![]() ![]() “From the 1950s, Johns’ art has vibrated along the division lines of modern art’s hierarchy, embracing and challenging ideas of abstraction, representation, subject matter, and the relationship of art to the personal and universal,” said Crystal Bridges Director of Curatorial Affairs, Margi Conrads. Encaustic emphasizes each brushstroke and individualizes each star and stripe, activating the entire surface with rich texture. Johns then painted an image of the flag on top using encaustic, a medium of colored pigment mixed with hot wax. This painting contains a silk flag, collaged on canvas, as its base layer. Johns used the same basic composition for each flag, including 48 stars and 13 stripes, as the first flag was created before Hawaii and Alaska joined the United States. With a painterly style at odds with the crisp design of the actual object, he charges the viewer to look past the familiar, something, he explained, “the mind already knows,” to explore the paint itself as subject matter. The subject kindles personal and symbolic meaning, yet for Johns, painting the flag went beyond the representation of the United States’ most famous icon. Johns grew up in South Carolina and was named for an ancestor famous for rescuing a flag during the Revolutionary War. Thereafter, he created flag paintings, drawings, prints, mixed-media collages, and sculptures, including, nearly three decades later, the Crystal Bridges’ painting. This acquisition enhances our ability to tell the stories of shifting art movements in late 20 th-century American art.” In 1954, a dream of an American flag inspired Jasper Johns first rendition of the subject. “The flag is the most enduring of Johns’ subjects, appearing in more than 90 works throughout his career. Unimagined things in the world, including handprints and footprints, casts of parts of the body, or stamps made from objects found in his studio, such as the rim of a tin can.“We look forward to commemorating this iconic American work during Flag Day weekend,” said Crystal Bridges Executive Director Rod Bigelow. Throughout his career, Johns has included in most of his art certain marks and shapes that clearly display their derivation from factual, Still later, the "things the mind already knows" became details from famous works of art, such as the IsenheimĪltarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (1475-5528), which Johns began to trace onto his work in 1981. Identified in interviews as things he had seen for example, a pattern of flagstones he glimpsed on a wall while driving. In addition to popular icons, Johns chose images that he This painting remained in the artist's collection until it was acquired by the Metropolitan MuseumĪs Johns became well known and perhaps as he realized his audience could be relied upon to study his new work his subjects with a demonstrable prior existence expanded. He then joined the three panels and overpainted them with more beeswax mixed with pigments, adding touches of white oil. He dipped these into molten beeswax and adhered them to After applying a ground of unbleachedīeeswax, he built up the stars, the negative areas around them, and the stripes with applications of collage: cut or torn pieces of newsprint, other papers, and bits of fabric. Painted on three separately stretched panels of cotton: the star area, the seven upper stripes to the right of the stars, and the longer stripes below. The fast-setting medium of encaustic enabled theĪrtist to make each brushstroke distinct, while the forty-eight-star flag design contiguous with the perimeters of the canvas provided a structure for the richly varied surface, which ranges from translucent to opaque. The lush reticence of the work perfectly exemplifies his early style. White Flag is the largest of Johns's flag paintings and the first in which the flag is presented in monochrome. Stresses conscious control rather than spontaneity. ![]() This is partly because, while Johns' painting extended the allover compositional techniques of Abstract Expressionism, his use of these techniques The new style has usually been understood to be coollyĪntithetical to the expressionistic gestural abstraction of the previous generation. Johns' early mature work, of the mid- to late 1950s, invented a new style that helped to engender a number of subsequent art movements, among them Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual art. ![]()
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