With 250 objects, and his best work from the Fifties, it’s a slog.
Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirroris the new and overdue retrospective of the artist who is as sui generis as artists come, a pivot for American art in the 1950s and early ’60s, and, at 91, still at work. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, where I saw it, Mind/Mirror is close to 250 objects, in numbers the biggest exhibition I can remember, and deadening. A parallel retrospective, slimmer at 225 works of art, runs concurrently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This is a new kind of crazy, but more on that later.
Art, for Johns, is a means to experience an object. The object itself, to him, is usually irrelevant. Whether they’re flags, targets, numbers, coffee cans, crosshatches, or beer cans, he’s after something else, but what? Johns has been famous since the 1950s but an enigma, and now a hermit. He’ll offer insights into his own work that don’t get much more explicit than “Oh, it’s what I was thinking.” This raises questions the Whitney doesn’t answer. Why does Johns matter? Why should we care? Does his art make us think? I’m tempted to suggest, with big qualifications, that he does, we should, and, more or less, no.
Harsh, I know, but my take comes in part from the exhibition’s front-loading Johns’s most moving and iconic work in one spectacular gallery at the beginning. Mind/Mirror is more or less chronological, so the earliest, biggest, and most startling flag, map, and target works are in the beginning. After that, over 50 years, a river of sameness, or at best marginal variation, runs through his career.
Johns came from next to nowhere and was discovered in a fluke only a tad more predictable than Lana Turner’s rise to stardom from a stool at Schwab’s Drug Store.
He was born and grew up in rural South Carolina, raised by his grandfather and his aunt in painful loneliness. He did two years in the Army, briefly studied art in New York, met a then-young but more polished and ebullient Robert Rauschenberg, and joined his tiny circle of starving artists. In 1957, he had a chance meeting with Leo Castelli, who’d just opened a gallery selling the work of living artists. Castelli hoped to lure Rauschenberg to his stable of artists. Johns and Rauschenberg then shared studio space. Castelli saw his work during a studio visit targeting Rauschenberg, enlisted him on the spot, gave him a one-man show a few months later, and a star is born.
These early things are so good that they’re spine-tingling, but I felt in looking at them that I’m seeing a celebrity, since each work is famous, and correctly so. It’s worth seeing the show just for this gallery. Johns’s Target with Four Faces, from 1955, still unsettles. As a form, the target, like numbers, could be a motif that serves only as a vehicle for the artist’s handling of materials. It’s a set of adjacent circles in contrasting colors. Four cast heads join the target, looming in a row above it, each in his or her own compartment, each with a different expression, each cropped at nose’s bridge so there are no eyes. Above the row of busts is a hinged wooden panel that can be lowered to conceal them.
The American art survey take on Johns’s target pictures is concealment of his homosexuality, and this gives the target pictures at least some bite. Gay men survived by hiding, and no more so than during the ’50s, when the broader culture was more aware than ever of homosexuality’s existence and, consequently, more appalled and frightened by it. Next to being a Communist, it was the ultimate transgression. Did Johns paint a self-portrait as a target, and did he mean something universal by it? I’m not sure. In 1955, he was a window dresser, a night clerk in a bookstore, in his mid-20s, and apolitical.
I’m happy to buy the American-art-survey take since we’ve lived in an age of identities for a while now, but the themes of concealment, hiding in plain sight, targeting, and seeing nothing and saying nothing are universal and not just limited to gay people. Today’s crypto-fascists, with their speech codes and exotic, incessant sense of grudge and grievance, will slap a target on anyone who disagrees with them.
White Flag, also from 1955, is Johns’s first triumph in the medium he made his signature: a mix of encaustic, or melted beeswax, oil paint, and bits of crumbled newsprint. In the late 1950s, critics saw Johns as the antidote to Abstract Expressionism, a style, turbulent and inscrutable, running on empty. I first saw White Flag 40 years ago. Its surface is rich and viscous but bewitchingly soft and quiet. Pollock’s surfaces are viscous, too, but he used shiny industrial paint and, as we know, applied it on the move. He’s not called an action painter for nothing. Johns’s surfaces signal deliberation, a waiting game, the ticktock of a grandfather clock in the next room.
