Jasper Johns: Born artist, living with and for art

Jasper Johns is a US-American artist whose diverse work consists primarily of painting, but also includes sculptures, stage designs and costumes.

Jasper Johns is considered one of the important pioneers of Pop Art , although his artistic work is not solely attributed to this style by art historians; more often, Johns' works are with Abstract Expressionism or Neo-Dada .

Jasper Johns celebrated his 85th birthday on May 15, 2015; on that date he had around eight decades of artistic work behind him and had been a multi-millionaire for around four decades through his art.

In a single auction (Sotheby's November 2004 auction), Jasper Johns' "Green Target" $3,368,000, the 1971 "Flag" "Numeral 0 Through 9" $10,928,000 – nearly $20 million for three works, something not many artists achieve.

On the art portal artfacts.net , which ranks the success of artists worldwide based on exhibitions and sales, Jasper Johns currently holds 57th place. He is thus among the 100 most famous artists in the world; in the 2000s he even made it into the top 30.

An artist who piques the curiosity of art lovers, not only about his work, but also about a life path that leads to such success:

Jasper Johns: Childhood, youth and private life

Jasper Johns was born on May 15, 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, in the heart of the southern United States.

His parents were Jean Riley and William Jasper Johns. William Jasper Johns passed the name Jasper on to his son (which he himself had received in honor of William Jasper, a sergeant in the American Revolutionary War), which is why the artist is sometimes referred to as Jasper Johns Jr.

Because his parents' marriage failed after a short time, Johns spent his early years with his grandparents in Allendale, South Carolina. He then lived for a year with his mother in Columbia, South Carolina, followed by a few years with his aunt in Lake Murray, South Carolina—a typical itinerant fate for some children of divorce. In 1947, Johns graduated from Edmunds High School in Sumter, South Carolina, where he was living with his mother again.

Little Jasper is said to have started drawing at a very young age, entirely on his own; neither his parents nor his grandparents exposed him to any form of art. Johns later said the following about this period of his life:

In the places where I was a child, there were no artists and no art; I didn't know what art meant at all.”

Johns goes on to say at this time:

I think I considered art to be something that would put me in a different situation than the one I was in.”;

Whether he meant that he used art at this early age to escape the unpleasantness of his world, or whether it was a purely factual statement, is not recorded.

In any case, Johns found his way to art without any prior influence from his environment, and he thus proved to have the right instinct, as will be shown in the paragraph “Jasper Johns’ artistic training”.

From 1954 onwards, that is, from the beginning of his artistic career, Johns lived in a relationship with Robert Rauschenberg , which lasted until the 1960s and ended very unhappily.

Although not artistically, through Rauschenberg Johns moved within the artistic avant-garde around Merce Cunningham and John Cage ; he worked with them and developed his own ideas about art. In Rauschenberg's studio, Johns was discovered in 1958 by gallery owner Leo Castelli .

While Johns and Rauschenberg were already drifting apart artistically, the collaboration between Johns and John Cage became closer: In 1963, they founded the “Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts” , now known as the “Foundation for Contemporary Arts” .

Since then, Johns has had an apartment in New York; until 2012, he lived in a rustic 1930s farmhouse with a glass studio in the town of Stony Point, 65 kilometers north of the center of New York City.

In 1961, when a retrospective exhibition of his works was scheduled at the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina (and his relationship with Rauschenberg was already quite fragile), Johns bought a house in Edisto Beach, South Carolina, where he retreated for months at a time and where some of his works were created.

Johns also owns a house on the island of Saint Martin (Caribbean). He had begun visiting the island regularly in the late 1960s, and in 1972 he purchased a plot of land there. On this land, the architect Philip Johnson (whose other works include the Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at MoMArt in New York City (1953), the Seagram Building in New York with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1958), the New York State Theatre (now the David H. Koch Theater, 1964), the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (1966–1968), the AT&T Headquarters in New York (now the Sony Tower, 1980–1984), the Lipstick Building in New York (1986), and the Philip Johnson House at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin (1994–1997) built a long, white, rectangular house with three separate sections, of which few photographs seem to exist.

In 1994, a property in Sharon, Connecticut was added, where Johns spends the time he is not on St. Martin.

Jasper Johns artistic training

As mentioned, Jasper Johns began drawing and painting as a small child, even though his environment had essentially denied him any creative education in this area. For a child under the prevailing conditions at the time, this was more than astonishing; acquiring any kind of education independently was extremely difficult and/or very expensive, and until his university studies, Johns likely had few opportunities to learn about art .

That Johns was able to pursue an artistic career – he is said to have known he wanted to be an artist from the age of five – is primarily due to his instinct and tenacity. At university, however, he found better conditions than a young person today who doesn't come from a wealthy family – the ideal of equal education for all is increasingly being sacrificed on the altar of unlimited economic growth; theoretically, everyone can still study, but in practice, it's only easy for those born with the right nationality and into the right social class.

For young people today who have a different career path in mind than what their environment dictates, Jasper Johns' career and rise to international artist status is nevertheless a very encouraging example. Because today we have the internet, where one can not only watch consumerist or cat videos, but also learn—learn a great deal, and learn for free—from institutions and knowledgeable individuals whose purpose in life is not to amass as much wealth as possible.

Jasper Johns immediately set about realizing his goal after graduating from high school, studying art at the University of South Carolina in Columbia from fall 1947 to December 1948. Clearly possessing sufficient talent, after three semesters his art teachers urged him to move to New York.

