Farley Breaks Down

Narrator: Lauren Young is the curatorial assistant for this show.

Lauren Young: This painting is based off of an image by Larry Burrows, the photojournalist, of a Marine crumpled in grief after a helicopter mission in Vietnam. Johns came upon this one in a book and was really struck by the image. He has taken the image and abstracted it into various shapes, relying on outlines. At first, it’s very hard to discern what the image is of. The yellow blurry figure is Marine Lance Corporal Farley breaking down in a store room after a comrade died in battle.

What’s interesting about this work is that Johns takes up photographs. Something he only did in the 2000s, so, quite late in his career. Before this point, all of the source material he is using are symbols that the symbols are things the mind already knows: his flags, maps and numbers, or motifs he’s come across in real life. Johns said about these works that he wanted to find the structure, free of the information that the image conveys. However, the subject matter itself is important to Johns.

Even though Johns stated that he wanted to get away from the information that these images convey, they still very much matter and tie into this gallery as a whole, which is about mortality, sadness, despair. It is not a coincidence that both of the photographs Johns uses in the 2000s are of young men crumpled in grief. In this case, it’s even a documentary image of an event that actually took place.