“In 1955, Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Willem de Kooning dominated the New York art scene. “The Belgian Surrealist René Magritte was also interested in the relationship between an artwork and its subject matter, and in the months prior to Flag’s execution, Johns visited an exhibition of Magritte’s work and saw a painting that directly addressed this issue. Is Flag a painting or a flag, or both? Flag does not conclusively answer that question instead, like so many of Johns’s creations it establishes a line of inquiry and asserts its significance for the practice and history of art. "Perhaps most obviously, Flag serves to question what a painting is, and how it is to be differentiated from the object it represents. More like a riddle than an expression of patriotism or unconscious zeal, Flag is, in many respects, deeply challenging. “As many commentators have noted, Johns represented Flag’s motif faithfully – a decision that was, in some respects, more mystifying than had he deviated from the flag’s conventional form. Jasper Johns at Pearl Street studio in 1955. Moderate in scale it has none of the visionary qualities one might expect given its purported origins in the artist’s unconscious. Secondly, he painted Flag, a curiously mature work inspired by a dream in which he saw himself painting an American flag. First, he systematically destroyed all existing work in his possession, vowing that henceforth his art would be free of perceptible debt to other artists. “In the early 1950s, while working closely with Robert Rauschenberg in adjacent lofts in lower Manhattan, Johns resolved to be an artist. With this novel sense of determination, Johns did two things that would help establish his identity and significance as an artist. As quite a few tweets observed, the artist Jasper Johns created a series of all-white 'stars and stripes' in the mid 1950s, alongside his most famous rendering of the star-spangled banner, Flag (1955).Īnd while Johns possibly isn’t among the foremost suspects currently being sought, the incident did make us ponder his flags and the meaning behind them once more. Why the recurrent theme? And how did this painting of the stars and stripes both introduce Johns as a key New York artist, and bring his painting into dialogue with Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, as well as the Civil War, and ancient Egyptian artistic techniques? Luckily, Isabelle Loring Wallace, author of our forthcoming Jasper Johns Phaidon Focus book, was on hand to fill in the backstory. We guess that like us you enjoyed reading the various theories behind the white flags hoisted over Brooklyn Bridge last week. Johns’s most famous work took in the Civil War, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Egyptology - here's how The colors are slipping the letters are slipping and sliding-they’re falling.Flag (1955) by Jasper Johns The incredible story behind Flag by Jasper Johns I think one of the most immediate things about the experience of looking at Land’s End is a sense of slipping. That imprint of a hand you see on the canvas? That’s his. SFX: OCEANIC SOUND BED which rises and becomes more complex, slowly turns into something less recognizable, evoking a sense of being subsumed by the ocean The gray tones, washing over the painting in thick brushstrokes, and thin, fluid drips, have the feeling of a dark and roiling ocean. ![]() He named it after a poem by Hart Crane, who wrote a lot about the sea. SFX: Ocean waves crashing on shore below us, as if we are standing on a cliff looking out to sea Foghorn in the distance.Īt the time Jasper Johns made this painting, he said: “I had the sense of arriving at a point where there was no place to stand.” He called it Land’s End.
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