Jasper Johns: Gray

At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

When I saw the announcement for this exhibition I was very excited and eager to see it. On my tour of American museums in 2005 I saw the very impressive “Near the Lagoon” (Catenary) at the Chicago Art Institute, the less than impressive “Fools House” at the Walker, and the lithographs “Alphabet” in Seattle and “No” in Tucson. In addition I saw the exhibition, “Jasper Johns; Forty years of Printmaking” at the De Young in San Francisco. I have always had a fondness for gray and have often pointed out to others the pale traces of color that are discernable in an overcast sky and in the landscape of an otherwise gray day. That ability to see those colors might have come from my admiration for the works of Corot. After the trip, impressed by his mutual affinity for gray, I determined that I would do some further study and become more familiar with Jasper Johns’ work

I lived in New York City from 1959 to 1988 and the name Jasper Johns was known to me. I know I had seen Flag and Target, but other than recognizing the name I had never paid much attention to his work. Seeing variations of those familiar works on my trip I gave them more time than I usually have done and I was very impressed that Johns was such a painterly painter.

It is with great sadness then that I have to say I found this exhibition really disappointing: except for “Catenary”, most of the work here is not interesting. This opens in a small gallery with “False Start”, an abstract in color with stenciled color names. Next to it is a variation in grays, “Jubilee”. Both of these are extremely well done, they show a mastery of craft and a cleverness of conception. However, in the next gallery we were presented with some very early works from the sixties that had the look of having been student work on inexpensive materials. I wondered if they might not have been included in order to pad out the exhibition.

The interpretation states that in the gray works the artist was creating work which removed the emotional values associated with color and that it was intended to focus the viewer on the concept and the craft of the process. In the third gallery, works in the Alphabet series, this is all readily apparent, it makes its point, and I fully expected that the remaining work, executed over a forty year period, would go somewhere beyond this. But it did not. Instead the work took on the character of an extension of something that was of only minor interest in its conception, something one might do in his off hours or as an exercise to “keep in shape”. This became a formed opinion in the fourth gallery where there were spoons and forks and knives hanging on strings over canvases to which they had no relationship and or meaning. In the fifth gallery there was “Between the Clock and the Bed”, a design the artist had seen painted on a car on the Long Island Expressway. As a large painting this was physically impressive but it did not sustain the interest of the observer, neither mine nor the others with me in the gallery. Facing it, across the room, there was one of the “Savarin” works in which this same motif was used as the ground and it immediately identified why the larger work cannot interest us: this motif works very well as a ground but not at all as a subject.

In that same gallery, facing Bed/Clock, we see, on loan from Chicago, “Near the Lagoon”, a gift of Muriel Kallis Newman (as in The Steinberg Newman Collection discussed below). And it is indeed a very impressive painting, in technique, craftsmanship, and concept. It is a definitive image: henceforth the catenary will always be associated in art with Jasper Johns. It made me aware that the allure of a suspension bridge might well reside in the sensuous drape of the cables uniting the rigidly horizontal and vertical supports. This work is vertical. Next to it, on the side wall, in a horizontal format, is “Study for a Painting”, another catenary variation that is every bit as good as the first. But on the other side wall is a third variation, with a band of harlequin diamonds that immediately recalled Cezanne and Picasso. Going to read the museum interpretation, it told me that indeed that reference was intended. Suddenly it seemed a very obvious and a very trite reference, an indication, perhaps, of over reaching.

In the last gallery there are works that are based on the pattern of a flagstone walk. I thought they looked like value studies for an Armstrong Linoleum floor covering under consideration for manufacture. Cezanne was able to find a variety of motifs in every setting: Ansel Adams traveled in a station wagon equipped so that he could stop at any place and make an artwork from what he termed a found photograph. Jasper Johns apparently has an eye for the found pattern. Fine. But these flagstone works made me aware that not every found pattern is able to sustain the observer’s interest.

