Studio

Scott Rothkopf: Studio might at first seem an unlikely name for this painting. Where are we? Are we even in a studio? In fact, it was made as an allegory of painting, a story about the act of artistic creation at Jasper Johns’s studio in Edisto Beach, South Carolina, on the shore. We see the imprint of a screen door that maybe makes us think of a place that’s warm and of a palmetto frond from a tree that grows on the island. We also see on the right side the cans Johns used for mixing paint and a brush dangling off the surface, so we have the tools of the artist trade, we have the place in which he worked, and we also have this big, gray expanse that might suggest the ocean or the sky, a different sense of space than Johns had in his earlier paintings that he made in New York.

Jasper Johns grew up in the South, in South Carolina. In 1961, he bought a house and returned there. He was going through a difficult time in his personal life. The artist Robert Rauschenberg, who had been his boyfriend for several years, finally moved out of the building they shared together, and he needed to find a retreat, and to connect maybe with his past, but also find a way into the future, a new way of making paintings and living his life.