As Johns would put it many years later, he hoped as an artist “to do something a little more worthwhile than oneself.”[27] Taking advantage of the achievements of others was no way to achieve this goal.
In part, Johns’s destruction of his work may have been a gesture of respect to Rauschenberg, his partner in their ongoing professional and personal conversation, but it was perhaps also an act of independence as well. As such, the challenge it presented should not be underestimated. Johns’s decision that his art should exclude anything that had a place in another artist’s work occurred in the context of a relationship with someone whose art had begun to encompass almost everything imaginable – dripping paint, picture postcards, stuffed chickens, comic strips, and T-shirts.
Given the extremely deliberate nature of Johns’s decision to destroy his work, the act that accompanied it appeared seemingly as a bolt out of the blue. One night around this time, Johns dreamed he was painting a large American flag. He woke up, got the materials he needed, and began. A painting prompted by a dream suggests a process of sudden, impassioned creation, and the fact that he has on occasion described the painting’s support as being a sheet heightens the sense of quick and decisive action in the grips of awakened inspiration. However, this impression is contradicted by the fact that Flag is not the continuous surface that simply painting on a bedsheet would yield. Instead, Flag is constructed from three separate panels that divide the painting into a field of stars and two areas of stripes.
Tango, 1955. Encaustic and collage on canvas with music box, 109.2 × 139.7 cm. The Ludwig Collection, Aachen. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Flag, 1954–55. Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood (three panels), 107.3 × 153.8 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson in honour of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
The appearance of Flag also belies the impression of a painting made spontaneously and quickly, at least as painterly process was recognised in the context of Abstract Expressionism, where broad, gestural brushstrokes suggested work made in the exalted rush of the moment. In contrast, time in Flag comes to a thickening near-halt. Johns began the painting in enamel, but when it proved too slow in drying for him to prolong a session of work, he recalled reading about the ancient technique of encaustic. He began applying melted pigmented wax to the painting’s surface, and as the wax cooled and set, it preserved its appearance at each discrete moment of its application.
Importantly, the encaustic process was not associated with any other artists Johns knew; it was something that – like the flag itself – he could consider his own. To this method Johns wed a process related to one he had been using in his earlier work and deployed scraps of newspaper and cloth, in some places sewing them to the support, in others dipping them in the hot wax in order to bind them to the cooling surface. The wax gave the painting’s surface an appearance of intensely material translucency, and the series of individually inflected and preserved marks – some almost indistinguishable from the collage support – presented a detailed, almost diaristic record of process. The resulting painting seemed the product of a slowed-down, almost painfully heightened sensitivity, suggestive of vulnerability yet directed to the most unlikely of subjects.
Deciding to take the American flag as the subject of a painting was something of a risk in the conservative 1950s. Although Senator Joseph McCarthy had fallen from grace and the red scare of the early years of the Cold War had abated somewhat by the time Johns painted Flag, the possibility of his work being construed as unpatriotic was deterrent enough for the Museum of Modern Art to drop Flag from the group of works under consideration for purchase in 1958 (instead, a trustee bought it, later donating it to the museum). To complicate matters, Johns’s biography offers some intriguing connections between the American flag and his own identity. When he was a boy, on one of the rare occasions when they were together, Johns’s father pointed out a statue in a park in Savannah, Georgia of a Revolutionary War hero named Sergeant William Jasper, who had sacrificed his own life to recover the flag when it was shot down during a battle. Johns’s father told him that they had both been named after William Jasper, and it is thus conceivable that the flag might be thought of not only as a national emblem but a personal and paternal one as well.
When interviewers first asked Johns why he had chosen to paint flags, he replied that he “intuitively [liked] to paint flags.”[28] The account of his dream only emerged publicly with increased scholarly attention to his work in the early 1960s. There is no reason to doubt Johns’s explanation, but it has interesting consequences for the understanding of his identity as an artist. Johns wanted to do “only what [he] meant to do, and not what other people did,” a stance that might be readily associated with a strong sense of decisiveness. But what Johns “meant” to do he explained in terms far from such willfulness: “It seems to me that if you avoid everything you can avoid, then you do what you can’t avoid doing, and you do what is helpless, and unavoidable.”[29]
Dreams are some of our most intensely private experiences, but they are also the result of neither conscious volition nor taste: we are “helpless” before them. Despite the flag’s status as a patriotic emblem of the United States as well as its connections to his family history, Johns’s dream seemingly takes the responsibility for the painting’s subject matter out of his hands, making it difficult to ascribe a political or personal meaning to his decision to make a painting of an American flag. The difficulty of pinning down Johns’s intentions is not surprising, considering that he had decided that he did not want his work to be “an exposure of [his] feelings,” nor did he think himself capable of making such work, as the Abstract Expressionists claimed to have done.[30] What else might be possible in a work of art, if the expression of one’s self were excluded? That work could be expressive without being self-expressive was one possibility, suggested by one of the first works Johns made after Flag: Target with Plaster Casts.
In selecting a target as his subject, Johns focused on a motif that shared several characteristics with the flag. To begin with, it was utterly familiar, an everyday image everyone knows. Secondly, it was composed of a few simple geometric elements that would allow Johns to devote considerable attention to the application of paint without compromising its legibility. Finally, it was flat, so that it elided the usual conflict between abstraction and representation: there is little practical distinction between a target at which one takes aim and a painting of one.
The plaster casts were another matter. Johns had used a plaster cast of a friend’s face in the early work discussed above, and he had made a number of others that he kept around his studio (traditionally, artists might keep such casts in order to study anatomy or draw from them, and the casts may have also been of use in Johns’s freelance decorating work with Rauschenberg). Initially, Johns had decided that his painting of a target would be topped by a row of wooden blocks that, when pressed by the viewer, would sound notes – a sort of large-scale reprise of Construction with Toy Piano. When he had difficulty figuring out how to make this function practically, he simply changed his plan. Atop the target are a series of wooden boxes with hinged lids that can be closed and opened to reveal their contents: plaster casts of body parts, including a breast, a penis, and an ear, each painted in a different colour.
Johns has explained that he painted the casts because he was concerned that their fragmented forms would appear morbid if they were realistically painted in flesh tones or left white. Nonetheless, these components remain a complex psychological element of Target with Plaster Casts, as they do in Target with Four Faces, which Johns made shortly thereafter. Here, the faces – tinted an orange-tan tone distantly related to the colour of flesh – are cut off below the eyes, so that only their lower halves are visible. The
Johns, in a 1999 unpublished interview with Richard S. Field, quoted in Richard Shiff, “Flicker in the Work,”
