noma jasper johns exhibition booklet, fall 2015
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ON THE COVERJasper Johns, Savarin, 1977-81, Lithograph on paper, 50 ¼ x 38 inches
Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. RosenArt © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Prints from the Donna Perret Rosen
and Benjamin M. Rosen Collection
NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM OF ART
OCTOBER 23, 2015 – JANUARY 31, 2016
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Jasper Johns: Reversals showcases an exceptional group of prints by
Jasper Johns (American, b. 1930), one of most influential artists of the
our time. Known for his representations of icons of American culture
like flags, targets and maps, Johns is a master printmaker whose work
in print influences all aspects of his art. This exhibition brings together
a choice selection of Johns’ mixed media works from the 1970s through
today to show how the logic of printmaking—its multiple plates, mirror
images, repetitions and reversals—informs Johns’ art across media, from
painting and drawing to relief sculpture and collage. Johns’ multifaceted
investigations into the methods and materials of printmaking inspire him
to reinvent familiar media and forms, and reinterpret customary markers
of American cultural identity. For Johns, stars and stripes—like numbers
and letters—are symbols to be deciphered, decoded and reimagined. His
crosshatched stripes, compounded numbers and fragments of newsprint
and typeface revolutionized 20th century art, and continue to explore the
role of the multiple image in contemporary American art and culture.
FIGURE 2 Jasper Johns, Flags I, 1973, Silkscreen on paper, 27 ½ x 35 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. RosenArt © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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FIGURE 3 Jasper Johns, #6 (from ‘Untitled 1975’), 1976, Lithograph on paper, 30 1/8 x 29 ¼ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. RosenArt © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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Johns began experimenting with printmaking in the early 1960s, and
the medium quickly became a generative force at the center of his art-
making. As Johns remarked in 1979, “Just the process of printmaking
allows you to do—not allows you to do things but makes your mind
work in a different way than, say, painting with a brush does…you
find things which are necessary to [the process of] printmaking that
become interesting in themselves [and] become like ideas.”1 Johns’
prior paintings had investigated how we derive meaning from visual
signs, from culturally charged symbols like the American flag to more
seemingly straightforward signs like targets, numbers and letters. Early
prints like Savarin, 1977 –81 (Cover) and Flag I, 1973 (Fig. 2) deepened
and extended this analysis, requiring him to break images and forms
down to their constituent parts, and then reconstruct them across
multiple printings and plates. In his paintings and prints from the 1970s
like #6 (From ‘Untitled 1975’), 1976 (Fig. 3), Johns made crosshatching—
the crossed lines used by printmakers to create light and shadow—into
his central motif, exploring how the abstract shapes and forms used to
compose images might carry their own independent meanings.
FIGURE 4 Katy Martin, Jasper Johns at Simca (#62-6), 1980, Digital print, dimensions variable,Collection of the artist
FIGURE 5 Jasper Johns, Figure 8 (From Black and White Numerals), 1968, Lithograph on paper, 37 x 30 inches, New Orleans Museum of Art, 2004.151, Museum Purchase and Partial Gift of Jean Heid, George Roland, Tina Freeman, Mr. and Mrs. Clemmer and William Cousins, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
FIGURE 6 Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1970, Lead relief, 30 x 23 ½ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
FIGURE 7 Jasper Johns, 0-9 (With Merce’s Footprint), 2009, Bronze, 19 ¼ x 37 ¼ x 1 ¼ inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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Johns often relentlessly reorders, reverses and recombines numbers and
letters, upending conventional chronology in order to put familiar forms
like Figure 8, 1970 (Fig. 5) in a new light. The finely wrought surfaces of
mixed media works like 0 through 9, 1970 (Fig. 6), and 0-9 (With Merce’s
Footprint), 2009 (Fig. 7) remove numbers from the calculus of everyday
experience to reflect on their deeper relationship to memory and human
consciousness. As Johns said in 1969, “Numbers…were things people
knew, and did not know, in the sense that everyone had an everyday
relationship to numbers…but never before had they seen them in the
context of a painting. I wanted to make people see something new…
when something is new to us, we treat it as an experience.”2 When
creating numbered prints like Figure 3, 2012 (Fig. 8) and Figure 5, 2013
(Fig. 9), Johns reworks the printing plate in between each printing so
that every successive print—and every encounter with each number—
is a unique experience. Eliciting this more meaningful relationship to
numbers, Johns transforms printmaking from an impersonal process of
duplication into a meditation on the resonance of numbers as recurrent
markers of time and human experience.