Not only barrels but Exxon Valdez–size tankards of ink have been spilled over the meaning of the flag paintings, of which Johns did many. Johns said he dreamed of an American flag, which gave him the idea of painting one. The flag’s a sharp design, simple but complex. Betsy Ross was a great designer. Rob Janoff, who did the Apple logo, has nothing on her. And dreaming about a flag is as good a source as any. In the U.K., the most common subject of dreams is the queen. All of this said, the flag is a freighted thing. Drained of red, white, and blue, White Flag makes us focus on Johns’s paint texture and the design’s angles and lines, as if it were a Cubist painting waiting to spring.
A white flag signals surrender, but Johns did red, white, and blue flags, and triple flags. It’s hard to look at a flag without thinking patriotic thoughts. Johns painted flags, using dense, cryptic encaustic, in the 1960s, when protesters burnt flags willy-nilly. Map, from 1961, nearly seven-by-ten feet, depicts the familiar outlines of the Lower 48, each in orange, red, yellow, or blue, but the surface is only oil, so it’s flatter. Johns conveys his borders precisely and labels each state with its name in stencils, but within the borders, he applies paint freely, in splashes.
So, by the late ’50s, Johns, the young Southern sphinx, was famous. There really hadn’t been anything in painting like his flag, target, and map paintings.
By using rigidly linear and geometric subjects, he seemed to take the excesses of Abstract Expressionism, its debauched willfulness, and tame it. In art-history lingo, he’s a bridge between Pollock, a wild man, and Pop Art’s cool, detached irony. Flags, targets, and maps made Brillo boxes and Lichtenstein’s cartoon pictures possible.
I think Johns’s problem, and the show’s, is of the “what’s next” variety. Big things like According to What, from 1964, and Untitled, from 1972, are combines, one with a chair jutting out and the other with strips of wood, but they’re both lifeless and pointless. Racing Thoughts, referencing the Mona Lisa and Castelli, just isn’t good. Johns did a series of Nightmare pictures in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Now, Henry Fuseli, John Martin, and Goya knew how to do nightmares. Johns’s are thin gruel. His late skeleton paintings are riffs on the motif that’s as old as visual art. Mostly big black-and-white paintings, flat as old Champagne, they’re just not moving.
A big gallery of Savarin monotypes comes about in the middle of the exhibition. As a printmaker, Johns is very good. These are from the early ’80s. By then, Johns wasn’t so much a provocative, relevant artist as a brand. Like Rothko, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Pollock in the ’50s and ’60s or, say, Jeff Koons, Bill Wegman, or Chuck Close today, Johns became a recognized brand. His coffee-can prints and crosshatch print and paintings are very decorative.
As repetition and serialist become rehash, Johns has his moments. Untitled, from 2018, is one of a group of works in different media based on a 1965 photograph in LIFE magazine that showed a Marine serving in Vietnam sobbing after an ambush that had killed one of his comrades. Johns embeds the figure in patterns so dense that it takes a few seconds to see what’s happening. As an image of despair and of loss of control, it’s effective. A selection of ink-on-plastic drawings of the same scene are displayed nearby. They are technically flawless and have the gravity of an Old Master. It’s also one of the too few moments where Johns goes for the heart and soul, not the head.
Visual quotations from Manet, Degas, and Picasso seem dry and, again, pointless. There’s no emotional pull. Johns is a master of gray, the color of thought, and his Catenary series of prints and paintings starting in the late ’90s are good. They’re small seas of mottled gray with an idealized hanging string running in an arc shape starting on the lower left, drooping under its own weight, and then rising to the upper right. Chains and arches are ubiquitous forms — think of the Golden Gate Bridge — so these objects are familiar, like flags and numbers. Johns’s are classically simple, not minimalist, since his paint surfaces attract the viewer. His Catenary works and a variation – close-up, abstract drapery folds, all in gray — are moving in their cool beauty.
