Jasper Johns Exhibition by Mary Degnan

Prints from the Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen Collection NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM OF ART OCTOBER 23, 2015 – JANUARY 31, 2016

ON THE COVER Jasper Johns, Savarin, 1977-81, Lithograph on paper, 50 ¼ x 38 inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

FIGURE 2 Jasper Johns, Flags I, 1973, Silkscreen on paper, 27 ½ x 35 inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Jasper Johns: Reversals showcases an exceptional group of prints by Jasper Johns (American, b. 1930), one of most influential artists of the our time. Known for his representations of icons of American culture like flags, targets and maps, Johns is a master printmaker whose work in print influences all aspects of his art. This exhibition brings together a choice selection of Johns’ mixed media works from the 1970s through today to show how the logic of printmaking—its multiple plates, mirror images, repetitions and reversals—informs Johns’ art across media, from painting and drawing to relief sculpture and collage. Johns’ multifaceted investigations into the methods and materials of printmaking inspire him to reinvent familiar media and forms, and reinterpret customary markers of American cultural identity. For Johns, stars and stripes—like numbers and letters—are symbols to be deciphered, decoded and reimagined. His crosshatched stripes, compounded numbers and fragments of newsprint and typeface revolutionized 20th century art, and continue to explore the role of the multiple image in contemporary American art and culture.

FIGURE 3 Jasper Johns, #6 (from ‘Untitled 1975’), 1976, Lithograph on paper, 30 1/8 x 29 ¼ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

FIGURE 4 Katy Martin, Jasper Johns at Simca (#62-6), 1980, Digital print, dimensions variable, Collection of the artist

Johns began experimenting with printmaking in the early 1960s, and the medium quickly became a generative force at the center of his artmaking. As Johns remarked in 1979, “Just the process of printmaking allows you to do—not allows you to do things but makes your mind work in a different way than, say, painting with a brush does…you find things which are necessary to [the process of] printmaking that become interesting in themselves [and] become like ideas.”1 Johns’ prior paintings had investigated how we derive meaning from visual signs, from culturally charged symbols like the American flag to more seemingly straightforward signs like targets, numbers and letters. Early prints like Savarin, 1977 –81 (Cover) and Flag I, 1973 (Fig. 2) deepened and extended this analysis, requiring him to break images and forms down to their constituent parts, and then reconstruct them across multiple printings and plates. In his paintings and prints from the 1970s like #6 (From ‘Untitled 1975’), 1976 (Fig. 3), Johns made crosshatching— the crossed lines used by printmakers to create light and shadow—into his central motif, exploring how the abstract shapes and forms used to compose images might carry their own independent meanings.

FIGURE 5 Jasper Johns, Figure 8 (From Black and White Numerals), 1968, Lithograph on paper, 37 x 30 inches, New Orleans Museum of Art, 2004.151, Museum Purchase and Partial Gift of Jean Heid, George Roland, Tina Freeman, Mr. and Mrs. Clemmer and William Cousins, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

FIGURE 6 Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1970, Lead relief, 30 x 23 ½ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

FIGURE 7 Jasper Johns, 0-9 (With Merce’s Footprint), 2009, Bronze, 19 ¼ x 37 ¼ x 1 ¼ inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

FIGURE 8 Jasper Johns, Figure 3, 2012 Lithograph on paper, 10 ½ x 8 inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

FIGURE 9 Jasper Johns, Figure 5, 2013, Lithograph on paper, 10 ½ x 8 inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Johns often relentlessly reorders, reverses and recombines numbers and letters, upending conventional chronology in order to put familiar forms like Figure 8, 1970 (Fig. 5) in a new light. The finely wrought surfaces of mixed media works like 0 through 9, 1970 (Fig. 6), and 0-9 (With Merce’s Footprint), 2009 (Fig. 7) remove numbers from the calculus of everyday experience to reflect on their deeper relationship to memory and human consciousness. As Johns said in 1969, “Numbers…were things people knew, and did not know, in the sense that everyone had an everyday relationship to numbers…but never before had they seen them in the context of a painting. I wanted to make people see something new… when something is new to us, we treat it as an experience.”2 When creating numbered prints like Figure 3, 2012 (Fig. 8) and Figure 5, 2013 (Fig. 9), Johns reworks the printing plate in between each printing so that every successive print—and every encounter with each number— is a unique experience. Eliciting this more meaningful relationship to numbers, Johns transforms printmaking from an impersonal process of duplication into a meditation on the resonance of numbers as recurrent markers of time and human experience. 5

