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Reviewed by:
  • Jasper Johns: Gray
  • Karen Wilkin (bio)
Jasper Johns: Gray: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Jasper Johns is one of the few post-war American painters whose work is officially acknowledged to have evolved during the more than half century that has elapsed since his earliest exhibitions. (Born in 1930, Johns had his first solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958.) That is to say, he is routinely represented in museum installations and survey shows of twentieth-century art by selections from different periods in his career. What makes this apparently banal fact worth noting is that most of Johns's equally long-lived peers are not accorded this kind of treatment, but instead, are pigeonholed according to the moment when they were first recognized as innovators to be taken seriously; work made subsequently to their "signature" efforts is largely ignored, despite the current interest in late style, no matter how the artist's approach has developed during the intervening years. Helen Frankenthaler, for example, is invariably [End Page 146] discussed in terms of her iconic Mountains and Sea, 1952. No one can dispute the excellence of the painting or question the influence its stain technique exerted on Frankenthaler's colleagues. As fresh and direct as a giant watercolor, with its uninhibited sweeps and puddles of transparent rose and luminous blues, Mountains and Sea is a ravishing picture that perfectly illustrates its author's role as what Morris Louis famously described as "the bridge between Pollock and what was possible." But Frankenthaler was twenty three when she painted this wonderful picture, and she will be eighty in December 2008. In the past fifty-six years, she has made a great many paintings every bit as powerful as Mountains and Sea, yet surveys of American abstraction almost always fail to take into account the mature Frankenthaler's large, impressive body of work and concentrate instead on her youthful achievements. Virtually everything Johns has done, by contrast, is treated with as much respect as the signature Flags, Targets, and Maps that first established his reputation in the late 1950s.

Just why this should be so is a matter for speculation. Current indifference to work that postdates an artist's initial declaration of his presence may reflect the present-day art world's apparently unquenchable thirst for the next new thing. Or it may have something to do with the high value the rhetoric of heroic modernism attached to the "breakthrough"—the climactic moment when an artist finds that he has at last made works wholly unlike anything he (or anyone else) has done before, works that will determine his future direction and coincidentally, alter the course of contemporary art. What sets Johns apart? Has he alone been so consistent, over the years, that his work from every period of his long career warrants special, sustained attention while that of the majority of his contemporaries does not? The large survey exhibition Jasper Johns: Gray, seen at the Art Institute of Chicago from November 2007 to January 2008 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from February to May 2008, offered an opportunity to consider the question by presenting us with a well-chosen selection of Johns's works in many media—paintings, works on paper, graphics, and sculpture—spanning the entire trajectory of his career, from the 1950s to the present.

Restricting an overview of an artist's work to his exploration of a single color (or in this instance, a single non-color, depending on your point of view) might seem arbitrary. Several of my colleagues, in our conversations at the preview of the Johns show, judged it to be "overdetermined." It's difficult to imagine anyone's attempting to organize an exhibition titled Henri Matisse: Blue. It could be done, of course, and it would even include some extraordinary pictures—the St. Louis Museum of Art's Bathers with a Turtle, 1908; the Hermitage Museum's The Conversation, 1908-1912; the Art Institute of Chicago's Bathers by a River, 1909-10, 1913, 1916; plus a selection of the gouaches coupées blue nudes from the last years of Matisse's life...

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