Catenary (I Call to the Grave)

Scott Rothkopf: Catenary (I Call to the Grave) is one of the largest paintings from the Catenary series that Johns began making in the late 1990s.

Narrator: Scott Rothkopf.

Scott Rothkopf: The word “catenary” describes a curve that’s created by gravity, when a string is held from two fixed points. You see that in suspension bridges, or here on the surface where you have the string hanging from the top right edge and coming down to the left.

Johns’s Catenary paintings are dark and moody. They remind me of some of the earlier paintings in his career, but here, he’s making them as an older man. You see this string traversing, this large expanse, and it seems fragile, fluttering in the air of the gallery, casting a shadow. It’s been compared by some, to the fragile thread of life, if we think about how one ages. At the bottom of the painting, you see an inscription that says, “I Call to the Grave,” which is a phrase from the Old Testament prophet, Job, where he was being tested by God and was thinking about death as being the only solution to his troubles. These paintings are very powerful, when one thinks of an artist who is approaching, in this case, the age of seventy, making work to some degree about death or the end of life. I find this series one of the most moving in all of Johns’s career.