Word: jasper
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...Jasper Johns' New York retrospective...
...Jasper Johns, considered by many people the greatest artist at work in America, has been in the public eye for not quite 20 years. It seems longer. No art career pupated more quickly. Johns appeared in 1958 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, a reclusive young Southerner from Augusta, Ga., who had been surviving in virtual isolation in Manhattan since 1952. With his paintings of targets and of the American flag, he landed on point, in the spot, at centerstage: the Museum of Modern Art bought three paintings from that first show, an unheard-of gesture to an unknown painter...
...didactic painter-hero of the '60s; a man of distances, margins and blocks, detachedly rendering the nuances of ambiguity through the most commonplace objects. But his work has not been seen whole. Now it can be: last week a retrospective of 201 paintings, drawings, multiples and prints by Jasper Johns opened at New York's Whitney Museum. Curator David Whitney, a former assistant to Johns, put the retrospective together; the West Coast science-fiction writer Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain) supplied a catalogue text. It is, of course, a fascinating show; but the painter who rises from...
Between 1955 and '61, Jasper Johns invented most of his principal motifs: the targets, the stenciled words and numbers, the rulers, the fragments of human anatomy, the American map, the American flag. No period in his later work would equal this one for vitality and daring. A work like White Flag, 1955, has lost the aura of scandal that clung to it when it was first seen. Instead it has moved into the company of, say, Pollock's Lavender Mist as one of the classics of American modernism: a work of such authority, intelligence and opulent technical skill...
...Jasper M. Rowland...