|
 |
Katherine Dolgy Ludwig
Jasper Johns: Gray is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 4.
Jasper Johns, Racing Thoughts, 1984. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Jasper Johns, the great mariner of modern art, guides us down deep into the world of gray in this shining 200-piece retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Johns emerged as a leading artist in the early 1950s, between the waning of Abstract Expressionism and explosion of Pop Art, and took on the task of interpreting and confronting icons of personal import, i.e. the breast/target of his infancy in Gray Target, 1958; the repeated letters and numbers of his education in Gray Alphabets, 1956 and Gray Numbers, 1957; the American map and flag of his adult allegiance in Map, 1962 and Two Flags, 1959; and the tools of his craft and face of his dealer in works such as Device, 1962 and later Racing Thoughts, 1984. His “found objects” on display here such as Light Bulb II, 1958, Flashlight I, 1958, The Critic Sees, 1961, and the oil on bronze Light Bulb, 1960, are forerunners to Pop Art that still amuse and challenge with questions about consumerism.
The palette of these works could, in the hands of a lesser artist, dampen their vibrancy, but Johns’ work has its own life, recalling its own memories that are more real. Although he has been called a detached formalist, Johns has paradoxically always been fixated on using the visceral qualities of materials to emphasize the humanity of the body, for instance in works such as Canvas, 1956, Newspaper, 1957, Drawer, 1957, Coat Hanger, 1959, and Coat Hanger II, 1960, where a coat hanger hovers in front of the picture plane, its shadow a part of the composition. With their matter-of-fact titles, these works use an ancient process to encapsulate objects in the artist’s grasp.
All things human attract Johns, as exemplified by Skin, 1975, where the oil on his skin is smeared onto paper. His body parts are applied, his teeth really bite in Painting Bitten by a Man, 1961, and sexual jokes abound. In the early work Gray Painting with Ball, 1958, the canvas is cleaved in two, to suggest a plaything ball, a vaginal cavity, and an opening-up of the two-dimensional space. In Good Time Charley, 1961, and Diver, 1962-63 recollections of process fill the picture plane; in Portrait-Viola Farber, 1961-62, In Memory of My Feelings-Frank O’Hara, 1961, Periscope (Hart Crane, 1963, Beckett, 2005, Within, 1983-2005, and Winter, 1986, allusions to friends, poets and other artists fill the work as the set of stories that reflect back on Johns’ life.
Works from the artist’s recent Catenary series are also on display, many for the first time. They are titled after an engineering term coined from the Latin word for chain, alluding not only to spans across great waters, but also to the Buddhist idea of the span of a life, each moment like a single pearl of many on a necklace suspended across time and space. Technically and formally, works such as Catenary I (I Call to the Grave), 1998, and Catenary (Henri Monnier), 2000, incorporate many of the motifs Johns has courted throughout his career. The integrity of the marks left by Johns and his concern with the essential will always speak, teach, and guide. These newest works remind the viewer that the work of Jasper Johns, whether rich in color, or executed in somber reflexive grey tones, is always beautiful and continuously relevant.
