Edmunds High School, Sumter, South Carolina, United States
In his early years, Jasper studied at Edmunds High School.
College/University
Gallery of Jasper Johns
66 5th Ave, New York, NY 10011, United States
In 1949-1951, Jasper studied at Parsons School of Design.
Gallery of Jasper Johns
University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, United States
In 1947-1948, Jasper studied at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
Career
Gallery of Jasper Johns
1958
Jasper Johns in his studio. Photo by Peter Stackpole.
Gallery of Jasper Johns
1982
145 W Broadway, New York, NY 10013, United States
Leo Castelli and gallery artists at the Odeon restaurant, in New York City, for the 25th anniversary of the Castelli Gallery, including Jasper Johns (eighth from left), Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Serra, among others. Photograph by Hans Namuth.
Gallery of Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Gallery of Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Achievements
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1984
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
National Academy of Design
1990
15 Gramercy Park S, New York, NY 10003, United States
National Academy of Design
Awards
Presidential Medal of Freedom
2011
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
The then United States President Barack Obama presents artist Jasper Johns with the Medal of Freedom.
Leo Castelli and gallery artists at the Odeon restaurant, in New York City, for the 25th anniversary of the Castelli Gallery, including Jasper Johns (eighth from left), Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Serra, among others. Photograph by Hans Namuth.
(An unprecedented collection, this volume explores Jasper ...)
An unprecedented collection, this volume explores Jasper Johns's art and thought, from all periods of his career, through interviews, published writings, working notes he kept in his sketchbooks and recorded conversations with critics and friends.
Jasper Johns is an American painter and sculptor, who helped to break the hold of abstract expressionism on modern American art and cleared the way for pop art. Versatile in several different artistic fields, he has given the world sculptures, lithographs and prints, as well as paintings.
Background
Jasper Johns was born on May 15, 1930, in Augusta, Georgia, United States. He is the son of Jasper Johns and Jean (Riley) Johns. The painter was a year old, when his mother left his alcoholic father. Jasper was raised by his paternal grandparents, when his parents divorced. He was nine years old, when he lost his grandfather, and thereafter, he was shuttled back and forth between his mother and various relatives on his father's side.
Education
Initially, Jasper was educated at Edmunds High School in Sumter, South Carolina, United States. Later, he attended the University of South Carolina, beginning from 1947 to 1948. After his studies at the University of South Carolina, Johns enrolled in Parsons School of Design in 1949, graduating in 1951.
Jasper Johns worked first as a messenger, then as a shipping clerk. Johns also served as a clerk in the Marlboro Bookstore.
For the first time in his life, Johns was supporting himself with his art. This change from part-time painting and part-time clerking represented a profound change in the way he viewed his own profession and his own future. One of the first things he did was to rip up and destroy every piece of his early work. Fortunately, four paintings survived this action to give art-lovers an idea of his early creative years.
Jasper began to develop a definite discipline and a method all his own. Intensely interested in experimentation, he learned to work with "encaustic", a method, which combines pigments and hot wax before they are applied to the surface of a painting. Plaster casts of different types also began to appear on various paintings. The works, most commonly associated with this period, were his paintings of flags and of targets. The subjects he chose were oftentimes objects, which are often seen, but are usually too commonplace to be closely noticed. Then, he proceeded to give them individuality by adding encaustic textures and other elements, which both enhanced and lessened their familiarity at the same time.
In 1955, Johns' painting, "Green Target", was exhibited in the Jewish Museum as a part of the Artists of the New York School: Second Generation show. But this was not the only place Johns' paintings were to be seen. Along with other artists, supplying pictures and drawings for Bonwit Teller's displays, he was invited to show two of his flag paintings in their windows. Johns had the first of many one-man shows in 1958. Paintings of flags, numbers and targets abounded, and all were sold, three of them to New York's Museum of Modern Art.
In 1959, Johns met the artist Marcel Duchamp for the first time. Duchamp, forty seven years Johns' senior, had long been one of the art world's most influential figures. He was a proponent of the school, known as Dada, which, before dying out in 1923, had sought to destroy preconceived notions of what was or was not artistically acceptable. Duchamp himself had contributed to the movement, largely by depicting what he called "ready-mades" (utilitarian articles, such as snow shovels and bottle racks), signing the resulting pictures and presenting the result as objects of art, rather than objects, made for everyday use. This was an idea, that Johns embraced and modified.
Like Duchamp, Jasper embellished his paintings with "devices", but shied away from Duchamp's spontaneity by making complex arrangements of the objects he used. His "Painted Bronze", consisting of a Savarin coffee can, filled with paint brushes, is a perfect example of his careful arrangement. By the middle of the 1970, these ideas were joined by a technique, called "crosshatching". Johns was inspired to try this method after an automobile trip to the Hamptons, during which he saw a car, covered with marks flash past in the opposite direction.
By this time, Jasper Johns was well-known and was expanding his interests to embrace new fields. Johns and John Cage founded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York in 1963. Four years later, in 1967, for instance, he became artistic advisor to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, for which he designed sets, costumes and occasionally, posters. Cunningham's ballet "Second Hand", produced in 1980, was just one work, bearing the mark of Johns' creativity.
In 1973, Jasper started to create 33 etchings for a collection of short stories, called "Foirades/Fizzles", written by Nobel Prize winner - Samuel Beckett. Unfortunately, as Johns biographer Richard Francis remarks, though the collection appeared on schedule in 1976, the two men could not compromise on interpretation. Despite their commonly held bleak view of life, the resulting work leaned more towards two parallel works, rather than seamless one, created by two artists, working in unison.
A major retrospective of 225 of Johns' works was held in New York at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997. Later, he began a new series, that was much more muted, mysterious and serene, than his earlier work. The exhibition of these paintings debuted on September 15, 1999 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to the Yale University Art Gallery in January 2000, then to the Dallas Museum of Art. Also, the same year, in 2000, Jasper Johns created a limited-edition linocut for the Grenfell Press.
Johns currently divides his time between Sharon, Connecticut, and the island of Saint Martin. Until 2012, he lived in a rustic 1930's farmhouse with a glass-walled studio in Stony Point, New York.
Jasper Johns: Privileged Information
Fusing criticism and biography, this work offers insight into the life and work of America's pre-eminent living artist.
1996
Jasper Johns: A Retrospective
Accompanying the major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1996-1997, "Jasper Johns: A Retrospective" contains 264 color plates, illustrating Johns's work in all its facets - paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints.