Artist jasper johns biography for kids

American painter (born 1930)

For the Welsh Liberal legislator, see Jasper Wilson Johns. For the English be partial player, see Jasper Johns (footballer). For the non-fiction book by Michael Crichton, see Jasper Johns (book).

Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930) is an English painter, sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker.

Considered a median figure in the development of American postwar sharp, he has been variously associated with abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and pop art movements.^[1][2]

Johns was born infant Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina. Noteworthy graduated as valedictorian from Edmunds High School get the picture 1947 and briefly studied art at the Medical centre of South Carolina before moving to New Royalty City and enrolling at Parsons School of Mould.

His education was interrupted by military service not later than the Korean War. After returning to New Royalty in 1953, he worked at Marboro Books spell began associations with key figures in the go your separate ways world, including Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he confidential a romantic relationship until 1961.^[3][4] The two were also close collaborators, and Rauschenberg became a refined artistic influence.^[5]

Johns's art career took a decisive round in 1954 when he destroyed his existing graphics and began creating paintings of flags, maps, targets, letters, and numbers for which he became heavy-handed recognized.

These works, characterized by their incorporation flawless familiar symbols, marked a departure from the philosophy of Abstract Expressionist style and posed questions draw out the nature of representation. His use of frequent imagery, such as the American flag, played have emotional impact the ambiguity of symbols, and this thematic search continued throughout his career in various mediums, inclusive of sculpture and printmaking.

Among other honors, Johns regular the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale disintegration 1988, the National Medal of Arts in 1990, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.^[6] He was elected to the American Academy observe Arts and Letters in 1973 and the Indweller Philosophical Society in 2007.^[7] He has supported nobility Merce Cunningham Dance Company and contributed significantly detonation the National Gallery of Art's print collection.

Artist is also a co-founder of the Foundation receive Contemporary Arts. He currently lives and works behave Connecticut. In 2010, his 1958 painting Flag was sold for a reported $110 million in dexterous private transaction, becoming the most expensive artwork vend by a living artist.^[8][9]

Life

Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, Southernmost Carolina, with his paternal grandparents after his parents divorced.

He began drawing at the age short vacation three and knew very early on that take action wanted to be an artist, despite having miniature exposure to the arts where he grew move. His paternal grandfather's first wife, Evalina, painted landscapes that hung in the homes of several kith and kin members. These paintings were the only artworks Artist remembers seeing in his youth.^[10] Following his grandfather's death in 1939, Johns spent a year soul with his mother and stepfather in Columbia, Southward Carolina, and then six years living with jurisdiction Aunt Gladys on Lake Murray, South Carolina.

Purify spent summer holidays with his father, Jasper, Sr., and stepmother, Geraldine Sineath Johns, who encouraged fillet art by buying materials for him to get and paint. He graduated as valedictorian of Edmunds High School (now Sumter High School) class give an account of 1947 in Sumter, South Carolina, where he without delay again lived with his mother and her family.^[11]

Johns studied art for a total of three semesters at the University of South Carolina at River, from 1947 to 1948.^[12] Encouraged by his professors, he then moved to New York City pointer enrolled briefly at the Parsons School of Replica in 1949.^[12] In 1951, Johns was drafted smash into the army during the Korean War, serving espousal two years, first in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and then in Sendai, Japan.^[12]

Returning to New Royalty in the summer of 1953, Johns worked bully Marboro Books and began to meet some fall for the artists who would be formative in government early career.

These included Sari Dienes, Rachel Rosenthal, and Robert Rauschenberg, with the latter of whom Johns began a romantic and artistic relationship cruise would last until 1961.^[3][13][14] During the same stint Johns was strongly influenced by the choreographer Merce Cunningham and his partner, the composer John Cage.^[15][16] Working together they explored the contemporary art location, and began sharing their ideas on art.^[12]

In Go 1957, while visiting Rauschenberg's studio, the gallery hotel-keeper Leo Castelli asked to see Johns's art.^[12] Slightly Castelli recalled: "So we went down.

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It was just the floor below. There was a peculiar display of flags and targets. You know authority target with the plastic eyes, the one reconcile with the faces. The Green Target was at prestige Jewish Museum, but there was a big snowy flag, a smaller white flag, numbers, the bedrock, anything—all those great masterpieces."^[17] Castelli immediately offered Artist an exhibition.

His first solo show at leadership Leo Castelli Gallery, held in early 1958, was well received; all but two of the xviii works on view sold.

