Exhibition of the week Jasper Johns: “Something Resembling Truth”
Royal Academy, London W1 (020-7300 8090, www.royalacademy.org.uk). Until 10 December
Jasper Johns is a “living monument from a golden age of American art”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Born to a working-class Georgia family in 1930, he arrived in New York at a time when abstract expressionism dominated the scene, and representational painting seemed irredeemably unfashionable. Yet in a few years, he had “altered the course of Western art history”. In 1954, prompted by a dream, Johns created the first of many paintings of the US flag. This “enigmatic” work effectively ended abstraction’s dominance. It reintroduced “reality into fine art”. Archery targets, maps, forks and spoons would follow – “things the mind already knows”, as he put it. And he changed the way we look at pictures.
The new Johns retrospective at the Royal Academy, the first in Britain for 40 years, does justice to his vision, said Sooke. It brings together some 150 paintings, sculptures and drawings produced over Johns’ career, giving us a rare chance to “marvel” at his “heroic” early output, and to familiarise ourselves with his later work. Johns’ fame “rests principally on the work he produced in the 1950s, when he presciently prefigured pop art”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Years before Andy Warhol’s soup cans and Brillo boxes, he was already including “perfectly observed” cans of beer and light bulbs in his art. However, his approach – “so complex, unhurried, pale of tone, light of touch, thoughtful, poetic, gently philosophical” – was very different to Warhol’s. Johns’ early work is certainly “electrifying”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Best of all is his 1967 flag, “a vision of glory in blood red, deep blue and the white of whipped waves”, its paint as “heavily worked” as a Rembrandt. Later, though, he began churning out lacklustre art that often verged on “kitsch”, as exemplified here by a series of “almost classically boring” paintings based on the work of Munch. There can be little doubt that his career underwent “one of the sharpest nosedives in art”.
Nevertheless, even the “weakest” recent stuff “cannot diminish the transcendent power of what comes before”, said Ben Luke in the London Evening Standard. Johns was always best when depicting the most “banal” of objects, and making us look at them afresh. Fortunately, there are dozens of these “astonishing” works here, all of which conduct an “underlying philosophical enquiry into making, looking and thinking”. For all its faults, this is an “unmissable” show containing some of the most “brilliant” art of the 20th century.