Word: johnses
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Varnedoe's show does an immense service to Johns by 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...
We are so 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...
And yet the picture that launched his career came to this then unknown, 24-year-old Southerner in a dream. One night in 1954, by his own account, Johns dreamed of painting a large American flag, and the next morning he got up and began to do so. He would...
AbEx, in its transcendentalist ambitions, shunned the specifics of contemporary American culture; its followers created a veritable academy of "authenticity," sign of the hot, tragic and inventive sensibility. Johns wanted to work with something not invented, something so well known, as he put it, that it was not well seen...
Was Johns' Flag, 1955, a flag or a painting? The American flag is the best-known abstraction in the world; is a painting of an abstraction a representation? The questions twist back to Rene Magritte's famous brainteaser, the painting of a pipe with "This is not a pipe" written...