ART & ARTISTS

Saturday, 19 March 2011

Jasper Johns

One of the ‘founding fathers’ of pop art, Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1930. In 1947- 48 he studied art at the University of South Carolina, but soon moved to New York where he did an apprenticeship as a commercial artist. In 1951-52 he had to serve his time in the army. Back in New York he earned a living doing odd jobs.

In 1954 Johns met the artist Robert Rauschenberg when together they decorated the shop window of Tiffany’s. They became lovers, and Rauschenberg soon had great influence on Johns’ own work. In the 1950s he makes the first ‘Flag’, ‘Target’, and ‘Number’ artworks. In 1958 his first one-man show was held at the Leo Castelli gallery in New York.

Works from those days are dominated by the motif of the American flag and the target, but also numbers and letters, the images that Johns is most famous for. Like Rauschenberg, Johns picks the issue of the ambiguity of symbols in a consumer society as the central motif of his work - symbols that are deprived of their symbolic function by their daily reproduction by mass media. Johns soon began to use the ancient technique of encaustic, which he applied to his newspaper collages.

He is best known for his painting Flag (1954-55) which he painted after having a dream about the American flag. His work is often described as a Neo-Dadaist, as opposed to Pop Art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture. Still, most compilations on Pop Art include Jasper Johns because of his artistic use of classical iconography.

1954-55 Flag

Detail of Flag 1954-55 showing use of encaustic (the use of hot wax), oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood (three panels). Now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In the late 1950s he also worked on sculptures, casting and painting everyday banal objects like beer cans or light bulbs. In the 1960s he made assemblages, integrating real objects or casts of body parts into his panels. His range of elements expanded over the following year, his works become more and more complex and, full of details alluding to private events or art history.

In 1988 he was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. In 1989 he was appointed honorary member of the Royal Academy in London. The Museum of Modern Art in New York held a large retrospective in 1996.

Footnote: In 1999, Jasper Johns guest-starred in the animated television series The Simpsons, as himself. In the episode “Mom and Pop Art”, Homer Simpson is hailed as an “outsider artist” after an art dealer discovers Homer's mangled brick barbecue grill, and Johns attends one of his exhibitions. Johns is portrayed as a kleptomaniac, constantly stealing food items, lightbulbs, a motorboat, and Marge’s painting of the flooded town.

1955 Target with Four Faces

Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg both incorporated images taken from popular culture into a fine art context, and English pop artist Peter Blake has acknowledged their example. This work refers to Johns's work in particular. Whereas Johns had taken a familiar object - a target - and executed this motif on the canvas in a painterly style, Blake took this further by using a real archery target purchased from a sports shop. The work of art is consequently less like a painting and is even closer to the real world. Blake thus questions: is this 'The First Real Target'?

Peter Blake: The First Real Target? 1961

1956 Grey Alphabets

1958 Three Flags

1959 False Start

1960 Painting with Two Balls

1960 Painted bronze (Ballantine Ale)

1960 Painted bronze (Savarin Coffee)

1967-69 Untitled

1977-81 Savarin

1978 Savarin

1982 Savarin

1961 0 - 9

1961 Map

1961 Target

1962 Fools House

1963 0-9: Plate 8

1964 Souvenir

1964 Watchman

1967 Corpse and Mirror

1967 Flag

1967 Watchman

1967-69 Title Page

1967-69 Untitled

1969 Figure 7

1968 Figure 9

1969 Figure 9

1970-71 Sketch for Cups 2 Picasso / Cups 4 Picasso

1970-72 Two Flags (black)

1971 Decoy

1972 Evian

1972 Four Panels from Untitled

1972 Zone

Scent 1973-4

1977 Untitled

1978 Land's End

1979 Cicada

Dancers on a Plane 1979

1980 Untitled

1980 Usuyuki

1980-81 Dancers on a Plane

1981 Cicada

1982 Between the Clock and the Bed

1982 In the Studio

1984 Racing Thoughts

1984 Untitled

1986 Ventriloquist

1987 The Seasons (Spring)

1987 The Seasons (Summer)

1987 The Seasons (Fall)

1987 The Seasons (Winter)

1989 The Seasons

Green Angel 1990

1991 Untitled

1992 Untitled

1994 After Holbein

1994 Untitled

2004 Pyre

2005 Bushbaby

2007 Within

2008 0-9 aluminium

2011 Shrink Dink 3

2011 Shrink Dink 4

2012 Untitled

2014 Regrets

Tuesday, 15 March 2011

Mark Rothko

I featured Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) in a previous blog post back in July 2010. However, I thought I’d revisit and extend it a bit in the context of the current posts on mid-century painters.

Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Russia (now Latvia). In 1913 he left Russia and settled with the rest of his family in Portland, Oregon. Rothko attended Yale University, New Haven, on a scholarship from 1921 to 1923. That year he left Yale without receiving a degree and moved to New York. In 1925 he studied under Max Weber at the Art Students League. He participated in his first group exhibition at the Opportunity Galleries, New York, in 1928. During the early 1930s Rothko became a close friend of Milton Avery and Adolph Gottlieb. His first solo show took place at the Portland Art Museum in 1933.

Rothko’s first solo exhibition in New York was held at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in 1933. In 1935 he was a founding member of the Ten, a group of artists sympathetic to abstraction and Expressionism. He executed easel paintings for the WPA Federal Art Project from 1936 to 1937. By 1936 Rothko knew Barnett Newman. In the early 1940s he worked closely with Gottlieb, developing a painting style with mythological content, simple flat shapes, and imagery inspired by primitive art. By mid-decade his work incorporated Surrealist techniques and images. Peggy Guggenheim gave Rothko a solo show at Art of This Century in New York in 1945.

In 1947 and 1949 Rothko taught at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, where Clyfford Still was a fellow instructor. With William Baziotes, David Hare, and Robert Motherwell, Rothko founded the short-lived Subjects of the Artist school in New York in 1948. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the emergence of Rothko’s mature style, in which frontal, luminous rectangles seem to hover on the canvas surface. In 1958 the artist began his first commission, monumental paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gave Rothko an important solo exhibition in 1961. He completed murals for Harvard University in 1962 and in 1964 accepted a mural commission for an interdenominational chapel in Houston. Rothko took his own life on February 25, 1970, in his New York studio. A year later the Rothko Chapel in Houston was dedicated.