San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presents Jasper Johns. Seeing with the Mind’s Eye, an exhibition on view November 03, 2012 – February 03, 2013.
Jasper Johns, Land’s End, 1963; oil on canvas with wood; 67 x 48 1/4 in. (170.2 x 122.6 cm); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson; © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Throughout his career, contemporary American artist Jasper Johns, now 82, has found new ways to explore, as he once put it, “how we see and why we see the way we do.” Continually reinventing his own work, he has driven key transformation in the art world for nearly 60 years.
This major exhibition, the first museum overview in San Francisco in 35 years, was organized in close cooperation between Jasper Johns and Gary Garrels, SFMOMA’s Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, who has been a longtime advocate of Johns in the Bay Area. Ranging across Johns’s entire career—from his breakthrough paintings of the 1950s, which paved the way for the subsequent development of Pop art and Minimalism, to his most recent work—the survey offers a rich overview of the visual and philosophical inquiries central to Johns’s practice and illuminates his enormous impact on artistic developments following Abstract Expressionism.
The presentation also celebrates the significant holdings of Johns’s work in the region, bringing together for the first time some 90 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from SFMOMA and other local and private collections as well as several key works lent by the artist himself, including a large recent canvas that will be on view to the public for the first time.
Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930 and currently lives and works in New York City. He studied art at the University of South Carolina, but soon moved to New York where he met Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham, becoming a central force in the intensive reconsideration of contemporary arts unfolding at the time. In the 1950s, he developed a distinctive painting style that would help lead American art away from the then dominant movement of Abstract Expressionism. Unlike that energetic style, Johns’s work was seemingly mute and serene, at once taciturn and vibrant, quixotic and matter-of-fact. Apart from occasional found objects or cryptic references to his own life, he painted mostly impersonal motifs early in his career, such as numbers, maps, and flags. The exact correspondence of figure and ground in his work also challenged the traditional distinction between an object and its depiction.
Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind’s Eye will be installed roughly chronologically, beginning with a selection of Johns’s first mature paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints from the 1950s and 60s, focusing on one of his most iconic early subjects: numbers. For the artist, these were things “seen and not looked at, not examined” and therefore perfect vehicles for understanding the familiar in a new way. The exhibition then moves through canvases with dramatic brushstrokes and high-keyed colors that obscure clearly identifiable subjects.
The presentation continues with key examples from Johns’s early sculptural and lead relief works based on common objects (Light Bulb II, 1958), for which he used Sculp-metal, a silver-gray material that echoes his gray paintings of the same time (Canvas, 1956). It also looks at Johns’s play with language and his elaborate Duchamp-inspired puns between word and image (Wall Piece, 1968; Bread, 1969; The Critic Smiles, 1969); and explores the way Johns begins introducing more psychological, personal references to his canvases (Land’s End; 1963; Periscope [Hart Crane], 1963; Souvenir 1964).
In the1970s, Johns initiated his Crosshatch series (Corpse and Mirror, 1978; Between the Clock and the Bed, 1981), abstract compositions of colored brushwork that recall his earlier work, but now individual strokes are distinct and gathered in parallel groupings arranged at angles. From this point on, Johns’s work increasingly includes autobiographical references such as the artist’s shadow, first seen in his Seasons series (Summer and Fall, 1987).
Johns began a new mode of investigation in the 1990s that would become known as his Catenary works (Bridge, 1997)—spare, muted gray canvases marked by a string that hangs across the field of the painting. Over the past ten years, Johns has also started a new series of works on paper and plastic that he calls Shrinky Dinks after the children’s craft material utilized in their creation. And most recently he has developed a series of works based on a totemic black figure, represented in Bushbaby (2005), a monumental painting that will be on view for the first time with this exhibition.
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