Jasper Johns – review of Regrets show at Courtauld

What you need to know

A new exhibition of work by American painter Jasper Johns, Regrets, has opened at the Courtauld Gallery, London. Johns, now 84, is best known for his 1954 painting Flag and for his neo-Dadaist works inspired by images from popular culture.

This show was inspired by a 1964 photograph of Johns's friend Lucian Freud posing in Francis Bacon's London studio. Johns takes the photo as a starting point for a series of images meditating on memory, mortality, and the deaths of Freud and fellow painters Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. Runs until 14 December.

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What the critics like

Jasper Johns is one of the world's most important living painters, which makes his playful new pictures "a major art world event", says Ben Luke in the Evening Standard. What makes this small show so rewarding is a sense of joining a modern master on a profound visual journey.

In this small but "emotionally fathomless" exhibition, through a labyrinth of lines and shadows a skull emerges, says Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. There is sadness here but also black humour – Johns is laughing at death's door.

These powerful images ask more critical questions than they answer, says Rachel Spence in the Financial Times. But "Johns' flair for yoking together form, material and colour into such sensuous visual puzzles ensures that to tussle with them is unalloyed pleasure".

What they don't like

Some will hail Johns's musing on his own mortality, a final flowering of his genius in old age, says Alastair Smart in the Daily Telegraph. But the artist's little visual jokes undercut the emotion, so, "where one might have been moved, one ends up simply seeing skull after repetitive skull – in typical, deadpan Johns fashion".