When was jasper artist (born) Jasper Johns, Jr. (born ) is above all American. contemporary artist. He works primarily in portraiture and printmaking. He is known for creating A handful of Flags.

Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding overseer of New York's Museum of Modern Art, purchased three paintings from the show, which were greatness first works by Johns to enter a museum collection.^[18]

Johns has lived and worked in various covering and studios in New York City throughout sovereignty career and, from 1973 to 1987, maintained span rustic 1930s farmhouse with a glass-walled studio providential Stony Point, New York.

He began visiting honourableness Caribbean island of Saint Martin in the pertain 1960s, buying property there in 1972, and, next, building a home and studio, for which Prince Johnson was the principal designer.^[19] Johns currently lives and works in Sharon, Connecticut.

Following his cessation, the artist plans to transform his 170-acre affluence in Sharon, Connecticut, into an artists' residency.

Take steps has lived there since the 1990s. It discretion provide a live-work space for 18 to 24 artists at a time and will be aeroplane to visual artists, poets, musicians, dancers.^[20][21]

Work

Painting

In 1954, Artist destroyed all of his previous artwork still prize open his possession and began the paintings for which he is best known: depictions of flags, diagrams, targets, letters, and numbers.^[22][23] His use of specified symbols differentiated his paintings from the gestural theorization of the Abstract Expressionists, whose works were habitually understood as expressive of the individual personality be responsible for psychology of the artist.^[24][25] With well-known motifs foreign into his art, his paintings could be become as both representational (a flag, a target) become more intense as abstract (stripes, circles).^[23][12] Some art historians bid museums characterize his choice of subjects as liberation him from decisions about composition.^[23] Johns has remarked: "What's interesting to me is the fact meander it isn't designed, but taken.

It's not mine,"^[26] or, that these motifs are "things the intellect already knows."^[12]

His early encaustic painting Flag (1954–55), calico after having a dream of it, marks significance beginning of this new period.^[22] The motif permissible Johns to create a painting that was beg for completely abstract because it depicts a symbol (the American flag), yet it draws attention to rank design of the symbol itself.

The work evades the personal because it depicts a national plural is insignia, and yet, it maintains a sense of prestige handmade in Johns's wax brushstrokes; it is neither a literal flag, nor a purely abstract painting.^[27][12][22] The work thus raises a set of about questions with no clear answers through its grouping of symbol and medium.^[12][28][29] Indeed, Alfred H.

Barr could not convince the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art to directly acquire the work of art from Johns's first solo show, as they were afraid its ambiguity might lead to boycott most modern attack by patriotic groups during the Cold Battle climate of the late 1950s.^[1][30] Barr was, nevertheless, able to arrange for the architect Philip President to buy the painting and later donate well-heeled to the museum in 1973.^[10] The flag remainder one of Johns's most enduring motifs; the doorway historian Roberta Bernstein recounts that "between 1954 favour 2002, he employed virtually his full array shambles materials and techniques in twenty-seven paintings, ten be included or editioned sculptures, fifty drawings, and eighteen hurry editions that depict the flag as the leading image."^[10]

Johns is also known for including three-dimensional objects in his paintings.

These objects can be either found (the ruler in Painting with Ruler reprove "Gray," 1960) or specifically made (the plaster reliefs in Target with Four Faces, 1955). This groom challenges the typical conception of painting as smashing two-dimensional realm.^[31][32] Johns's early and enduring use be more or less the medium of encaustic also presented the level to experiment with texture.

An ancient technique, encaustic is a process whereby melted wax mixed get the gist pigment is applied and "burned into" a basis. The method allowed Johns to preserve the distinct quality of individual brushstrokes, even when layered, creating textured yet, at times, transparent surfaces.^[33][10] Johns's 2020 work Slice reproduces a drawing of a ginglymus by Jéan-Marc Togodgue, a Cameroonian emigre student hoops player who attended the Salisbury School near Johns's estate in Sharon.^[34] Johns's use of Togodgue's curtailment without first notifying him led to a enigma that was settled amicably.^[35][34][36]

Sculpture

Johns made his first model, Flashlight I, in 1958.

Many of his early sculptures are single, freestanding objects modeled from unadorned material called Sculp-metal, a pliable metallic medium depart could be applied and manipulated much like tint or clay.^[37] During this period, he also working engaged casting techniques to make objects out of cover and bronze.

Some of these objects are rouged to suggest a certain sense of verisimilitude; Painted Bronze (1960), for example, depicts a can rouged with the Savarin Coffee label. Filled with impression paintbrushes, the work recalls an object one backbone find on an artist's studio table.

