![]() Consider, the truculent, high-finish sculptures of Donald Judd or the omnivorous oeuvre of Andy Warhol, two artists who were born just before Johns and emerged just after him. Like an injection in art’s coursing vein, his hyperstimulating inventions were almost immediately absorbed and then outstripped by those of wilder progeny that now perhaps seem more of our time. Varnedoe’s account makes it difficult to imagine a modern artist who lit more fires faster, while continuing to blaze new trails of his own.ĭespite Johns’s preternatural and protean impact, today his work can sometimes feel more rooted in the past than the present. Just the first ten years of Johns’s mature work paved the way for Pop art, linguistically oriented Conceptualism, literalist painting and Minimalist sculpture, quasi-referential abstraction, process- and materials-based tendencies, and many more isms and trends that followed in his wake. Comparing Johns to the mythical figure of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, Varnedoe credited the artist with sparking countless new ideas. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 93–115.He endeavored to pry loose Johns’s art from the restrictive and reductive amber that had calcified around it even then. Kirk Varnedoe, “Fire: Johns’s Work as Seen and Used by American Artists,” in Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, ed. This was a point that curator Kirk Varnedoe argued in the catalogue of Johns’s fourth and, until now, most recent New York retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1996–97. Whatever the general conception of his work may be, Johns was surely not on autopilot. Indeed, if one lined up the first five years of his work alongside random samples from the next sixty, an untrained eye might be hard-pressed to recognize them as the products of the same artist. Yet nothing about these early paintings would predict the multifarious experiments of the decades that followed. Johns gained immediate attention in the late 1950s for his paintings of flags, targets, and numbers, which remain the enduring emblems of his art. His work helped create the very conditions into which it was so smoothly assimilated-the conditions in which contemporary art and artists still largely exist today. By the time he reached fifty, he had been the subject of three New York museum retrospectives and landed on the front page of The New York Times for his record-setting prices, a dubious distinction in the annals of art if not the popular imagination. ![]() Before turning thirty, Johns had made an indelible mark on the international art scene, and his ascent coincided with a growing and unprecedented international interest in contemporary art on the part of the press, museums, and an enthralled though sometimes skeptical public. ![]() Few, if any, artists in history have existed in the shadow of such precocious achievement and influence for such a long time. This longevity is both easy to take for granted and hard to truly fathom, like the presence of subatomic particles or galaxies beyond our view. At the time of this writing, Johns is nearly ninety-one years old and has been considered an important-if not the most important-living American artist for more than sixty years. 1930) has been making and showing his art for so long and so widely that it has come to seem like an immovable feature in a landscape against which contemporary life continues to unfold.
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