Following the artist’s suggestion to study his technique I found that those works which incorporated small areas of color were far more satisfying than those which relied on gray alone. For example; “Two” has both color and interest while the smaller “0 to 9” is muddy and looks like a class room gray scale exercise. “Jubilee” is interesting because there was real risk taking with a values range that extended from 9 to 1 on the gray scale, but in most of the other works, including “Catenary”, the range was from only 5 to 3. In addition there seemed little development of the technique over the forty year period: “Tennyson”, 1958, has an almost identical ground as “Catenary”, 2002. Like Seurat’s conte drawings, (see Seurat below), this comes off as devotion to technique rather than exploration, fresh insight, or as an expression of profound interest.

I suppose it is a legitimate departure for an artist to direct our attention to his technique, in contrast to the usual method in which the effect of the work is only sometimes explained as having anything to do with the technique employed. In many of the great classic paintings technique is rarely taken into consideration, rather the anecdotal content forms the basis of the art commentary. I believe it was not until Roger Fry’s small book on Cezanne that technique ever came into consideration at all. And as for technique and its development over a span of many years, Cezanne is one of the great exemplars of genius extending his range into unknown areas through a constant and ongoing analysis of the plastic elements. Understanding his technique is a path to comprehending his profound interest, his expressive form, and his vital content. Jasper Johns’ technique is rather masturbatory in that it holds the attention of the artist, the doer, but, because there is so little involvement for us, it begins to appear as a rather tedious self involved artist’s exercise.

Finally, it seems to me that the mottled gray works beautifully in the lithographs and drawings but not as well in the paintings. In the former there is the sense of a drama on the flat surface, a sense of implied surface and depth; there are spontaneous accidents that work with the whole. In the latter there is only the sense of the gray being a methodically placed waxy, textured ground. One of the great pleasures for me in looking at paintings is that I am in intimacy with the sensual richness of the impasto. There is no sense of that in the encaustic medium.

What I did notice and to which I have a very favorable response, is that Jasper Johns’ draftsmanship is excellent. It makes me aware of a sadness I feel for modern artists, de Kooning, Larry Rivers, et al, who draw with great mastery but who cannot use their gifts, or can only use them sparingly, because of the dictates of modern art and that to do so would place their status, as true moderns, in jeopardy. It is as if, as makers of modern art, they have become prisoners of their own self description. To which I can only state: Create dangerously!

Despite Jasper Johns’ invitation that we see only the intellectual side of his work, there is another element that is very apparent in this exhibition: there is a very strong homosexual presence in these works. In one we see a hairy scrotum with an upright penis cut off by the edge of the format (ouch). In a painting featuring a frontal male nude the penis is uncircumcised. One painting references Frank O’Hara, another Hart Crane, the celebrated suicide and darling of the educated gay masses. Remembering how the gay culture of the 60’s relied on code in the correspondence among the initiates, I began to wonder if there were more coded and hidden messages in other of the works here or if the artist, having lived in that coded era, was unaware of the degree to which he has used that device. It is interesting because it seems so contrary to the parameters he established for the observers: despite his claim that there is no message, there is, however, a strong subtext.

I think Jasper Johns is authentic, I think he has talent, and I think he is the master of his craft. But I sense that he has spent his working days illustrating an art world polemic. He has spent forty years making not very interesting works, works that show a decided lack of personal growth. That seems to be a common feature among American artists…Stuart Davis, Mark Rothko, Calder, Dale Chihuly… I often wonder, having created a personal, signature, image, if these men haven’t opened a production facility to simply make product for the American art market and the many, many museums. This is a nation of cultural conformity: it is a shame that our artists cannot break free from the ties in which they have bound themselves.

And one last humorous observation. Merce Cunningham is almost always referred to in print as “the dancer choreographer”. John Cage is referred to as “the contemporary composer who often worked with Merce Cunningham, the dancer choreographer”. It seems to me that in just about everything I have read about Jasper Johns it is mentioned that in his early New York days, back in the 50’s and 60’s, “he formed a friendship with John Cage, the contemporary composer, and Merce Cunningham, the dancer choreographer”. Something could be made of this name tagged hierarchy, but perhaps you get the point.