Jasper Johns did this at the end of 1948, and from January 1949 he completed a semester at the Parsons School of Design . Alongside this, Johns visited countless art exhibitions in New York and worked various odd jobs.

From May 1951 until the end of 1952, it was time for military service; after basic training in South Carolina (where he also worked in an art gallery), Johns was stationed in Sendai, Japan, from 1952 until the end of the Korean War (June 25, 1950 – July 27, 1953).

Back in New York, Johns enrolled at Hunter College (a college affiliated with the City University of New York) to study as part of the GI veterans' program, but quickly dropped out. He began working in a bookstore in uptown New York, where he met other artists through artists and art historians who frequented the store.

The right friends make the climb easier

The job in this bookstore and the friendships it provided were to become very important for Johns: Johns became friends with Robert Rauschenberg, Rachel Rosenthal and the dancer Merce Cunningham; the friendship with Rauschenberg brought him into the circle around John Cage, who influenced Johns' art through his ideas.

During this time of searching for his own artistic expression, Johns also quickly gave up his job in the bookstore in order to devote himself entirely to art.

He now earned his living by assisting Rauschenberg with window displays and also working as a freelance window dresser. He was quite successful; Johns and Rauschenberg created the last window displays for Tiffany.

By 1954, the artist had found his direction, and the first of the typical motifs that are now associated with the artist Jasper Johns emerged: 'Targets' , American flags, maps, pictures with numbers, words and letters:

Everyone knows them – The most important works of Jasper Johns

The flags:

• “Flag” , 1954-55, see image at the very top
• “White Flag”, 1955
• “Flag on Orange Field”, 1957
• “Three Flags” , 1958, see image above

The targets:

• “Green Target”, 1956
• “Target with Four Faces”, 1958
• “Target with Plaster Casts”, 1955

The Numbers:

• “Gray Numbers”, 1958
• “0-9”, 1960
• “0 Through 9”, 1961

A small showcase on Pinterest

Jasper Johns in the public eye: prizes and awards, teaching activities, legacy

In the article about Jasper Johns' art you will learn about his active exhibition schedule in all the major centers of contemporary art; this article focuses on his impact that extends beyond mere exhibition activity:

Jasper Johns was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1973. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1984.

In 1990, Johns received the US National Medal of Arts

In 1993, Johns received the Praemium Imperiale for painting , a Japanese “World Culture Prize” in memory of His Highness Prince Takamatsu, which is awarded annually for outstanding artistic or cultural achievements.

In 2011, Johns was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom , the highest civilian honor in the United States. Johns received the medal from President Barack Obama; he was the first artist to receive it since 1977 (when Alexander Calder received the honor).

His work has inspired many artists; in particular, with the encaustic painting technique, Johns was able to breathe new life into a very old technique that other artists have continued. Encaustic is an ancient artistic painting technique with a significantly longer tradition than oil painting ; its heyday was in the art of Greco-Roman antiquity .

In encaustic painting (from the Greek enkauston, meaning burned in; according to the artists' idea, materialized thoughts were burned onto the painting surface with fire), color pigments dissolved in wax are applied hot to the painting surface (formerly with hot spatulas, today with electrically heated painting tools) and then burned in.

In late antiquity, encaustic painting was superseded by other techniques , falling into complete oblivion around the 6th century AD, until Jasper Johns rediscovered its enduring, incomparable luminosity and freshness for his paintings. Internationally renowned artists such as Fernando Leal Audirac, Robert Geveke, Christine Hahn, and Martin Assig followed his lead and created important works using encaustic painting.

Jasper Johns today: Seeing, reading, feeling…

There is a website www.jasper-johns.org which, although not run by Jasper Johns himself but by an admirer, contains a wealth of interesting information.

On the Jasper Johns page of MoMA www.moma.org/ you can view many works by Jasper Johns online.

You can read books by Jasper Johns: Jasper Johns, “Aims for maximum difficulty in determining what happened.” , Interviews, Statements, Sketchbook Notes, edited by Gregor Stemmrich, translated by Michael Mundhenk. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1997.

and read books about Jasper Johns:

• John Yau, “A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns,” DAP/Distributed Art Publishers, 2008
• Barbara Hess, “Jasper Johns. The Business of the Eye.”, Taschen, Cologne 2007
• Fred Orton, “Figuring Jasper Johns,” Reaction Books, 1994
• Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns,” New York, George Wittenborn, 1963

You could even read an exhibition catalogue written by Michael Crichton, better known for works such as “Jurassic Park”, “Disclosure” and “The Lost World” (Michael Crichton, “Jasper Johns”, Whitney/Abrams, 1977) – if you can still find one in an antiquarian bookshop, as it has long been “out of print”.

Oh yes: If you wish to reproduce works by Jasper Johns, you can clarify the rights vagarights.com

Or you can simply see his works live, in one of the numerous public collections that own a work by Jasper Johns (see the list in the article “Jasper Johns: Art as a means of exploring and coping with life, among other things” ), or in one of the current or upcoming exhibitions that include works by Jasper Johns:

• to January 11, 2016: “Arbors of Art – Eleven Rooms Where Paintings Reside,” Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Sakura, Chiba, Japan
• until January 17, 2016: “International Pop” , Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, USA
• until January 31, 2016: “Pop Art: 20th Century Popular Culture as Muse ,” Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, USA
• until February 26, 2016: “Picasso.mania” , Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris
• until April 30, 2016: “Painting 2.0: Painting in the Information Age” , Museum Brandhorst, Munich
• from February 24, 2016: “International Pop” , Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA