Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965 - Hardcover

Weiss, Jeffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300121415 ISBN 13: 9780300121414

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is one of the most significant figures in the history of postwar art. His work from 1955 to 1965 was pivotal, exercising an enormous impact on the subsequent development of pop, minimalism, and conceptual art in the United States and Europe. This is the first publication to approach Johns’s work of this ten-year period through a thematic framework. It examines the artist's interest in the condition of painting as a medium, a practice, and an instrument of encoded meaning through several interrelated motifs: the target, the “device,” the naming of colors, and the imprint of the body.
In this handsome book, leading scholars, a conservator, and a contemporary artist consider Johns’s activity in this critical decade and discuss many of his iconic paintings, such as Target with Four Faces (1955), Diver (1962), Periscope (Hart Crane) (1963), and Arrive-Depart (1963). Their new critical and historical perspectives are grounded in an unusually close visual and material analysis of Johns's work.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeffrey Weiss is Curator and Head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. John Elderfield is Chief Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  Carol Mancusi-Ungaro is Director of Conservation at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Robert Morris is an American artist and contemporary of Johns. Kathryn Tuma is Assistant Professor of Modern Art at Johns Hopkins University.

From Publishers Weekly:

Rather than restating the fact of Johns' enormous influence during this highly productive decade, Weiss demonstrates it through a discussion of Johns's art-making process in this hefty monograph, produced in association with the National Gallery of Art. In five essays, Weiss and company focus on four "motifs"-"the target; the 'device' (the pivotal slat used to scrape paint); the stenciled naming of colors; and the trace of imprint of the body"-with illustrations throughout and a long central section devoted entirely to artwork. In Weiss's essay, he traces the dynamics of Johns's working life-in its process and context-investigating among other aspects the relationship between Johns's work and his contemporary Jackson Pollock's: "Pollock's compass is an instrument of release. ... Johns' compass is an instrument of containment, the body compressed into the mechanical 'actuality' of two-dimensional space." Not all of the essays are so tightly observed, as in Kathryn Tuma's "The Color and Compass of Things," which tends toward vague consideration of Johns's "playful verbal wit" and "highly sophisticated sense of visual irony." Despite the occasional art-class generalization, this volume has enough detail and richly reproduced artwork to make it a winning, illuminating addition to any art library. 80 halftone, 170 color illustrations.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0300121415
• ISBN 13: 9780300121414
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276