{"data":{"id":"653","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":653,"topgoose_id":1921,"tms_id":653,"display_name":"Jasper Johns","sort_name":"Johns Jasper","display_date":"1930–","begin_date":"1930","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eIn the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns began making paintings of recognizable objects and images, including the American flag, targets, and numbers. As the artist explained, these subjects are “things the mind already knows,” things that are “seen but not looked at, not examined.” In 1954, Johns had a dream that he painted the American flag. He carried out the idea for the first time a year later, and in 1958 he completed \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/1060\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThree Flags\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, arranging three canvases in a concentric stack. He used encaustic, a fast-drying mixture of pigment suspended in warm wax, to accumulate brushstrokes and achieve an agitated, textured surface. Projecting almost five inches from the wall, the work signals, as Johns asserted, that “the painting of a flag is . . . no more about a flag than about a brushstroke, or about the physicality of paint,” or, he might have added, about the painting’s physicality as an object.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJohns often reworks motifs in various mediums—a prime example of this is a paintbrush-filled Savarin coffee can from his studio. An \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/4447\"\u003eimage of the can\u003c/a\u003e was used by Johns in a lithograph announcing his 1977 retrospective at the Whitney, and then in 1981 he adjusted the composition to invoke a \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/17175\"\u003ehaunting self-portrait by Edvard Munch\u003c/a\u003e in which Munch depicted his face and shoulders hovering above a skeletal arm. Johns added the initials \u003cem\u003eE. M.\u003c/em\u003e, incorporated an imprint of an arm, likely his own, and deployed the brush-filled can as his visage. Eleven of the impressions rejected from the 1981 edition were then used by Johns as the basis for a new series of monotypes—among them, the Whitney’s \u003ca href=\"/collection/works?q[search_cont]=Savarin\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eSavarin\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the early 1980s Johns started to render perspectival space in his paintings. For \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/165\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eRacing Thoughts\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, Johns used trompe-l’oeil illusionism to “tack” and “tape” personal mementos, both depicted and actual, to the painting’s surface. The complex layering of imagery is set in the bathroom at his former home (note the faucet at bottom right and the khaki pants hanging at left). Like the flags and numbers, these new motifs—Johns calls them “fragments of thoughts”—such as a lithograph by \u003ca href=\"/artists/943\"\u003eBarnett Newman\u003c/a\u003e, a pot by the ceramicist George Ohr, and a jigsaw puzzle portrait of his dealer Leo Castelli, would recur in subsequent works.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"gray\"\u003eDana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, \u003ca href=\"https://shop.whitney.org/products/whitney-handbook-of-the-collection\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eHandbook of the Collection\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 194–195.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":true,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500022247","wikidata_id":"Q155057","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:52:53.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-29T07:02:36.595-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/653/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/653/exhibitions"}}}}