rush of attention that followed his debut at the Leo Castelli Gallery, Johns refused to relax into a comfortable signature style that might have satisfied the expectations of others. Instead, whenever something seemed settled and familiar in his practice, he questioned it, even at the risk of failure. In the five decades that have followed, Johns has remained remarkably focused considering the intense scrutiny to which he and his work have been subjected by scholars, critics, curators, dealers, collectors and other artists. A strong sense of identity has been instrumental to Johns’s ability to continue challenging himself as an artist despite what could have become overwhelming distractions. In fact, it might be said that this identity was one of Johns’s first creations as an artist.
Star, 1954. Oil, beeswax, and house paint on newspaper, canvas, and wood with tinted glass, nails, and fabric tape, 57.2 × 49.5 × 4.8 cm. The Menil Collection, Houston. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Untitled, 1954. Construction of painted wood, painted plaster cast, photomechanical reproductions on canvas, glass, and nails, 66.6 × 22.5 × 11.1 cm. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
The Birth of an Artist
When he was forty years old, Johns attempted to explain why he had become an artist:
It had been my intention to be an artist since I was a child. But in South Carolina, where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I didn’t really know what that meant. I thought it meant that I would be able to be in a situation other than the one I was in. I think that was the primary fantasy. The society there seemed to accommodate every other thing I knew about, but not that. In part I think the idea of being an artist was, not a fantasy, but being out of this: since there is none of this here, if you’re going to be it, you’ll have to be somewhere else. I liked that, plus I liked to do things with my hands.[7]
Johns’s childhood desire to be somewhere else is not surprising given his upbringing, which, in his own words, “wasn’t specially cheerful.”[8] Shortly after his birth in May 1930, Johns’s mother divorced his alcoholic father, and Johns was left to be raised by a shifting cast of relatives in and around Allendale, South Carolina. The successive displacements were surely not helped by the fact that although Johns liked to do things with his hands, they were not often the things associated at that time and place with the exploits of boys. He loved to draw, but he was also apparently interested in cooking, and he had little interest in hunting, fishing or other outdoor activities.
In wanting to be an artist, Johns ended up focused on a conjunction of activity and identity. Being an artist was what one did, but the first artistic act was to make oneself an artist. The dual processes of creation – artwork and self – were no simple matter. Johns had very little contact with art in his childhood, and as much as this inaccessibility probably contributed to its appeal, it also presented a number of obstacles: Johns’s early encounters with art were less revelations than near-misses. In his paternal grandfather’s house, where he lived until the age of seven, there were a handful of paintings by his grandmother that aroused his curiosity; but she had died before his birth, and he knew very little about her. When an itinerant painter passed through town, Johns took some of his materials and attempted to paint with them, not knowing that the oil-based pigments would not mix with water. Johns’s grandfather arranged to have them returned to the painter, with whom the boy had no further contact.
Untitled, 1954. Graphite pencil on oil-stained (?) paper, 21 × 16.7 cm. Collection of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Johns’s world slowly began to expand as he reached adulthood. After three semesters of studying art with Rembert and others at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, he went at their urging to New York in 1948 and studied for a few months at the Parsons School of Design. When he ran short of money, the school’s director offered him a scholarship based on a recommendation from one of his teachers at the University of South Carolina, but added that he didn’t really deserve it. Johns thereupon refused her offer, left school, and worked at various odd jobs, from messenger boy to shipping clerk, in order to stay in New York. It was an exciting time to be there. The Abstract Expressionists were just beginning to show the ambitious and monumental paintings for which they would become best known, and Johns saw numerous works at this time, including Pollock’s dripped and poured paintings and Newman’s expansive fields of saturated colour.
Although such experiences were stimulating, Johns’s early existence in New York was nonetheless quite isolated, and he struggled with poverty. His situation changed somewhat when he was drafted into the army in 1951. While stationed at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Johns developed an art exhibition program for soldiers before he was sent to Japan for six months. Although the Korean War was underway, Johns saw no combat; instead, he worked in Special Services, designing posters for military films and educational campaigns and working on decorations for a chapel.
Construction with Toy Piano, 1954. Graphite and collage with toy piano, 29.4 × 23.2 × 5.6 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), Monogram, 1955–59. Combine painting, 106.7 × 160.7 × 163.8 cm. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Art © Robert Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Discharged in 1953, Johns returned to New York, briefly attending Hunter College. He continued looking at art and telling the few people he knew that he was going to be an artist, yet it was difficult for him to assimilate his impressions of the art he was seeing. At times the idea of making something of his own out of these impressions was so overwhelming as to seem almost impossible. Art “seemed… to exist on a different plane” from the one that Johns occupied.[9] His disorientation was profound and was in part rooted in the physical identity of art objects themselves:
I remember the first Picasso I ever saw, the first real Picasso… I could not believe it was a Picasso, I thought it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. I’d been used to the light coming through color slides; I didn’t realise I would have to revise my notions of what painting was.[10]
Against this decisive experience of painting’s materiality was Johns’s less than certain sense of himself. “I had no focus,” he later recalled, “I was vague and rootless.”[11] Exacerbating this impression was the Abstract Expressionist emphasis on the role of the self in the creation of art and a corresponding insistence upon the work of art as a direct expression of that self. As Johns later put it, “Abstract Expressionism was so lively – personal identity and painting were more or less the same, and I tried to operate the same way. But I found I couldn’t do anything that would be identical with my feelings.”[12]
Instead, Johns was caught up in a desire as intense as it was bewildering: “This image of wanting to be an artist – that I would in some way become an artist – was very strong… But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn’t know how to do it.”[13] In South Carolina, becoming an artist meant being in another place. In New York, Johns was in the right place to make art, but now he found himself deferring this change in his life to an indefinite time in the future, just
Emile de Antonio and Mitch Tuchman,
