Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965

last updated 8 January 2015

When Jasper Johns left the Army in 1953, abstract expressionism was all the rage, said Peter Plagens in Newsweek. 'œAll the art hipsters were emulating Jackson Pollock—aka Jack the Dripper'—who spread his canvases with hyperactive rivulets of heavy paint. Johns picked a different direction. Target With Plaster Casts (1955) 'œwasn't a picture of a target but the thing itself, a 4-foot-square canvas collaged with newspaper and covered with red, yellow, and blue paint.' Now on display at the National Gallery with a judiciously chosen selection of other works from the era, this odd object stunned its first viewers by suggesting that art could be both representational and abstract. It was also a 'œgreat piece of art—it's beautiful and stays fresh no matter how many times you look at it'—as well as a forerunner of Andy Warhol's paintings of soup cans and other pop art.

Indeed, Johns may be the most influential artist of the last 50 years, said Blake Gopnik in The Washington Post. 'œJohns has an artistic mind up there with only a few other geniuses in Western art.' His preoccupation with repeatable formulas, most famously his motifs of targets and American flags, later inspired conceptual artists. His fondness for playing with words—one target, for instance, has the words 'œred,' 'œyellow,' and 'œblue' rather than the colors—influenced such 1970s artists as Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. 'œEven the postmodern artists of the 1980s and '90s, who rejected much of classic modern art,' shared Johns' obsession with language and the body. Certain Johns works from the late 1960s, in which he used his hands and face to paint the canvas, seem years ahead of their time.