![]() While making the first work in the series he found the stamp and pressed it into the corner, and it appears in almost all the works, a small but insistent detail that punctures any sense of melancholy. The 91-year-old Johns’s creatively disruptive art receives its most comprehensive consideration to date in Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, simultaneous companion retrospectives at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. ![]() He used to return unsolicited correspondence stamped with a mock-handwritten message saying “Regrets, Jasper Johns”. suggested mirror imaging or a fold through space hinging on a central spine. ![]() Art Review Meaning, mystery in prints by Jasper Johns. Johns has called the series Regrets, which conjures a mood of ruefulness, but is in fact something of a joke. Jasper Johns is an artist one finds difficult to love. It’s as if the skull in Johns’s paintings and drawings is the monster of his figure’s imagination.īut the works are far from morbid. Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY via Matthew Marks Gallery. Indeed, the connection between these pictures and the work of another artist is greater: in the margin of one drawing Johns has written “Goya? Bats? Dreams?”, suggesting he has connected Freud’s pose with Francisco de Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, depicting an artist slumped, head on hands, surrounded by the winged creatures of his unconscious. Acrylic over etching with collage on canvas, 19-3/4 x 23-3/4 inches. Freud’s and Bacon’s lives, and particularly Bacon’s homosexuality, are writ large in their work, while Johns largely avoids autobiography and has always refused to discuss his relationship with Rauschenberg. They are all about visceral human feeling, a direct engagement with the human body and psychology, while Johns’s art is more cerebral and poetic. In many ways Bacon and Freud sit at the opposite end of the spectrum to Johns. Perhaps Johns latched onto the skull because, at 84, it reflects his feelings about his own mortality.īut his art has always been elusive.
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