Jasper Johns Still Doesnt Want to Explain His Art
Jasper Johns Still Doesn’t
Want to Explain His Art
Mr. Johns, who is now 87 and widely regarded as
America’s foremost living artist, has a new retrospective
at the Broad called “Something Resembling Truth.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/arts/design/jasper-johns-retrospective-broad-museum.html
LOS ANGELES — Not long ago, Jasper Johns, who is now 87 and widely regarded as America’s foremost living artist, was reminiscing about his childhood in small-town South Carolina. One day when he was in the second grade, a classmate named Lottie Lou Oswald misbehaved and was summoned to the front of the room. As the teacher reached for a wooden ruler and prepared to paddle her, Lottie Lou grabbed the ruler from the teacher’s hand and broke it in half. Her classmates were stunned.
“It was absolutely wonderful,” Mr. Johns told me, appearing to relish the memory of the girl’s defiance. A ruler, an instrument of the measured life, had become an accessory to rebellion.
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Mr. Johns himself is loath to offer biographical interpretations of his work — or any interpretations, for that matter. He is famously elusive and his humor tends toward the sardonic. He once joked that, of the dozens of books that have been written about his art, his favorite one was written in Japanese. What he liked is that he could not understand it.
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The Broad show, which remains on view through May 13 and covers six decades, offers a relatively intimate glimpse at his work. In a welcome departure from curatorial convention, the exhibition is organized thematically rather than chronologically. You come to see how the American flags and targets that remain Mr. Johns’s most acclaimed motifs are no more persistent than other motifs and themes, including forks and spoons, unsettling images of the human body broken into fragments and the drama of a muted self unable to express its needs.
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The idea for the current show originated with Roberta Bernstein, an art historian whose scholarship on Mr. Johns assumed magisterial proportions last year, with the publication of a five-volume catalogue raisonné of his paintings and sculptures. She was joined in assembling the Broad show by Joanne Heyler, the museum’s founding director; and Ed Schad, a curator and critic. The threesome visited Mr. Johns at his home last November, after sending him an elaborate Gatorfoam-board model of their installation. They wanted to ensure that he was happy or at least not miserable about the show’s accents and emphases, which include the flashy and rather L.A. idea of opening with as many flag paintings as they could gather.
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Interesting article, he says his favorite book about his art is one from Japan "because he can't read it".
= new reply since forum marked as read
