Word: artistes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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ROBERT HUGHES, TIME's art critic, knows the artist Jasper Johns only slightly, but he has followed Johns' work closely for decades. "He is unquestionably the most famous--and high priced--artist in America," says Hughes, who appraises a new Johns retrospective at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in this week's issue. "The question is whether his work over the past 20 years will be seen as the equal of the paintings--like the flags and the targets--that made his reputation 40 years ago. I wonder if it will be." Hughes' own reputation, meanwhile, continues...
...trying to see him whole, as a painter with a continuous 40-year oeuvre, rather than as a hinge figure between movements--Abstract Expressionism and Pop, Minimalism and process art, or whatever. Johns has been thrust rather too easily into this role by his great influence on other artists. The deadpan stripes of his Flag, 1954-55, become the pinstripes of Frank Stella's black paintings in 1959, and his deliberateness, making the picture up in advance instead of discovering it in the act of painting, lies behind much process art. As Bruce Nauman put it, "Johns was the first...
...there, or has there ever been, a modern American artist with a more peculiarly sacrosanct reputation than Jasper Johns? If so, none spring to mind. Johns' current retrospective of 225 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures at New York City's Museum of Modern Art has all the air of a cult event. This is not the fault of the curator, Kirk Varnedoe, who has done an exemplary job of hanging the show and, without resorting to the usual pseudo-philosophical guff that attends critical discussion of Johns, describing and analyzing his work in the catalog. Rather, it seems immovably built...
...used by now to being told that Johns is an artist of the utmost profundity and difficulty that we assume, on peering into the well of his talent, that the fault for not recognizing masterpieces in it lies with ourselves. It's like the familiar Barnett Newman problem: having for so long been told that the famous "Zip" in Newman's canvases contains the unnameable name of God or the tragic condition of humankind, one must make an almost perverse effort of will to look past all the midrash and see a vertical stripe...
...innocent aura coexists, in person, with a more knowing and world-weary affect (after all, she was raised by artist parents in a loft in Manhattan's SoHo district and has been acting professionally since age 6). In one breath she confidently states a sophisticated opinion of Juliet ("more one-dimensional than people might expect") and in the next worries about how her looks are discussed in the press...