FIGURE 10 Jasper Johns, Usuyuki, 1981, Screenprint on paper, 29 x 46 ½ inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

In the early 1980s, Johns collaborated with Simca Print Artists in New York to create a series of ambitious, multi-screen prints titled “Usuyuki,” a Japanese word meaning “light snow.” In Usuyuki, 1981 (Fig. 10), one of the largest and most complex works from the series, Johns embeds printed fragments of newspaper text in between each of his crosshatched strokes, creating a collage-like effect. As in many of Johns’ crosshatched works, each of the three panels are imperfect duplications of one another. Torn snippets of newspaper headlines appear and recur in different places throughout each panel, as if to question the veracity and permanence of mass-produced information. Phrases like “Illusion of...”, “Excerpt from…”, and “It’s Time for…” are layered alongside obituary announcements and redolent terms like “Falsehoods and Distortions.” In an interview for the film Hanafuda/Jasper Johns, Johns said that the “word [usuyuki] had triggered [his] thinking…about the fleeting quality of beauty in the world.”3 In Usuyuki, Johns’ fugitive fragments of massproduced newsprint call forth the ephemeral quality of the “news,” with the title “Snow” evoking the blur of contemporary media culture as well as the cloudy and often inexact nature of human memory.

FIGURE 11 (LEFT) Jasper Johns, Bushbaby, 2004, Ink on plastic, 34 ¾ x 24 inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY FIGURE 12 (ABOVE) Jasper Johns, Fragment of a Letter, 2010, Intaglio on paper, each sheet 44 7/8 x 30 ½ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen, Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Johns’ art incorporates an array of enigmatic art historical references, frequently mining the work of other artists and exploring different aspects of their work across multiple mediums. As Johns said in 1979, “I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between the two: the image and the medium. In a sense, one does the same thing two ways and can observe differences and samenesses—the stress the image takes in different media.”4 Johns derived the bold design of his Bushbaby series from the harlequin patterns Picasso incorporated into many of his most famous paintings and collages. Johns created Bushbaby, 2004 (Fig. 11) in ink on plastic, a nonabsorbent material that makes the resultant drawing appear fluid and unfixed, as if the ink never quite dried. Johns further investigated the variable and unfixed nature of visual signs in his intaglio diptych Fragment of a Letter, 2010 (Fig. 12). Based on a letter Vincent Van Gogh wrote to Émile Bernard, Johns printed part of the letter in text on the right, and then translated that passage into sign language on the left. Constantly adapting and reworking familiar signs and symbols, Johns conveys the meaning in art as a thing in a similar state of flux.

FIGURE 13 (LEFT) Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2014, Lithograph on paper, 15 1⁄8 x 10 7⁄8 x inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY FIGURE 14 (ABOVE) Jasper Johns, Regrets, 2014, Aquatint on chine-collé, 26 ¼ x 34 1⁄8 inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

