Jasper Johns

Allendale to Castelli

Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930 and spent most of his childhood in South Carolina, with his paternal grandparents in Allendale and later with an aunt on Lake Murray, after his parents divorced. He began drawing at the age of three and decided very early that he would be an artist, despite seeing almost no art: the landscapes painted by his grandfather's first wife were the only pictures he remembers from his childhood. He was valedictorian of his high school class in Sumter, studied three semesters at the University of South Carolina and then moved to New York and enrolled briefly at the Parsons School of Design. Drafted during the Korean War, he served two years, part of them in Sendai in Japan, before returning to New York, where he took a job at Marboro Books and met Sari Dienes, Rachel Rosenthal and Robert Rauschenberg, who became his partner and his closest artistic interlocutor for the better part of a decade. Merce Cunningham and John Cage were part of the same circle. When the dealer Leo Castelli came down one flight of stairs from Rauschenberg's studio to see what Johns was doing, he found a room of flags and targets and offered a show on the spot. That first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958 sold all but two of its eighteen works, and Alfred Barr bought three paintings for the Museum of Modern Art, the first works by Johns to enter any museum.

Things the mind already knows

Shortly before that, Johns had destroyed every work still in his possession and started again with flags, targets, maps, letters and numbers. The choice was a rebuke to Abstract Expressionism: by taking a motif that was already designed, he removed composition from the list of decisions a painter has to make. What interested him, he said, was that the image was not designed but taken, and was not his; such motifs were things the mind already knows. The paintings read at once as depiction and as abstraction, a flag and a set of stripes, and they refuse to resolve. He worked in encaustic, an ancient technique in which pigmented wax is burned into the support, because it kept each brushstroke distinct even under layers, and he pressed three dimensional things into the surface: a ruler, plaster casts of body parts. He was reading Wittgenstein by the sixties, and the critic Robert Storr has described the whole body of work as an ever widening version of the philosopher's language games. Sculpture followed the same logic, from a first flashlight modelled in Sculp metal to a painted bronze of a coffee can stuffed with brushes.

A printmaker's printmaker

Johns is one of the great printmakers of the century. Tatyana Grosman invited him to Universal Limited Art Editions on Long Island at the start of the sixties, and he has published well over a hundred and eighty editions there, returning again and again to the same compositions in lithography, etching and screenprint. He made lithographs and lead reliefs at Gemini in Los Angeles, screenprints with Hiroshi Kawanishi at Simca in New York, and intaglios with Petersburg Press at the Atelier Crommelynck in Paris, including a book made with Samuel Beckett. He later built his own printmaking studio in Connecticut and founded his own imprint. The four etchings with aquatint of The Seasons, published by the press on Long Island, are among the most sought after prints of his later career: a complete signed and numbered set made a high five figure sum in dollars at Bonhams in New York in 2024.

Honours

He took the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1988 for the exhibition in the United States pavilion, and has since received the National Medal of Arts, the Praemium Imperiale and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the first painter or sculptor so honoured in more than thirty years. He cofounded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts with Cage and served for years as an artistic adviser to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In 2026 the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao mounted Night Driver, a retrospective covering more than seventy years of his work. He lives and works in Sharon, Connecticut, on a property he intends to become an artists' residency.