![]() ![]() The American flag, at this point an almost overdetermined touchstone in our view of his artistic origins, provided the structure not only for the historically critical and familiar Flag paintings but also for a surprising number of gray versions, which neutralize the weirdly ambivalent patriotic formalism of their better-known siblings and set the subject adrift in a sociologically disconnected limbo. (His gravitation to printmaking was probably both a result and a reinforcement of this basic disposition.) A precedent might be Cézanne’s repetitive return to certain landscape subjects, although the operations of rotation, doubling, and mirroring, which Johns combined with his attraction to the properties of diverse materials, located his work in a diagrammatic and abstract realm. Early on, Johns began dealing with his subjects as motifs or armatures that provided points of departure for works in various media and categories. Henceforth, the installation was organized by subject or perceived affinity and, in gross terms, chronologically. ![]() ![]() Both iconic canvases are “about” gray, whether as a subject (the word gray) or as an experienced fact, and although their juxtaposition is hardly rocket science, it isn’t at all obvious to use them to introduce room after room of relentlessly colorless material. These works were not the earliest present but were positioned to frame curators Douglas Druick and James Rondeau’s didactic intentions, and, considered in tandem, they succinctly encapsulate the artist’s early concerns with the nature of language’s relationship to experience and with the doubtful possibility that thought or feeling could be transferred as meaning to an artwork, along with his agnostic relationship to the content of painterly gesture. The exhibition began with two paintings from 1959, False Start (which is not gray but contains the word gray as a pictorial element) and Jubilee (which is basically black, white, and gray, and also includes that word). Johns has made a lot of gray art, and there was a lot of it in the show, which brought together nearly 140 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures. But the show’s reality obviated such ungenerous concerns: “Jasper Johns: Gray” operates as a kind of shadow retrospective, illuminating in a necrotic light a narrative underbelly that even his most attentive enthusiasts might have had trouble imagining, and for which it is difficult to summon an artistic or curatorial precedent. The premise seemed symptomatic of a curatorial compulsion to occupy niches perhaps not crying to be filled. JASPER JOHNS has been the subject of so many career surveys, narrowly conceived museum exhibitions, and critical/theoretical writings that one might be forgiven for some initial skepticism regarding the need for a big show focusing on his use of the color gray. ![]()
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