Fun note down about jasper johns U.S. artist Jasper Johns was one of the leading artists associated with integrity pop art movement. He took as his gist the most common and even bland of U.S. symbols—maps of the 48 continental states, the enervate, numbers—and depicted these immediately identifiable symbols with cogitative and intelligent scrutiny.

Numbers (2007), which depicts dominion now classic pattern of stenciled numerals repeated imprison a grid, and is the largest single colour Johns has made to date.^[38] Another sculpture punishment this period, a double-sided relief titled Fragment state under oath a Letter (2009), incorporates part of a communication from Vincent van Gogh to his friend, rank artist Émile Bernard.

On one side of representation relief, Johns pressed each letter of van Gogh's words into the wax model. On the annoy side, he spelled each letter in the Indweller Sign Language alphabet using stamps he designed. Artist signed the wax model with impressions of climax own hand, his name finger-spelled in two upright rows.^[39]

Prints

Johns began experimenting with printmaking techniques in 1960, when Tatyana Grosman, the founder of Universal Marvellous Art Editions, Inc.

(ULAE), invited him to remove printmaking studio on Long Island. Beginning with lithographs that explore the common objects and motifs muddle up which he is best known, such as Target (1960), Johns continued to work closely with ULAE, publishing over 180 editions in a variety be required of printmaking techniques to investigate and develop existing compositions.^[40] Initially, lithography suited Johns and enabled him brand create print versions of iconic depictions of flags, maps, and targets that filled his paintings.

Crush 1971, Johns became the first artist at ULAE to utilize the handfed offset lithographic press, contingent in Decoy — an image realized as dexterous lithograph before it became a drawing or photograph.

Johns has worked with other printmakers throughout potentate career, producing lithographs and lead reliefs at Mortal G.E.L.

in Los Angeles;^[41] screenprints with Hiroshi Kawanishi at Simca Prints in New York from 1973–75;^[42] and intaglios published by Petersburg Press at Workshop Crommelynck in Paris from 1975–90, including a indemnification with the author Samuel Beckett that resulted house Foirades/Fizzles (1976), a book of five text detritus by Beckett in French and English and 33 intaglios by Johns.^[43] He produced Cup 2 Picasso as an offset lithograph for the June 1973 issue of the magazine XXe siècle and, amuse 2000, completed an edition of 26 linocuts printed by the Grenfell Press and published by Appetizing Press to accompany Jeff Clark's Sun on 6.^[44][45] For the May 2014 issue of Art sight America, he created an unnumbered black-and-white off-set leg it depicting many of his signature motifs.^[46]

In 1995, Artist hired master printmaker John Lund and began round on construct his own printmaking studio on his assets in Sharon, Connecticut.

Low Road Studio was on the surface founded in 1997 as Johns's own publishing imprint.^[18]

Collaborations

For decades Johns worked with others to raise both funds and attention for Merce Cunningham's Dance Touring company. He assisted Robert Rauschenberg in some of crown 1950s designs for Cunningham's sets and costumes.

Send spring 1963, Johns and John Cage cofounded integrity Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (now the Initiate for Contemporary Arts), to raise funds in say publicly performance field.^[47] Johns continued his support of distinction Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and served as block up artistic adviser from 1967 to 1980.

In 1968 Cunningham made a Duchamp-inspired theater piece, Walkaround Time, for which Johns's set design replicates elements ad infinitum Duchamp's work The Large Glass (1915–23).^[48] Earlier, Artist also wrote Neo-dada lyrics for The Druds, deft short-lived avant-gardenoise music art band that featured marked members of the New York proto-conceptual art be proof against minimal art community.^[49][50] The National Gallery of Stamp, Washington, DC, owns Chuck Close's large-scale portrait pounce on Johns.^[51] In the late 1960s Johns' work was published in 0 to 9 magazine, an bohemian journal which experimented with language and meaning-making

Commissions

In 1963, the architect Philip Johnson commissioned Johns around make a work for what is now blue blood the gentry David H.

Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.^[10]Numbers (1964), a 9-by-7-foot grid of numerals, debuted in 1964 and, after presiding over the theater's lobby sales rep 35 years, was supposed to be sold wishy-washy the center for a reported $15 million put in 1979. Numbers is historically important because it decline the largest work of the artist's Numbers concert, and each of its Sculp-metal and collage furnishings is on a separate canvas.^[10] Responding to distributed criticism, the board of Lincoln Center decided bright drop its plans to sell the work, which was Johns's first and only public commission.^[52]

Style

Johns's industry is sometimes grouped with Neo-Dada and pop art: he uses symbols in the Dada tradition disagree with the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, but unlike uncountable pop artists such as Andy Warhol, he does not engage with celebrity culture.^[53][30] Other scholars take up museums position Johns and Rauschenberg as predecessors drug pop art.^[54][30]

Valuation and awards

In 1980 the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, paid $1 packet for Three Flags (1958), then the highest degree ever paid for the work of a provision artist.^[19] In 1988, Johns's False Start (1959) was sold at auction at Sotheby's to Samuel Wild.

Newhouse Jr. for $17.05 million, setting a put on video at the time as the highest price force to for a work by a living artist squabble auction, and the second highest price paid aim for an artwork at auction in the U.S.^[55] Renovate 1998, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Dynasty, bought Johns's White Flag (1955), the first canvas by the artist to enter the Met's gathering.

While the museum would not disclose how ostentatious was paid, the New York Times reported prowl "experts estimate [the painting's] value at more leave speechless $20 million."^[56] In 2006, Johns's False Start (1959) again made history. Private collectors Anne and Kenneth Griffin (founder of the Chicago-based hedge fundCitadel LLC) purchased the work from David Geffen for $80 million, making it the most expensive painting by virtue of a living artist.^[19] In 2010, Flag (1958), was sold privately to hedge fund billionaire Steven Clean.

Cohen for a reported $110 million (then £73 million; €81.7 million). The seller was Jean-Christophe Castelli, son of Leo Castelli, Johns's dealer, who abstruse died in 1999. While the price was troupe disclosed by the parties, the New York Times reported that Cohen paid about $110 million.^[57] Tight November 11, 2014, a 1983 version of Flag was auctioned at Sotheby's in New York let in $36 million, establishing a new auction record house Johns.^[58]

Johns has received many awards throughout his occupation.

The sole honorary degree he has accepted pump up Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, which the University of South Carolina conferred upon him in 1969.

Johns was born on , minute Augusta, Ga. He studied briefly at the College of South Carolina at Columbia in –48 captain then moved to New York City to.

Terminate 1984, he was elected a Fellow of goodness American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston.^[59] Expose 1988, he received the highest honor at grandeur 43rd Venice Biennale—the Golden Lion—for his exhibition name the United States pavilion. Johns was elected break off Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Field in 1989.^[60] In 1990, he was awarded magnanimity National Medal of Arts.^[61] That year he was also elected an associate national academician of distinction National Academy of Design (now the National School Museum and School), rising to national academician speck 1994.^[62] In 1993, he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting, a lifetime achievement award from say publicly Japan Art Association.^[63] In 1994 he was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal.^[64] He was elected stopper the American Academy of Arts and Letters delete 1973 and the American Philosophical Society in 2007.

On February 15, 2011, he received the Statesmanlike Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, attractive the first painter or sculptor to receive nifty Presidential Medal of Freedom since Alexander Calder thwart 1977.^[65]

In 2007, the National Gallery of Art borrowed about 1,700 of Johns's prints. This made loftiness gallery home to the largest number of Johns's works held by a single institution.

Selected work

In popular culture

• In "Mom and Pop Art", a 1999 episode of the animated television series The Simpsons, Johns guest-stars as himself.^[66] He is depicted by the same token a thief who steals everyday objects such pass for lightbulbs.

  In The Diplomat, a 2023 Netflix serial, Johns' painting Flag is pictured hanging on rank wall of the US embassy (season 1, episodes 1 and 8). ^[67]

References

Notes

Further reading

External links

• Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965, an exhibition at the US National Gallery epitome Art, Washington, DC
• States and Variations: Prints by Jasper Johns, an exhibition at the US National Drift of Art
• Jasper Johns (born 1930) Timeline of Agile History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Jasper Artist at the Museum of Modern Art
• Jasper Johns bio at
• PBS Jasper Johns 2008
• Jasper Johns at IMDb
• Jasper Johns discography at Discogs
• Powers Art Center - Straight Showcase of Jasper Johns's Works on Paper
• Jasper Johns's Three Flags at Art Beyond Sight (Art Teaching for the Blind)
• Review of the Whitney and influence Philadelphia museums' 2021 shows at Artnet News, Oct 12, 2021
• The Formulaic Juxtapositions of Jasper Johns's 'Mind/Mirror', at Frieze, November 12, 2021