Diver

Scott Rothkopf: Diver is one of the largest works on paper that Johns has ever made in his entire career. It’s a drawing that takes up the scale of painting.

The image suggests a diver, hands at the bottom of the drawing and feet at the very top, like someone plunging into the water, with two arrows that indicate a kind of motion in a circle, maybe like someone’s starting to swim.

John Yau: It’s like, when you’re in the water, when does your body end, and where does the water begin?

Narrator: John Yau is a poet and a critic.

John Yau: I think a lot of his work is about that understanding of experience, that somehow, some things you put together. There’s a sense of loss of identity.

That’s so sensual, that drawing. There’s also real physicality, sensuality to his work that I think is really the meaning of it, as well. There’s a bleakness to his work. Bleak in the fact that he doesn’t offer us a transcendent possibility, but it’s not grim like—oh it’s all bad. It’s just, i.e., this is the way it is. It doesn’t have to be. We don’t have to see it badly, even if it’s bleak. You can see in the drawing, all that attention, so even if it’s bleak, look what I’ve done. I’ve made this beautiful drawing.

Scott Rothkopf: I wanted to include this work in the first gallery of this show because people often think of Jasper Johns as an early Pop artist, someone whose work is colorful, bright, full of symbols from the everyday world. Although that’s true, there’s also a darkness to his early work, a sense of withholding, a sense of sadness sometimes, of disappearing, of hiding.