Introduction

Scott Rothkopf: This show is a survey of Johns’s work from 1954 to 2021. That’s more than sixty-five years of art made by an artist who is now ninety-one, and still working in his studio almost every day.

Narrator: The installation of prints on this wall covers the full range of that long career. Take a look at the works as you hear more from Scott Rothkopf. He curated this exhibition along with Carlos Basualdo, curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Scott Rothkopf: Jasper Johns began making his work in the mid-1950s at a time when the predominant art in New York was abstract painting. He shocked people in the art world with images that were drawn from everyday life—a flag, a target, a map—things, as he calls them, that the mind already knows. This created a kind of scandal, because people didn’t think these subjects were appropriate to fine art. Yet, they also enabled Johns to think about things beyond the subject, so that eventually the subject became less important than a way of looking, making, thinking, and also, our perceiving the work.

Narrator: This exhibition is unusual in that it is being held simultaneously here at the Whitney, and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Scott Rothkopf: As you move through the exhibition, you’ll see galleries that explore different ideas about Johns’s work: maybe how he used one medium, a different motif, a place that he worked in that was important to him. Each of these galleries has a reflection gallery in Philadelphia taking up the same idea, but with a different set of examples. Don’t worry: if you only see it here, it will make sense, but if you see it in both places, I know the sum will be greater than the parts.