Montez Singing

Scott Rothkopf: Montez Singing is named after Johns’s step-grandmother, with whom he lived as a boy. That’s the name, Montez, at the top. The singing is because he remembered her singing a song called “Red Sails at Sunset.” You can see a little picture in this bigger picture that shows almost like a child’s drawing of a sailboat and a sunset.

The painting feels like it depicts a face, but it’s also a painting looking at itself. If you look around the edges of the frame, you see these two eyes that Johns used repeatedly in this room from a Picasso portrait. Here, they’ve attached themselves to the edges of this frame where you also see wispy lines that maybe evoke hair. At the bottom of the painting, you see lips and this funny curlicue that could be most likely a nose, but also, a mustache.

Some people have looked at this painting and actually seen it not just as a face, but as a landscape, where maybe that nose is a cloud, and the lips are mountains, and the eyes are like suns. This idea of a painting that is dreamy, and reminds you of maybe surrealism of the 1930s, was important to Johns at this time. He wanted to get away from images that were easy to recognize and from the abstract images of his crosshatch paintings into something that suggested reverie, the unconscious daydreams. That’s an important theme of all the works in this gallery.