Jasper Johns

The art of Jasper Johns has affected nearly every artistic movement from the 1950s to the present

Jasper Johns is regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, and has remained central to American art since his arrival in New York in the 1950s. With his then partner Robert Rauschenberg, Johns helped to establish a decisive new direction in the art world, termed “Neo-Dada” at the time. Johns’ striking use of popular iconography, “things the mind already knows,” as he put it (flags, numbers, maps), made the familiar unfamiliar―and made a colossal impact in the art world, becoming a touchstone for Pop, minimalist and conceptual art.

This handsomely illustrated book brings together Johns’ paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings. From his innovations in sculpture to his use of collage in paintings, it gives focus to different chapters of Johns’ career and examines the international significance of his work. Featuring contributions from a range of experts, this volume promises to explore the depth and breadth of Johns’ oeuvre, made over more than half a century.

Jasper Johns (born 1930) made his major breakthrough as a painter in the mid-1950s when he started using iconic, popular images in his paintings―an explosive move at a moment when advanced painting was understood to be exclusively abstract. Johns’ midcentury paintings’ lush, painterly surfaces resemble those of Abstract Expressionism, but Johns arrived at them through slow, labor-intensive processes and mediums such as encaustic. Throughout his 60-year career Johns has worked with many different mediums and techniques, using the restlessness of his own process to explore the interplay of materials, meaning and representation in art.

Roberta Bernstein is a professor at the University at Albany, New York (SUNY), and author of the catalogue raisonne of Jasper Johns's paintings and sculptures. Edith Devaney is curator of contemporary projects at the Royal Academy of Arts, where she was co-curator of 'Abstract Expressionism' (2016). Hiroko Ikegami is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies at Kobe University and author of The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (2010). Morgan Meis is an essayist and critic who writes about art and culture for many newspapers and magazines, among them Harper's, n+1, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Believer. Robert Storr was an influential curator at MoMA, New York, for over a decade. More recently Dean of Yale University School of Art, he has written on such major post-war artists as Guston, Richter, Close, Rauschenberg, Reinhardt and Bourgeois, among many others.