Jasper Johns has been one of America’s most famous artists since the 1950s, when he began to make his highly distinctive paintings of everyday images like flags. A new exhibition opening Sept. 29 shows that he has never stopped exploring new directions.
Artists before Mr. Johns had created series of paintings devoted to a single subject observed under changing natural conditions, like Cézanne’s apples or Monet’s haystacks. But curator Scott Rothkopf of the Whitney sees Mr. Johns’s images as being closer to abstract art. Rather than reproducing particular objects, his paintings draw on archetypal images that, in Mr. Johns’s phrase, “the mind already knows” before seeing them.
Mr. Johns’s work can be witty as well as striking. One story goes that the artist Willem de Kooning remarked that the gallerist Leo Castelli, who represented Mr. Johns, was so slick a salesman that he could sell two beer cans. Mr. Johns responded by casting a bronze sculpture of two cans of ale, “Painted Bronze” , and Castelli sold it.
Mr. Rothkopf, who co-curated “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” with the Philadelphia Museum’s Carlos Basualdo, calls the ale cans “in a way the conceptual hinge of the entire exhibition.” The show’s subtitle alludes to the way much of Mr. Johns’s work is about repetition and doubling. But his approach was different from the exact reproductions that would make Andy Warhol famous a few years later.
His more recent work, while still enigmatic, is more emotionally direct. One series of paintings is based on a photograph published in Life magazine in 1965, showing a U.S. Marine named James Farley weeping for a comrade killed in battle in Vietnam. Mr. Johns alters the image in various ways, darkening it until the figure of Mr. Farley is hard to discern or doubling it, possibly to stress the fragmentation of personality that can come with grief.
Sometimes the ambience of Mr. Johns’s late paintings is cosmic. In an untitled 1997 painting, the artist has set a black-and-white image of what could be the Milky Way against a sky-like background with gold highlights. There are also disjointed cartoonlike eyes, what could be the curlicue of a nose, and a ruler, another of Mr. Johns’s longtime favorite images. The final element of the picture shows an inverted Big Dipper and three human stick figures. Here Mr.
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