FIGURE 9 Jasper Johns, Figure 5, 2013, Lithograph on paper, 10 ½ x 8 inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
FIGURE 8 Jasper Johns, Figure 3, 2012Lithograph on paper, 10 ½ x 8 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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In the early 1980s, Johns collaborated with Simca Print Artists in
New York to create a series of ambitious, multi-screen prints titled
“Usuyuki,” a Japanese word meaning “light snow.” In Usuyuki, 1981 (Fig.
10), one of the largest and most complex works from the series, Johns
embeds printed fragments of newspaper text in between each of his
crosshatched strokes, creating a collage-like effect. As in many of Johns’
crosshatched works, each of the three panels are imperfect duplications
of one another. Torn snippets of newspaper headlines appear and recur
in different places throughout each panel, as if to question the veracity
and permanence of mass-produced information. Phrases like “Illusion
of...”, “Excerpt from…”, and “It’s Time for…” are layered alongside obituary
announcements and redolent terms like “Falsehoods and Distortions.”
In an interview for the film Hanafuda/Jasper Johns, Johns said that the
“word [usuyuki] had triggered [his] thinking…about the fleeting quality
of beauty in the world.”3 In Usuyuki, Johns’ fugitive fragments of mass-
produced newsprint call forth the ephemeral quality of the “news,” with
the title “Snow” evoking the blur of contemporary media culture as well
as the cloudy and often inexact nature of human memory.
FIGURE 10 Jasper Johns, Usuyuki, 1981, Screenprint on paper, 29 x 46 ½ inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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Johns’ art incorporates an array of enigmatic art historical references,
frequently mining the work of other artists and exploring different
aspects of their work across multiple mediums. As Johns said in 1979,
“I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between
the two: the image and the medium. In a sense, one does the same thing
two ways and can observe differences and samenesses—the stress
the image takes in different media.”4 Johns derived the bold design of
his Bushbaby series from the harlequin patterns Picasso incorporated
into many of his most famous paintings and collages. Johns created
Bushbaby, 2004 (Fig. 11) in ink on plastic, a nonabsorbent material
that makes the resultant drawing appear fluid and unfixed, as if the ink
never quite dried. Johns further investigated the variable and unfixed
nature of visual signs in his intaglio diptych Fragment of a Letter, 2010
(Fig. 12). Based on a letter Vincent Van Gogh wrote to Émile Bernard,
Johns printed part of the letter in text on the right, and then translated
that passage into sign language on the left. Constantly adapting and
reworking familiar signs and symbols, Johns conveys the meaning in art
as a thing in a similar state of flux.
FIGURE 11 (LEFT) Jasper Johns, Bushbaby, 2004, Ink on plastic, 34 ¾ x 24 inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
FIGURE 12 (ABOVE) Jasper Johns, Fragment of a Letter, 2010, Intaglio on paper, each sheet 44 7/8 x 30 ½ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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In 2012, Johns encountered a tattered 1960s photograph of the painter
Lucien Freud that inspired him to embark on a new body of work entitled
Regrets. Over the ensuing two years, Johns created a series of paintings,
drawings and prints inspired by this photograph’s striking jagged
edges and evocative portrait of a man holding his head in his hands in
despair. Regrets, 2014 (Fig. 14) is part of this larger series, and derives its
abstract form from the rips and folds of this found photograph of Freud.
