In American art, he bridges so many significant moments: After he arrived in New York in 1953 from South Carolina following his discharge from the Army, his work with signs, symbols, and everyday objects reinvigorated Dadaism and presaged pop and conceptual art all at once he was key in a cohort that would leave Abstract Expressionism, by then creaking under the weight of its own self-importance, in the dust. Johns, who never trained as an artist, had an intuitive sense of what made art, art: a way to make the comfortable strange, often with the deftest of nudges. Instead, they’re bleak, obsessive, furtive-seeming a cool critique of the oppressions of the everyday, structures built to contain the uncontainable. His works might have a veneer of the playful - big textbook maps of America smeared with bright swatches of paint, handmade number grids from zero to nine in an array of colors and materials - but they’re not. You’ll know Johns best for his canny and serial use of familiar emblems and symbols: “things the mind already knows,” he once said, a hook slyly set with easy-to-swallow bait. Nose to nose with this constellation of works, it then offers you a choice, though it’s really no choice at all: Left or right, both ways lead to darkness. It’s a broad and restless confrontation of the work of one of the country’s best-known artists - flags and targets, crosshatches and maps, bright color and dun-gray - and among its most inscrutable. NEW YORK - The fifth floor elevators at the Whitney Museum of American Art whisk open to a kaleidoscope of Jasper Johns. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Illinois Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics, Rockford, Ill. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. The Museum of Modern Art, New York gift of Mr. Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects. Jasper Johns's "Target with Four Faces," from 1955.
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