The idea to paint “something the mind already knows,” in the artist’s words, came to him in a dream. Mildly annoying, the sound fades as we approach his iconic Flag (1954-55), among the artist’s greatest works. In Philadelphia, “Mind/Mirror” begins with the disembodied voice of John Cage reading Johns’ cryptic texts. At Johns’ debut in 1958, a prescient reviewer noted that his “genuinely new art assaults and enlivens the mind and the eye with the exhilaration of discovery.” Perhaps the most influential American artist of the 20th century, the 91-year-old Johns came to aesthetic maturity within the network of conceptual and experimental artists in downtown Manhattan that included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg, who was his lover for a time.Ĭage’s interest in chance in the creative process is early manifest in Johns’ intriguing False Start (1959), with its randomly placed bursts of color.Īlthough the artist’s gestural brushwork and painterly drips were symbolic links to his abstract expressionist elders, the banal, enigmatic images he exhibited at the start of his career, pointed toward the emotionally cooler future of Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual art. In describing the shows’ contents in a public conversation with Rothkopf (available on the Whitney’s website), Basualdo said with a smile: “Everything is unique, and everything is part of a series.” While Philadelphia focuses on images of numbers in its “First Motifs” section, for example, the Whitney highlights flags and maps. The same ten thematic categories, variously interpreted, structure both halves. The twin installations are more fraternal than identical. Many have never or only rarely been exhibited before. The ability to mean two things at once is the essence of irony.Īnd doubling is central to “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” a mammoth retrospective of a virtuoso ironist, simultaneously on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.Ĭocurators Carlos Basualdo of the Philadelphia Museum and the Whitney’s Scott Rothkopf, assisted by Sarah Vogelman and Lauren Young, gathered more than 500 of Jasper Johns’ paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture, and assigned roughly half to each institution. PMA and Whitney show 500-plus works by Johns - arguably the most influential American painter of the 20th century.īy Judith Stein, Published Octoin The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jasper Johns, master virtuoso of the double, one of the most influential of American painters, in massive Philly-NYC exhibition.
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