In this series, Johns subjects the photograph to endless manipulations
and modifications, reversing, mirroring, inverting, etching, coloring
and painting until his work bears little trace of the portrait with which
it began. The title Regrets comes not from Freud’s despairing pose,
but the stamped phrase “Regrets, Jasper Johns” that appears on
many works from the series, taken from a rubber stamp Johns uses to
decline invitations and requests. Like so much of Johns’ work, Regrets
resists being read either as emotional self-portrait or a purely formal
exploration of technique. Regrets embraces the ambiguity between
meaning and form that Johns often conveys as the unanswerable
question at the core of his art. “The final suggestion,” he says, “the final
gesture, the final statement [in a work of art] has to be not a deliberate
statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can’t avoid
saying, not what you set out to say.”5
—Katie Pfohl, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
FIGURE 13 (LEFT) Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2014, Lithograph on paper, 15 1⁄8 x 10 7⁄8 x inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
FIGURE 14 (ABOVE) Jasper Johns, Regrets, 2014, Aquatint on chine-collé, 26 ¼ x 34 1⁄8 inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
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ENDNOTES
1 Jasper Johns, “Interview mit Jasper Johns/Interview with Jasper Johns,” in Christian Geelhaar, ed., Jasper Johns: Working Proofs, ex. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel (1979), reprinted Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, Kirk Varndoe ed., compiled by Christel Hollevoet (New York: Museum of Modern Art,1996). p. 209-10.
2 Jasper Johns quoted in Gunna Jespersen, “Mode med Jasper Johns,” Berlingke Tidende (Copenhagen), February 23, 1969, 14. Translated from the Danish by Scott de Francesco; reprinted in Varnedoe and Hollevoet, Jasper Johns: Writings, 134, 136.
3 Jasper Johns, “Interview with Katy Martin,” from Katy Martin, Hanafuda/Jasper Johns (DVD from Super 8mm Film, 1977-81, 35 mins.)
4 Christian Geelhaar, “Interview with Jasper Johns,” in Geelhaar, Jasper Johns: Working Proofs, ex. Cat., Kunstmuseum Basel (1979), 39; reprinted in Varnedoe and Hollevoet, Jasper Johns: Writings, 191.
5 David Sylvester, “Interview with Jasper Johns,” 1965, reprinted Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 160.
BACK COVER Katy Martin, Jasper Johns at Simca (#63-16), 1980, Digital print, dimensions variable, Collection of the artist
EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
1Jasper Johns, Figure 8 (From Black and White Numerals), 1968, Lithograph on paper, 37 x 30 inches, New Orleans Museum of Art, 2004.151 Museum Purchase and Partial Gift of Jean Heid, George Roland, Tina Freeman, Mr. and Mrs. Clemmer and William Cousins
2Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1970, Lead relief, 30 x 23 ½ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen
3Jasper Johns, Cup 2 Picasso, 1973Lithograph on paper, 15 x 10 ½ inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen
4Jasper Johns, Flags I, 1973Silkscreen on paper, 27 ½ x 35 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen5Jasper Johns, #6 (from ‘Untitled 1975’), 1976, Lithograph on paper, 30 1⁄8 x 29 ¼ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen
6Jasper Johns, Savarin, 1977-81Lithograph on paper, 50 ¼ x 38 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen
7Katy Martin, Hanafuda/Jasper Johns, 1978-81, DVD from Super 8mm film, 5 minutes, Collection of the Artist
8Jasper Johns, Usuyuki, 1981Screenprint on paper, 29 x 46 ½ inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen
9Jasper Johns, Bushbaby, 2004Ink on plastic, 34 ¾ x 24 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen
10Jasper Johns, 0-9 (With Merce’s Footprint), 2009, Bronze, 19 ¼ x 37 ¼ x 1 ¼ inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen
11Jasper Johns, Fragment of a Letter, 2010, Intaglio on paper, each sheet 44 7⁄8 x 30 ½ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen
12Jasper Johns, Figure 3, 2012Lithograph on paper, 10 ½ x 8 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen
13Jasper Johns, Figure 5, 2013Lithograph on paper, 10 ½ x 8 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen
14Jasper Johns, Regrets, 2014, Aquatint on chine-collé, 26 ¼ x 34 1⁄8 inchesCollection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen
15Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2014, Lithograph on paper, 15 1⁄8 x 10 7⁄8 inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen
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