Is there, or has there ever been, a modern American artist with a more peculiarly sacrosanct reputation than Jasper Johns? If so, none spring to mind. Johns' current retrospective of 225 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures at New York City's Museum of Modern Art has all the air of a cult event. This is not the fault of the curator, Kirk Varnedoe, who has done an exemplary job of hanging the show and, without resorting to the usual pseudo-philosophical guff that attends critical discussion of Johns, describing and analyzing his work in the catalog. Rather, it seems immovably built into the penumbra--glowing, and yet after all these years possessing the consistency of solid concrete--that surrounds the work.
We are so used by now to being told that Johns is an artist of the utmost profundity and difficulty that we assume, on peering into the well of his talent, that the fault for not recognizing masterpieces in it lies with ourselves. It's like the familiar Barnett Newman problem: having for so long been told that the famous "Zip" in Newman's canvases contains the unnameable name of God or the tragic condition of humankind, one must make an almost perverse effort of will to look past all the midrash and see a vertical stripe.
Varnedoe's show does an immense service to Johns by trying to see him whole, as a painter with a continuous 40-year oeuvre, rather than as a hinge figure between movements--Abstract Expressionism and Pop, Minimalism and process art, or whatever. Johns has been thrust rather too easily into this role by his great influence on other artists. The deadpan stripes of his Flag, 1954-55, become the pinstripes of Frank Stella's black paintings in 1959, and his deliberateness, making the picture up in advance instead of discovering it in the act of painting, lies behind much process art. As Bruce Nauman put it, "Johns was the first artist"--well, in New York in the 1950s, anyway--"to put some intellectual distance between himself and his physical activity of making paintings." His work has always spoken of planning, not spontaneity; of the recycled image (his own included), not the unwilled apparition.
And yet the picture that launched his career came to this then unknown, 24-year-old Southerner in a dream. One night in 1954, by his own account, Johns dreamed of painting a large American flag, and the next morning he got up and began to do so. He would play with the flag motif for several decades more, rendering the Stars and Stripes in wax encaustic paint on newspaper collage, in oil on canvas, in bronze, pencil and lithography. His fascination with it came, in part, from his very nuanced and ironic feelings about the function of art, particularly in America and especially after Abstract Expressionism.