Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Jasper Johns
American (b.1930)
O THROUGH 9 (1977)
lithograph
9.75” x 7.75”

STYLE: 70s PRINTMAKING,
POP ART

  

Raised in South Carolina, Jasper Johns moved to New York in 1949, where he studied commercial drawing, but soon changed the course of his career when he met artist Robert Rauschenberg and dancer Merce Cunningham. His artworks during the fifties and sixties included such recognizable cultural objects as beer cans, flags, and targets and these are the works that first brought him acclaim and are the reason he is now hailed as one of the founders of Pop Art. Johns was able to force the viewer to look at these familiar icons in new ways, through his inventive handling of materials, color, and form.

Johns made a number of works employing numbers, using single numerals, the numbers 0-9 arranged in a grid, the numbers 0-9 in a repeating pattern, and numbers superimposed on one another. Johns employed a wide range of media for these works, from cast bronze, to encaustics, to graphite, to richly-printed lithographs. Johns is known for taking the art of lithography to a new level and often worked with master printmakers like Robert Blackburn and many others. The body of lithography Johns produced is known as one of the most significant in the twentieth century.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Jasper Johns, Interview with G. R. Swenson, Art News, 2/64
"My paintings are not merely expressive gestures. Some of them I have thought of as facts, or at any rate, there has been some attempt to say that a thing has a certain nature. Saying that, one hopes to avoid saying I feel this way about this thing; one says that this thing is this thing and one responds to what one thinks it is.”
Roni Feinstein, Art In America, 4/97
"Although the various movements that the early work helped foster -- Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art -- emphasized the detached, impersonal qualities of his art, a good portion of the power and brilliance of these works, as has been noted, derives from their denials and negations, from the struggles with self embodied within them. Johns is himself responsible for the myth of impersonality that surrounds his art: with rare exceptions, in statements about his work to the present day, he has focused upon matters of intellect and form."

Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle, 9/15/90
The numerals 0 through 9 are abstract, bodiless figures. Surrogates for the human figure traditional to art, they are symbols of individuality, of primary differences. They also represent without picturing.
The American flag and the map of the United States, to take more complex Johns staples, are similarly flat, abstract, ready-made patterns that happen to be invested with lots of emotional symbolism.
In many of his early prints, Johns drains such stock images of their unconsidered content. He then invests them with his own brand of content: rich visual and material effects that strike the eye as self-justifying and seem to make the images concrete -- really seeable -- for the first time.
When Katrina Martin asks Johns where his images come from, speaking of the more recent, seemingly more concocted examples, he answers: ''from a thought, basically . . . I'm always interested in the physical form of whatever I'm doing and often repeat an image in another physical form just to see what happens, what the difference is, and to see what it is that connects them and what it is that separates them . . . I do what I think to do, and that's about all there is that I can do.''