JASPER JOHNS PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART HOW TO
JASPER JOHNS PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART FULL

This led to the dilemma that shaped Johns’s project for decades to come: how to insist on the absolute objecthood of a work-its resolute, Deweyan here-and-now-ness-without letting it settle into the unlife of a mere product on display. For Dewey and Barnes, art simply had to be thought of, contemplated, and enjoyed in the same terms, and at the same time, as all the other objects in the world that help build our lived experience as human beings.Īs Johns once said, in a moment of pure aesthetic Pragmatism, “A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.” (Barnes did not collect radiators, but he did buy old keys and hinges to hang with his paintings.) By the 1950s, however, John Dewey’s reigning Pragmatism, as it came to be applied to art by acolytes such as the collector and pedagogue Albert Barnes, had had decades to close off that option. They could claim that however commodity-like a painting might seem, as an object, it was in fact pointing away from its place down on earth-even in a shop window or sales gallery-to other, higher realms of thought and spirit. Once upon a time, artists and critics might have had a way out of this dilemma. Was the flag supposed to help move the dresses? Were the dresses meant to help the flag seem buyable? Either way the linkage between art and sales had been made patent and could not be wished away. The Bonwit’s window made that fact unavoidable, thanks to its pairing of those Lanz dresses with the supposedly radical, and no doubt unsaleable, White Flag.

By the time of his Bonwit’s appearance, the modernist vanguard had spent at least half a century decrying any work that served as a “mere” commodity, despite the evident fact that most art was intended to sell, or aspired to sales even when it seemed unsaleable. I think the department-store setting posed a problem for Johns that lurks behind almost everything in his huge show. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society.

Bronze and oil paint (3 parts), 5 1/2 × 8 × 4 5/8 inches. Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze, 1960 (cast and painted in 1964).

JASPER JOHNS PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART FULL

Having the full span of his work on view, and in mind, helped me bring it all into focus through the glass of that Bonwit’s window. But despite his retrospective’s vast scope in time and its overwhelming scale-or maybe because of both-I left with a clearer view of Johns than I’d ever managed. At ninety-one, Johns has even made new work for this latest show, sixty-five years after he made his first splash at Bonwit’s. It covers the tremendous range of Johns’s signature subjects and styles and series-flags and targets, numbers and letters, beer cans and flashlights, cross hatchings and hands, catenaries and skulls-in the countless media and techniques that he’s used over the seven decades of his career. With more than five hundred works on view, it is very probably the most expansive, extensive, impressive exhibition ever dedicated to a living artist. I think this tension is palpable, as a driving force, across all of Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, the stunning two-venue retrospective that just opened at the Whitney Museum in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There’s a special tension between the eccentric, avant-garde greatness of that early Johns-its virtues register even in the lone photo that survives of the window-and the fact that the painting, and thus the entire Johns “project” that got launched with his flags, was first revealed in a vitrine meant to move merchandise. Young Seventh Floor.” And sure enough, behind that scroll stood two mannequins done up in lovely pale dresses, just right to clothe youth for the coming spring season.Ī second, more unexpected scroll, placed right beside the one selling Lanz, read: “A painting by Jasper Johns, one of the young American artists who has worked with us on window displays.” And there indeed, hanging behind the mannequins in their “young” clothes, stood that painting, equally fresh and similarly pale: it was Johns’s great, vast, landmark White Flag-the first major Johns seen anywhere, getting its premiere in a store window. In genteel cursive, it read: “Young American Clothes by Lanz.

In January of 1956, Bonwit Teller, a high-end department store on Fifth Avenue in New York, placed a fancy scroll at the front of one of its window displays. Vogelman and Lauren Young, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia, and Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York City, through February 13, 2022 Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, curated by Carlos Basualdo and Scott Rothkopf with Sarah B. Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric (3 panels), 78 1/4 × 120 3/4 inches. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS).

Jasper johns philadelphia museum of art