![]() He’s always interested to hear about our work, but he has been distant in the sense that he has not been at all directional, more so than any artist I’ve ever worked with.” We have been spending lots of time with him in his studio and in researching works from his own personal collection, and we’ve been keeping him informed of all of our ideas and plans around the show and the catalogue. “He’s been both extremely close and somewhat distant,” Rothkopf says, “which is typical, I guess, of Jasper’s imagination, maybe. But that rather unflattering reputation seems more rooted in the past than present. The eyes can gleam… but even then, the mouth droops dourly, and imparts few secrets.” Johns famously blocked Jill Johnston’s unauthorized 1996 Thames & Hudson biography, Jasper Johns: Privileged Information, from using any reproductions of his work. One critic described the artist’s countenance this way: “his round face can lock up like a banker’s. The artist is a famously enigmatic and supposedly prickly and hermetic figure, at least in some media accounts. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Artīasualdo and Rothkopf have had plenty of opportunity to interact with Johns at his 170-acre estate in Connecticut. Even at 91, he’s still working in the studio every day, and I think it’s really terrific that a younger generation of curators are looking at his work and will come up with new ways of putting it together.” ALL THINGS CONSIDERED Untitled, 1972, a four-paneled work executed in oil, encaustic, and collage on canvas with objects ![]() There’s a kind of continuity within the change and, as a result, the work is really visually stimulating - in the layering of visual elements and in the layering of thoughts and ideas. “While there’s a thread of continuity in his work,” says Bernstein, “he’s always found new motifs that he develops. ![]() Her opus enabled the curatorial duo to drill deep into the artist’s six-and-a-half-decade oeuvre, as well as mine the quiet cooperation of the artist himself. This current mega-production, more than five years in the making and delayed by more than a year by the pandemic, is anchored in part by the five-volume catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings and sculpture that was authored by Bernstein, an art historian and curator who met Johns in 1967 when she was a graduate student at Columbia University. And that we could have two shows that in a way mirror, echo, or reflect one of them, that became the kind of structural logic or metaphor for how the exhibitions would proceed.”Ī retrospective for Johns is certainly nothing new - from his 1977 exhibition at the Whitney organized by David Whitney (no relation) to the 1996 show at the Museum of Modern Art, splendidly curated by the late and storied Kirk Varnedoe, to the 2017 in-depth survey “Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth,” cocurated by Roberta Bernstein and Edith Devaney at the Royal Academy of Arts in London that also traveled to the Broad in Los Angeles. “Since the very beginning of his career, the artist had been interested in mirroring, in doubles, in reflection, and doing a version of a work in encaustic or oil, in black and white or in color, and playing with reversal inversions of figure and ground. “Ultimately, we took the inspiration from Jasper’s own art,” says Scott Rothkopf, senior deputy director at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the exhibition’s cocurator. Image courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art We have chosen works that are mostly predicated on darkness, while everything at the Whitney is much more surreal.” FLYING HIGH The artist’s iconic Flag, 1954-55 - in encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on wood - is among the highlights going on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art For example, he explains: “Philadelphia shows Johns’s number paintings, and drawings, and the Whitney shows flags and maps. and Katherine Sachs senior curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “The rooms tell you the story, and for every room in one place, there’s a room in the other,” says Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” will showcase more than 500 works dating from 1954 to the present - a panoramic body of work that ranges from painting, sculpture, and drawing to prints, books, costumes, and even theater sets.īoth exhibitions have been designed as a series of curated rooms akin to twin mini-mansions, each having ten chambers with names like “Real Things as Paintings,” “Doubles & Reflections,” and “Disappearance & Negation.” ![]() At 91, Jasper Johns, the widely revered and famously private American artist who was an impoverished unknown until he became an overnight art-star sensation at age 27 with his debut solo show at the Leo Castelli gallery, will be honored this month with an unprecedented dual retrospective opening in both New York and Philadelphia.
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