The exhibition catalogue, which is a great book, covers a central player in the Johns phenomenon: his dealer, Castelli. Castelli discovered him and represented him until his death in 1999, a 40-year relationship. Insofar as an inventive, good artist can be anyone’s creature, Johns is a creature of Castelli’s.
Castelli is among the handful of dealers in the 1960s who made contemporary American art a big, even corporate, business. Until then, the American art market was a mom-and-pop thing, with most artists starving, patrons such as Peggy Guggenheim coming and going, lots of little cliques, and a few dealers. Two, Edith Halpert and Betty Parsons, were women, and then Sidney Janis was a heavy hitter, but Castelli was very different.
Castelli came to America from Paris in 1941, an Italian citizen from Trieste but part Hungarian. His career in Bucharest and then Paris was in banking, and his factory-owning Hungarian father-in-law had the sense to move the family’s money and business out of Europe to America in the late ’30s. Castelli was a charming, erudite European, obsessed with art but with a day job managing his father-in-law’s tie-making factory in Jamestown in New York. In the ’40s, he dabbled in collecting, went to MoMa constantly, and met Alfred Barr. Barr and Castelli became each other’s groupie. In the early ’50s, Castelli found a part-time gig working with Wassily Kandinsky’s widow in selling art from his studio, left when he died.
Castelli was a master networker in the inchoate New York art world. In 1957, he opened a gallery, with Johns his first discovery. Castelli understood as few, if any, Americans did that art movements came in waves, like fashion, with styles coming in and going out, replaced by new styles. In Europe, new art and artists faced the brick wall of establishment taste and the rule of art academies, so change was hard and slow. In America, things were more fluid. Castelli saw Abstract Expressionism as a style going out the door. Johns’s work, with its controlled surfaces, weird but familiar subjects, and elastic meaning, was that new thing.
Within days of signing Johns, Castelli persuaded Barr to buy three of his paintings for MoMa. He’d long cultivated Thomas Hess, editor of ARTnews, and introduced him to Johns’s work. Castelli was a master salesman. In him, Johns had a promoter with chutzpah and connections. In Barr, he had a museum sponsor, and in Hess a champion in the art press. In the ’60s, Castelli made it his business to know who the young Manhattan collectors with money were. For the first time, these collectors weren’t interested in European art, Old Masters, or Hudson River landscapes. They wanted the art of today.
Castelli was a fixture in the Hamptons, too, while it was emerging as a place with edgy art taste. He was ubiquitous. Among New York critics and curators, Johns became a darling, not a fad, but more like a trophy. He was the artist who, through Castelli, first emerged as a star in New York’s new hegemony in the art world. This type of alliance — an impresario dealer and a star artist — was new in American art. Whistler was a star, though a self-made one, a far better and more consequential artist than Johns but an outsider who brought something very different to the table.
I think this is why this quiet Southern artist who has lived in Connecticut for years is felt to be New York’s cultural property and why the Whitney is doing this behemoth of a show. It’s so big, and it has so many mediocre things in it, that it doesn’t portray Johns well, though I think it portrays him accurately.
The catalogue is readable, with short essays by many authors and nicely illustrated. Why did curators who produced such a readable book do a show that’s unviewable except to the doughty few? A better size would be a 150-object show, not 250. I think Johns, now past 90, needs a retrospective. He’s a historical figure, to be sure, but his 1950s and early-’60s work holds up very well. How to deal with what comes after is the show’s big failure. Mind/Mirror becomes less about Johns and more, tacitly, about the New York art scene.
And the missing figure is Rauschenberg. He and Johns were lovers in the 1950s, and he was, until his death in 2008, Johns’s muse and reference point, sometimes more, sometimes less. Aside from Liar, which Johns painted in 1961 after they broke up, he’s not much in the story that’s Mind/Mirror. That’s a future show, after Johns dies, a juicy, meaty 100-object show. Does the Whitney have the discipline and self-awareness to pull it off?
Editor’s note:This article has been updated to correct the number of objects in the exhibitions.
