Sensuous insights into our existence
Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth Royal Academy of Arts
Although it isn’t among the three paintings that open this exhibition, you glimpse it immediately through a doorway, glittering under the lights, like an angel appearing in our drab, sublunary world. Flag (1958), by the American artist Jasper Johns, is the foundation stone of his new retrospective at the Royal Academy, his first in Britain for 40 years. It also belongs to a series of works that altered the course of Western art history.
If you were a young artist in New York during the Fifties, there was only one way you could hope to be taken seriously: you had to make abstract pictures, following the post-war triumph of the Abstract Expressionists. Yet Johns, an unknown, moon-faced boy with a poetic sensibility from the Deep South, changed all that, when, in 1954, prompted by a dream, he painted his first picture of the American flag.
At the RA, several later paintings of his Stars and Stripes series are on show, including the example from 1958, an auspicious year for Johns, when his debut at Leo Castelli Gallery all but sold out, and three pictures were snapped up by the Museum of Modern Art.
Why is Flag so special? Well, for one thing, the canvas replicates, precisely, the dimensions and appearance of an actual flag. In a clever sleight-of-hand, we are momentarily wrong-footed into thinking that we are looking at a real object pinned to the wall, rather than a painting. Truth versus illusion: here is a quintessential Johns paradox.
The Flags endure for another reason, too, because they take a pristine icon of America and invest it, provocatively but tenderly, with emotional significance. Painted using an ancient, fast-drying technique called encaustic, which mixes pigments with hot wax, they offer a vision of a nation that is tattered, patched together, but still glowing, human, and whole. The drips of hardened wax are frozen tears. Whether of suffering or joy is for you to decide.
Johns had discovered a clever way of reintroducing reality into the realm of fine art. Irradiating self-belief, these works announced, in clarion terms, that the dominance of abstraction was over, kaput, defunct.
And, as the RA’S show reveals, flags weren’t the only everyday objects – “things the mind already knows,” as he once famously put it – that he painted and sculpted. He also depicted archery targets – great vortices of concentric colours, seemingly spinning to hypnotic effect – and Arabic numerals.
In time, other ordinary things also established themselves in Johns’s pictorial vocabulary: forks and spoons, light bulbs and brooms, rulers, torches, coat hangers, cans of beer. He paved the way for Pop Art. In short, Johns, now 87, is a living monument from a golden age of American art. It’s hard to overstate his significance and influence.
This retrospective of around
150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, produced over more than 60 years, is, de facto, a spectacular event. In a game move, the curators structure the show thematically – focusing, for instance, on his preoccupation with transience, or pictures set inside the artist’s studio. This decision has strengths and weaknesses. On one hand, it prompts us to consider the remarkable unity of Johns’s output: he often returns to symbols and motifs. On the other, it makes it tricky to get a proper handle on the distinct phases of this most elusive and inscrutable artist’s career.
Johns has a reputation as a sphinx: he rarely grants interviews, and is not in Britain for the opening of this show. His paintings are sometimes bewilderingly cryptic, cerebral affairs. Don’t come to the RA expecting Johns’s riddles to be solved. Moreover, while it is fascinating to spend time scrutinising the late work of a master, I left feeling ambivalent about some of it, which lacks the charismatic gestural authority of Johns’s earlier work. They also suggest that, while Johns started out by depicting familiar things, in time, his motifs began to baffle.
That said, this is a phenomenally fertile and complex exhibition, full of innovation and experimentation – and, to my surprise, wit. In Painting with Two Balls (1960), which explodes with firecracker-bright colours, a couple of small spheres prise open a join between two of the picture’s three canvases, like cartoon goggleeyes peeping through from the other side. They are ridiculous, and funny. And, in 1960, when Johns heard that the artist Willem de Kooning was grouching that Leo Castelli, the dealer, was a “son of a bitch” who could sell any old tat, even a couple of beer cans, he promptly created a painted bronze sculpture of two Ballantine XXX Ale cans, which are at the RA.
With Johns, it’s important to remember that this elegant irony is an essential element in his artistic identity – offsetting the portentousness of the Abstract Expressionists who preceded him. Ultimately, though, Johns is not a great artist because he is a purveyor of amusing pictorial puzzles and puns – the equivalent, you could argue, of the metaphysical poetry of John Donne. Rather, he is great because he accesses and articulates, in a gorgeous, sensual manner, mysteries that, for the rest of us, are unfathomable. Like a priest, he seems to be in possession of great spiritual insight into fundamental aspects of our existence. Skin (1975), for instance, is a haunting meditation on mortality, as delicate as a shroud, yet imbued with the authority of the art of ancient Egypt (surely a touchstone for Johns).
As an artist, Johns is always looking inwards. His paintings are characterised by timelessness and stasis. Sometimes, like stop signs on a road, they even seem to resist the viewer, blocking our line of sight, and challenging our preconception that a picture must offer a window on to a world. All this, I suppose, may sound ineffable and mysterious, and possibly even off-putting to those who prefer prose to slippery poetry.
Certainly, it’s tricky to write about without sounding pretentious. Which is why Johns, who loves poetry, and often plays with language, is not a writer, but a visual artist capable of glimpsing, in his own words, “something resembling truth”. We may employ a different phrase, and say that he taps, rapturously, into something divine.
From Sat until Dec 10. Tickets: 020 7300 8090; royalacademy.org.uk
‘This retrospective of around 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, is, de facto, a spectacular event’