How Jasper Johns abandoned emotional expression to paint the world’s most recognizable symbols.
In short: In the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns made a radical choice: he destroyed his existing work to escape the shadow of Abstract Expressionism. By turning to flags, targets, and numbers, he traded spontaneous psychic improvisation for familiar, literal imagery, forever changing the trajectory of American art and challenging the nature of representation.
Jasper Johns, born in 1930, emerged as a pivotal figure in American art during a period when Abstract Expressionism dominated the New York scene. While painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning emphasized personal emotional expression and the intuitive application of paint, Johns sought a different path. In 1954, he took the decisive step of destroying his earlier work to begin anew, focusing on commonplace, two-dimensional subjects such as the American flag, targets, maps, and the alphabet.
This shift was not merely a change in subject matter but a fundamental critique of the prevailing artistic climate. By utilizing recognizable symbols, Johns reintroduced subject matter into his paintings, allowing him to explore painterly concerns without relying on the emotive, gestural styles of his predecessors. His technique often involved encaustic—pigment mixed with hot wax—which acted as a quick-drying medium that recorded the physical drag of the brush in sculptural terms. This allowed him to maintain a dialogue with abstraction while grounding his work in literal, repeatable schemas.
Johns’s work is often associated with Neo-Dada and Pop art, though he differs from many Pop artists by avoiding engagement with celebrity culture. Instead, he explored the ambiguity of symbols and the tension between representational imagery and abstract geometry. Later, in the 1970s, he introduced crosshatched marks into his work, a pattern he described as having an obsessive quality and a potential lack of meaning. Through these evolving methods, Johns forged a new model of abstraction that was ordered and repeatable, effectively distancing himself from the highly charged, unstudied expressiveness that defined the 1950s.
His influence remains profound, marked by significant honors including the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2010, his 1958 painting Flag reportedly sold for $110 million, highlighting his enduring status as a central figure in postwar art. By choosing to paint what was already known, Johns forced viewers to reconsider the nature of the image itself, moving art away from the internal psyche and toward the external, shared world of signs.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Jasper Johns | Biography, Art, Paintings, Flag, Target, Exhibition, & Facts | Britannica
- Also: Jasper Johns
- Also: Target
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