhood, he has said it wasnt specially cheerful.
I waited for him to leave and approached Temkin.
I said, Ann, can you tell me what he thought?
I did hear him snap at someone once.
He was relentless, insistent.
He showed no quarter.
He has said he wanted to be an artist since he was 5.
In this painting, made when he was over 50, Johns embarked on a whole new artistic journey.
TheUsuyukiseries began in 1977.
Johns came to the word through a Kabuki play, and it means thin or light snow in Japanese.
This isUsuyuki(1982) to me.
LikeFlag, Usuyuki(1982) is a horizontal triptych.
It is a large abstract grid of 27 equal-size vertical rectangles.
Its as much an opaque stained-glass window, mosaic floor, or mossy Persian carpet.
Each of the 27 vertical boxes sports a configuration of these marks.
Sometimes the boxes match up at the edges or overlap or break off.
All this as the painting seems to oscillate colors like an octopus.
Everything youre seeing conforms to some complex, correlated, schematic unitary whole.
Study the painting, drift over it, zero in, and space out.
Soon you sense repeating shapes, configurations, and patterns.
The same way we cant see both versions of an optical illusion at once.
Its in our biology not to be able to.
Johns deploys a series of different configurations that repeat in different orders in different parts of the paintings.
Its a form of counting or ordered design.
This, then, is how this vision machine spoke to me.
Not simple 1-2-3, 1-2-3, or any obvious pattern.
I pick one, a pattern with a little teepee or triangle shape in the center.
This occupies the very lower left-hand panel.
Then I see it, again, the same, but in different colors.
Its on the right-hand side of the middle row of the middle panel.
(I told you its weird order.)
Look longer and you see how all the colors move in very distinct repeating ways.
They all move according to the light waves and particles ordered in accordance to the spectrum ROY G BIV.
Always in alternating orders of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
His numbers paintings work the same way.
These are invisible strings of the universe made briefly visible.
As Johns has said, all these are taken … not mine.
Looking at Johnss work, I sometimes almost no longer feel like a person.
I step outside myself and become more than one person seeing in different ways.
This was that atomic bomb that went off so many years before withFlag.
Jasper Johnss work leaves me helpless.
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