gallery sympathetic to his concerns. That would change one day in 1957, when Rauschenberg, who had been without a gallery for two years, had a visitor to his studio. After years as an insider in the art world, Leo Castelli was opening his own gallery and wanted a roster of distinctive young artists who were veering away from Abstract Expressionism. While visiting Rauschenberg, Castelli learned that the artist who made an intriguing painting of a target he had recently seen in another gallery’s group show lived in the same building and was moreover Rauschenberg’s friend.
Castelli asked to meet Johns and see his work and was so astonished by it that he offered him a show on the spot, momentarily forgetting about Rauschenberg. Castelli soon corrected his oversight (Rauschenberg’s exhibition would follow Johns’s debut), but this awkward moment in some ways prefigured what was to come. Johns’s show would be a sensation, but it would also provoke a veritable crisis in the art world. In reviews of Johns’s show, critics struggled to find language for such unusual work and were especially disturbed by its extreme reticence and its refusal to present itself as a direct expression of the artist himself.
This correspondingly put pressure on viewers to come to terms with the work on their own. Most were initially unable to do so, and some reviews presented their authors’ responses as a catalogue of irresolvable choices. “Is [Johns’s Flag] blasphemous or respectful, simple-minded or recondite?” wondered one critic, while another described his work as “pyrotechnic or lyric, earnest but sly, unaggressive ideologically but covered with aesthetic spikes.”[38] Johns himself summed up the prevalent reaction: “Two meanings have been ascribed to these American Flag paintings of mine. One position is: ‘He’s painted a flag so you don’t have to think of it as a flag but only as a painting.’ The other is: ‘You are enabled by the way he has painted it to see it as a flag and not as a painting.’ Actually both positions are implicit in the paintings, so you don’t have to choose.”[39]
This undecideable quality, an apparent determination on the artist’s part to have it both ways, and a freedom of interpretation that actually seems to have provoked a sensation of anxiety rather than liberation in many viewers became the focus of most early responses to Johns’s work. Its ambiguous and ambivalent qualities set critics to ruminating on their own bemusement, by turns frustrating and pleasurable. Some turned to a curious term, “Neo-Dada,” to describe the work of Johns, Rauschenberg and a few others. Dada had been an international art movement that erupted in protest of World War I some forty years earlier. Its members attacked established ideas about art and used unconventional materials and techniques to create work that harshly criticised the societies that produced the bloodshed and destruction of the war. Johns had never heard of the Dada movement and was dismayed to find his art labeled with such a term. In fact, rather than being a reference to a historical relationship, the term “Neo-Dada” is perhaps better understood as an indication of just how great a shock Johns’s art was when it at last came to the attention of the art world. Johns and Rauschenberg were soon to become the reluctant standard bearers of the long-awaited reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Their intensely private exchange would now take on a more complex, and more public, dimension.
Alley Oop, 1958. Oil and collage on cardboard, 58.4 × 45.7 cm. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. S. I. Newhouse. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
The Changing Focus of the Eye
At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.[40]
I have begun to want an object to be free from the way I see it.[41]
False Start, 1959. Oil on canvas, 170.8 × 137.2 cm. Collection of Kenneth and Anne Griffin. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
The decade following his debut at the Leo Castelli Gallery was probably the most prolific, stimulating and active of Johns’s career. The gradual accrual of a body of work began to prompt him to examine his motivations and intentions more closely, as he recognised that certain assumptions and habits had informed even the carefully conceived works with which he had begun his life as an artist. This realisation prompted an investigation that would extend through most of the 1960s, with Johns questioning the relation between his intentions, the processes he chose to realise them, and the art that resulted.
Johns would also continue to explore the relationship between the acts of making and looking at art. In 1961, his relationship with Rauschenberg – and the intimate connections between artist and viewer it had nurtured – would end. Johns continued his friendships with Cage, Cunningham, and artists such as Jim Dine, but other, more public sorts of relationships would also play a role in his evolving thoughts about art. During this period, Johns’s work attracted considerable attention not only from friends and other artists, but also from critics and scholars. The emergence of Pop Art further increased his visibility; although Johns was not really a Pop artist, his use of commonplace images and objects in his art inspired Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and others. In 1963, Leo Steinberg published the first monograph on the artist, and in 1964, New York’s Jewish Museum mounted a retrospective exhibition with a catalogue, an especially noteworthy achievement for an artist still under thirty-five years of age. In fact, few other artists have seen their work subjected so quickly to intensive analysis and investigation as Johns, and his interrogation of himself during this period would thus also be accompanied by questions regarding the relationship between artists and viewers, and how the meaning of an artwork can change over time, depending upon who is looking at it.
In the months following his first exhibition, Johns seems to have been carried along on the sheer momentum not only of its success but of the flow of his creative process as well. Professionally, there were new milestones. In the summer of 1958 Johns was included in the XXIX Venice Biennale, his first exhibition in Europe, and toward the end of the year he won a prize in the prestigious Carnegie Annual in Pittsburgh. By then, he and Rauschenberg were selling enough work to enable them to retire Matson Jones.
Johns also tried new materials, techniques and processes at this time, making his first major oil painting, a large Target, and also a small oil painting called Alley Oop. The little canvas was a nod to Rauschenberg, who had often included comic strips in his red paintings and combines, but it was also a bold attempt to introduce a livelier array of colours into his work. Additionally, Johns took up sculpture in 1958, taking as his subjects such everyday objects as light bulbs and flashlights and working in a new material called Sculp-metal, a blend of vinyl resin and aluminum powder. Its malleable consistency yielded sculptures (Illustration 1, 2, 3) with a silken grey glow that was a fitting counterpart to Johns’s predilection for grey in his paintings.
Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 78.4 × 114.3 × 12.7 cm. 50th Anniversary Gift of the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, an anonymous donor and purchase, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Coat Hanger, 1958. Conté crayon on paper, 61.9 × 54.9 cm. Private collection. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
In 1959, Johns made changes in his work that seemed dramatic to most observers. Most noticeably, he changed the way he applied paint. Viewers who had been entranced by the quietly reticent surfaces of Flag, Canvas and White Numbers were startled by the aggressively bright colours and loosely brushed marks of paint in such new paintings as False Start, Highway and Out the Window, not
Robert Rosenblum, “Castelli Group,”
