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| Jasper Johns Unique Target at The National Gallery |
A Jasper Johns
Prints exhibition titled Editions with
Additions: Working Proofs by Jasper Johns is on display
at The National Gallery,
Washington, DC until April 4, 2010.
Ruth Fine, curator of special
projects in modern art, selected 42
Jasper Johns from the 1,700 Jasper Johns Proofs for
300
lithographs, etchings, and screenprints that The
National Gallery has
acquired from the Artist. The Collection, includes almost all the
memorable images associated with Jasper Johns from the postwar era —
flags, targets, maps — and more recent compositions with references to
works by earlier artists.
"This extraordinary body of work,
which incorporate a range of media that includes graphite, pastel, ink,
and watercolor, has been created and carefully annotated by Johns over
four decades. It will be the largest institutional repository of works
by Johns. According the National Gallery Press Release, "Johns'
proofs—including state and color trial proofs as well as working
proofs—mark stages within the development of his printed images."
"It is in this
context that his working proofs are best known. Part
drawing and part print, the working proofs offer the additional
opportunity to view Johns' motifs through the expressive lens of this
combination of media, affirming the artist's comment that "an aspect
always of interest to me is to develop an idea or an image and execute
it in different ways to determine what its meaning could be."
The Jasper
Johns Prints exhibition "is arranged chronologically, and
several works are on public view for the first time. The initial
section of the show features working proofs from the 1960s and 1970s to
introduce several motifs that Johns continues to revisit in paintings,
drawings, and sculpture as well as in prints: letters of the alphabet,
targets, names of colors, and body parts."
"Works in the
second section include complex compositions from the
1980's and 1990's, in which Johns introduced autobiographical
references, such as an image of his shadow, family photographs, a floor
plan of his grandfather's house, and works of art by others that he
admires, including ceramic objects by George Ohr"
"A master in
many media, Jasper Johns
is a Printmaker of immense
curiosity and skill."
Since 1960 when he made his first lithographs, he has added
etching, screenprint and other techniques to his repertoire and has
completed more than 300 print editions."
"He takes full
advantage of the inherent nature of printmaking
techniques to reverse and duplicate images. Johns often sets his
matrices aside after an edition is completed, sometimes for years, and
later reworks them for a new edition, evident from the working proofs
for different versions of The Seasons."
"Among the
proofs shown in the
Exhibit are different versions of Jasper Johns' The Seasons. In the
fourth version of the The Seasons, Jasper Johns cut apart used printing
plates from past works to fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle to
create a new image", according to Ms. Fine.
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