Jasper Johns: Gray

Jasper Johns: Gray

Art Institute of Chicago

Through Jan. 6, 2008

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Jasper Johns may be the most important artist of the last half-century, said Alan G. Artner in the Chicago Tribune. In his works from the 1950s, Johns led a shift away from abstract expressionism, whose swirls and stains he felt were extravagant and self-indulgent. The artist began experimenting with all-gray paintings as “a way of minimizing the expressive effect he associated with color,” and of forcing himself to find other means of communicating mood and meaning. More than 140 paintings here—all in gray—represent every part of Johns’ career, from the mid-1950s to the present day. You might think a show full of paintings in a single color would be boring. Instead, “the show engages viewers on a fundamental level, challenging them to take in and discriminate among various types of marks and the equally varied ways the artist has realized them.” It’s like listening to a conver­sation that the artist has been having with himself for the past 50 years.

Johns, of course, is best known for colorful, iconic paintings of flags, targets, and maps, said Kevin Nance in the Chicago Sun-Times. Some paintings here are monochrome versions of those motifs, providing a sort of shadow history of his career. Others seem actually to have started out as full-color affairs, before the artist covered them with gray. “Hints of elaborate color underpaintings often peek out, as if from beneath invisibility cloaks.” All these works are important in chronicling the artist’s development, and it’s interesting to see them in one place. But because they are so similar, this “austerely cerebral” exhibition can be as wearying as it is fascinating.