Jasper Johns

Savarin
1982

A colorful artwork featuring a central tin can labeled "Savarin Coffee" filled with paintbrushes, surrounded by a border of vibrant handprints in orange, green, purple, and blue. The can rests on a yellow and green surface with a wavy black and white pattern beneath, resembling water.

The subject of these monotypes dates to 1960, the year Jasper Johns made a life-size painted bronzed sculpture based on a Savarin coffee can that he used to hold paintbrushes in his studio. He returned to the image in 1977, creating a lithograph of the Savarin can for a poster announcing a retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum, and used the extra plates from this print run to create a new variation on the subject in 1981. A group of proofs rejected from the 1981 edition formed the basis for these monotypes, (three of seventeen in the Whitney’s collection). To make these unique works, Johns painted on surfaces such as paper or plastic, placed the image face down onto one of the Savarin lithographs, and ran the sheet through a press. They are remarkable for their inventive variety: the arrangement of Johns’s handprints in one, for example, reiterates the pattern and distribution of hatch marks in another, while a third, inky black, limns the brushes with stalk-like white lines that verge on abstract marks. As in much of Johns’s art, we become sensitized to difference through the repetition of the same.

Not on view

Date
1982

Classification
Prints

Medium
Lithograph and monotype

Dimensions
Sheet: 50 × 38in. (127 × 96.5 cm) Image: 40 1/4 × 33 1/4in. (102.2 × 84.5 cm)

Accession number
2002.228

Edition
1/2

Publication
Printed by Jasper Johns; printed and published by Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc.

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of The American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President

API
artworks/17172

Audio

Savarin

In Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror

0:00

Savarin

0:00

Narrator: The prints lining the walls of this gallery have their origin in a sculpture that Johns made about two decades earlier—you’ll see it in the center of the room. Johns often returns to a theme again and again, taking it as an opportunity to explore new processes and approaches. These prints are monotypes, which Johns made on top of another type of print, a series of lithographs.
Kim Conaty: The actual process that Johns used to make these monotypes was one in which he positioned a plexiglass plate over an existing lithograph so that he could clearly see the image on which his marks were going to be superimposed.
Narrator: Curator Kim Conaty.
Kim Conaty: And then he painted on that plexiglass. While that ink was still wet, Johns pressed paper onto the plexiglass and ran it through a press to transfer the ink. This is following a typical monotype process.
Narrator: In the process, the image on the plexiglass is destroyed. This is why these prints are called monotypes—the method only makes one of each.
Kim Conaty: It also makes it a process that is extremely open to chance. And to me, I think that this aspect of chance, this sort of playfulness that Johns could experience through this process, is part of what drew him to it.
I think in looking at the prints that have, for example, Johns’s own hand, we really see quite literally the human touch in each of these works. Other examples of the Savarin monotypes in this room that are absolutely open to chance are those where Johns used an emulsifier. He added drops of this emulsifier as part of the monotype process to literally dissolve the ink, which means he’s dropping this liquid onto the surface and liquid will do what it will and it will spread and it will make these marks. It’s as if rain drops have hit these prints.

Exhibitions

Jasper Johns
212 works in the collection

View artist

Jasper Johns

Savarin 1982

Audio

Savarin

Exhibitions

Jasper Johns 212 works in the collection

Savarin
1982

Jasper Johns
212 works in the collection