In 2012, Johns encountered a tattered 1960s photograph of the painter Lucien Freud that inspired him to embark on a new body of work entitled Regrets. Over the ensuing two years, Johns created a series of paintings, drawings and prints inspired by this photograph’s striking jagged edges and evocative portrait of a man holding his head in his hands in despair. Regrets, 2014 (Fig. 14) is part of this larger series, and derives its abstract form from the rips and folds of this found photograph of Freud. In this series, Johns subjects the photograph to endless manipulations and modifications, reversing, mirroring, inverting, etching, coloring and painting until his work bears little trace of the portrait with which it began. The title Regrets comes not from Freud’s despairing pose, but the stamped phrase “Regrets, Jasper Johns” that appears on many works from the series, taken from a rubber stamp Johns uses to decline invitations and requests. Like so much of Johns’ work, Regrets resists being read either as emotional self-portrait or a purely formal exploration of technique. Regrets embraces the ambiguity between meaning and form that Johns often conveys as the unanswerable question at the core of his art. “The final suggestion,” he says, “the final gesture, the final statement [in a work of art] has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can’t avoid saying, not what you set out to say.”5 —Katie Pfohl, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art 11

ENDNOTES

Jasper Johns, “Interview mit Jasper Johns/Interview with Jasper Johns,” in Christian Geelhaar, ed., Jasper Johns: Working Proofs, ex. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel (1979), reprinted Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, Kirk Varndoe ed., compiled by Christel Hollevoet (New York: Museum of Modern Art,1996). p. 209-10.

Jasper Johns quoted in Gunna Jespersen, “Mode med Jasper Johns,” Berlingke Tidende (Copenhagen), February 23, 1969, 14. Translated from the Danish by Scott de Francesco; reprinted in Varnedoe and Hollevoet, Jasper Johns: Writings, 134, 136.

Jasper Johns, “Interview with Katy Martin,” from Katy Martin, Hanafuda/Jasper Johns (DVD from Super 8mm Film, 1977-81, 35 mins.)

Christian Geelhaar, “Interview with Jasper Johns,” in Geelhaar, Jasper Johns: Working Proofs, ex. Cat., Kunstmuseum Basel (1979), 39; reprinted in Varnedoe and Hollevoet, Jasper Johns: Writings, 191.

David Sylvester, “Interview with Jasper Johns,” 1965, reprinted Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 160.

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST 1 Jasper Johns, Figure 8 (From Black and White Numerals), 1968, Lithograph on paper, 37 x 30 inches, New Orleans Museum of Art, 2004.151 Museum Purchase and Partial Gift of Jean Heid, George Roland, Tina Freeman, Mr. and Mrs. Clemmer and William Cousins 2 Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1970, Lead relief, 30 x 23 ½ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen 3 Jasper Johns, Cup 2 Picasso, 1973 Lithograph on paper, 15 x 10 ½ inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen 4 Jasper Johns, Flags I, 1973 Silkscreen on paper, 27 ½ x 35 inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen 5 Jasper Johns, #6 (from ‘Untitled 1975’), 1976, Lithograph on paper, 30 1⁄8 x 29 ¼ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen 6 Jasper Johns, Savarin, 1977-81 Lithograph on paper, 50 ¼ x 38 inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen 7 Katy Martin, Hanafuda/Jasper Johns, 1978-81, DVD from Super 8mm film, 5 minutes, Collection of the Artist

9 Jasper Johns, Bushbaby, 2004 Ink on plastic, 34 ¾ x 24 inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen 10 Jasper Johns, 0-9 (With Merce’s Footprint), 2009, Bronze, 19 ¼ x 37 ¼ x 1 ¼ inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen 11 Jasper Johns, Fragment of a Letter, 2010, Intaglio on paper, each sheet 44 7⁄8 x 30 ½ inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen 12 Jasper Johns, Figure 3, 2012 Lithograph on paper, 10 ½ x 8 inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen 13 Jasper Johns, Figure 5, 2013 Lithograph on paper, 10 ½ x 8 inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen 14 Jasper Johns, Regrets, 2014, Aquatint on chine-collé, 26 ¼ x 34 1⁄8 inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen 15 Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2014, Lithograph on paper, 15 1⁄8 x 10 7⁄8 inches, Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

8 Jasper Johns, Usuyuki, 1981 Screenprint on paper, 29 x 46 ½ inches Collection of Donna Perret Rosen and Benjamin M. Rosen

BACK COVER Katy Martin, Jasper Johns at Simca (#63-16), 1980, Digital print, dimensions variable, Collection of the artist

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