If you are lucky enough to have the President’s Day holiday off work and you manage to wake up before 5 p.m., it may be a good chance to go down to the National Mall and look at some art. The National Gallery of Art’s new exhibit, Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955-1965, takes a focused look at four themes in the artist’s work during an important decade in American art. Johns is one of the giants of American painting, and the chance to look at this selection of paintings and sketches is welcome. Up close, one can see the process, the imprint of the painter, the thick and beautiful application of paint, and even read the yellowed strips of newspaper used in his encaustic-coated collage technique (“Chester Weddings of Interest” reads one headline visible in the 1961 Target). The luscious surfaces, the joy and comic touch make up for, it must be admitted, the general inscrutability of the sphinxian Johns.
The first theme in the exhibit is the target, most familiar in an iconic Johns work, Target with Four Faces, from 1955, owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is shown near its much less familiar twin from the same year, Target with Plaster Casts, now in the collection of record and movie producer David Geffen. In both cases a hinged panel opens at the top of the work to reveal casts of human body parts. In the version with four faces, these are casts of the artist’s lower face, seeming to indicate that the rest of his body could be behind the target. While the four faces are in a nondescript brown, the various casts Johns made of his own body (foot, nipple, ear, penis, etc.) for the other version are brightly colored. The first level of the exhibit is filled with various versions of the target motif, worked out in sketches and other paintings. Johns makes clear that the motif had lost all meaning and became a gimmick, in his Do It Yourself (Target), from 1960, a little kit to make your very own target painting, helpfully signed J. Johns and __________.
The second theme, which begins with works on the first floor, is the naming of colors, in which the words for colors, especially RED, YELLOW, and BLUE, are applied by stencil. This strikes me as a smart-ass reference to the paint by numbers technique, except that often the actual colors Johns applies do not match their corresponding words, as in the most famous canvas in this group, False Start, from 1959. This is not always without cynical reference to abstract expressionism and the so-called color field painters. Out the Window, from 1959, if the colors matched the stencils, could look something like a Mark Rothko.
All images © Jasper Johns, courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
