But ““Jasper Johns: A Retrospective’’ (which runs through Jan. 21) is a grand, meaty show. The 225 works, on two floors of the museum, dip below beautiful only a couple of times. They even manage profound more often than not. The famous paintings hyped as masterpieces almost as soon as they came off the easel back in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s turn out to be masterpieces after all–albeit in the slightly brittle, narrow way in which modern art differs inherently from that of the less anxious old masters. And Jasper Johns the artist turns out to be a risk taker where it counts most for an artist–in how a work of art gets to be a good one, rather than in what kind of junk from every- day life you can label ““art’’ for the fun of it.
““I’m from South Carolina, you know,’’ Johns says with quiet affability. Yes, we know. The story of his declasse small-town childhood (his father a drinker, his being raised by grandparents), arriving in New York in the early 1950s after a hitch in the army (where he started an on-base art gallery), buddying up with Robert Rauschenberg and painting an American ““Flag’’ in 1954-55 is standard lore. It’s the postwar art world’s equivalent of how jazz came up the river from New Orleans. (The story–with Johns destroying nearly all his pre-““Flag’’ work and making a white, six-pointed ““Star’’ in 1954–has acquired the patina of religious myth. That many of Johns’s paintings-with-attachments seem to be gritty, urban reliquaries only enhances that perception.) Then there’s the business about the young Johns setting out to knock the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning off its perch, rebutting their breast-beating angst with a painting of a ready-made image that coolly countered the action painters’ sweeping brushstrokes with delicate dabs confined within the boundaries of the stars and stripes. ““Abstract expressionism wasn’t a motive in what I did,’’ Johns says. ““It was more of a private thing.’’ (He painted the flag after having a dream about painting a flag.) About the wonderful painterly touch in ““Flag’’–and much of his subsequent work–he adds, ““I believe in things where I see signs of a person working, that a person made it.''
Johns’s private thing quickly went public. New dealer on the block Leo Castelli visited Johns’s studio in 1957 and offered him a solo show on the spot. MoMA bought four paintings from that 1958 show. Flags begat targets begat numbers begat maps–all rendered with that minestrone-like surface that became Johns’s trademark. Then he went loud with such paintings as ““False Start’’ (1959) and got into a bit of an esthetic bind with a ragged starburst brushstroke that he couldn’t quite weave into a unified canvas. He went large with the nearly sculptural ““According to What’’ (1964) and pursued visual puns perhaps a little too fervidly. Johns began to be appreciated more and more as a transitional figure from abstract expressionism to pop art. That’s exactly the view that the MoMA show–deftly curated by Kirk Varnedoe–seeks to dispel. ““Jas per Johns’’ wants us to see him as a great painter, period.
A few lapses to the contrary, Johns is. The most stunning galleries in the exhibition are those devoted to the fairly pure ““cross-hatch’’ paintings of the 1970s. All of them are bright, tight and rich–as good as anything by any American artist who painted nothing but abstractions. It’s amazing, in fact, how long you can look at these aggregates of short, straight freehand colored lines made with a paintbrush and still keep getting something satisfying out of them. It’s also amazing how many sophisticated plays of meaning Johns can get into these paintings. ““Between the Clock and the Bed’’ (1981), for instance, alludes to a self-portrait by Edvard Munch in which Munch stands between a grandfather clock and a bedspread with a crosshatch pattern. The title’s reference turns Johns’s abstract painting into an uncannily evocative self-portrait, too.
In the 1980s, Johns veered toward what Varnedoe calls ““optical’’ paintings, meaning pictures that look less like opaque slabs and more like windows to something going on beyond them. These are pictures freer to tell autobiographical stories–in Johns’s typically cryptic way, of course. ““The early paintings were ambiguous in a clear way,’’ Johns says. ““Now they’re more ambiguous in a complicated way. Perhaps it’s confidence, maybe it’s just habit, but now I trust more what happens to occur.’’ In the show’s last gallery, Johns starts to sum it all up. In ““Mirror’s Edge’’ (1992), he alludes to art (a stick figure from Picasso’s 1958 ““The Fall of Icarus,’’ a tracing from GrUnewald’s 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece), life (the floor plan of his grandfather’s house, his shadow, reprised from his own 1980s ““Four Seasons’’ paintings) and the mysteries of the universe (a spiral gal axy). In a frieze along the bottom edge, Johns runs both the title and his signature together in a band of alternating, reversed, stenciled letters. To get all this stuff into a single, visually coherent picture, Johns crops and composes like crazy, and reverts to muted colors–bluish gray, mauve and ocher. Only an artist so radical on the inside that he’s not afraid to look conservative on the outside could pull it off. And Johns does: this one painting and the whole magnificent show.
