Painted Bronze

Narrator: Painted Bronze from 1960 is one of Johns’s most deceptively simple works.

Scott Rothkopf: At first, it just looks like two casts of a Ballantine ale can, which was a popular beer when Johns made the sculpture. You see these two seemingly identical metal forms side by side on a plinth.

Then, if you look up close, you notice that the labels are not printed, but actually painted by hand to mimic what would have been an endlessly mass-produced, printed label. Here, you have the artist playing with this idea of reproduction, the idea that an artist reproduces something they see in the world, but also that commercial production of the things we consume makes one thing after the other thing after another thing. Already, you’re mixing up ideas about a copy and an original, a thing that’s fine art, or a thing that’s maybe just an everyday object from the world.

As you note these little differences, you’ll also see that the top of one of the ale cans appears to have been opened by an old-fashioned can opener. The two little depressions at the top. If you could touch this sculpture and pick it up, you would see that the sculpture with those impressions is actually hollow. It weighs less, as though it’s been emptied of beer, or in this case, bronze.

Narrator: The sculpture is one of the earliest works in this gallery, which explores the themes of mirroring and doubling that have been important to Johns throughout his career. These works, with their invitations to compare and contrast, emphasize the fact that looking at art is not a passive or simple activity.