"Jasper Johns: Gray" at the Met in N.Y.

In memory:
A gifted painter? Yes. But a great artist?

ROBERT ZALLER

It is now more than 50 years since Jasper Johns made his debut on the art scene with his meticulously painted flags and targets, and claimed a place he has never relinquished at the forefront of contemporary art. Critics and fellow artists sensed at once that these deadpan renderings of seemingly hackneyed objects redefined the possibilities of psycho-pictorial space, and offered a new way of hiding personal identity in plain sight. Johns caught both horns of his generation’s dilemma in one sure grasp: how to present objects of sense in an age of abstraction, and how to present self in an age of publicity.

Johns never repudiated abstract art, which he could paint with the best of them; rather, he showed how the object world itself could be treated as a mode of abstraction. If Abstract Expressionism, from Kandinsky to the New York School, had created nonobjective forms and color patterns as a direct means of depicting emotional states, Johns showed how pictorial representation could be deployed to the same end, but filtered through a scrim of irony.

The freshness and metaphysical excitement of a Johns canvas— and those early works still convey that excitement in a way that the more baroque experiments of a contemporary like Rauschenberg don’t— was that the object was both presented and deconstructed at the same time, there and not there at once. That is to say, the flags and targets (and beer cans and American maps, alphabets and numbers; the potential series was endless) were referential, but not symbolic: They pointed to a something that was not there, real but unrepresentable.

The self as mystery

That “something,” as it turned out, was the self itself. Jasper Johns had mastered the self as mystery, a peekaboo game to be played behind the surface of the canvas and the nominal presentation of an object world. The game was played with the viewer, but ultimately by the artist with himself, and if Johns was always a step ahead of us, his quarry was finally just as elusive to himself as to the rest of us. He was painting, in every conceivable guise, a portrait of the unseeable.

Another way of putting this would be to say that Johns is the consummate artist of detachment, and that his onanistic "quest" for the self is actually a strategy of estrangement. Samuel Beckett, an admirer, caught this quality obliquely in his description of Johns’s work: “No matter which way you turn you always come up against a stone wall.” A wall both blocks perception and flight: Whatever is behind it cannot be seen; whatever is in front of it cannot retreat (nor, on a two-dimensional picture plane, advance).

One thing we can be sure of

In his early “Tennyson” series, Johns in fact repeatedly paints a dark wall, below which is a pediment that bears the poet’s name in block letters. Much later on, in an iteration of his “Winter” series, Johns places the outline of a male figure, gesturing in vague alarm, against a similar wall. The figure is and isn’t Johns; perhaps it is best conceived as a sacrificial token left behind to conceal an act of flight. The wall, as Beckett suggests, is all we can be “sure” of.

Johns has always been a terrific colorist, but a large and important body of his work has been done primarily in gray, and the current retrospective of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York focuses on this. It begins with a single brightly colored work of the late ’50s, False Start, which is wholly abstract except for the words “red,” “yellow” and “blue” painted on it (each in a “false”— that is, other— color). This is a witty comment on the conventions of perception, but, beside it, Johns has taken the conceit a step further, producing a series of similar paintings done all in gray.

The subtlety of an overcast day

All light, as we know, is white, and only the exceedingly complex process of atmospheric refraction and optical conversion produces the colors we “see” (no two of us in exactly the same way). There are paintings done entirely in white, but “white” as we perceive it is as much a translation of primary light as any other secondary color; and, for Johns, gray is preferable as a point of reference. He certainly deploys it with endless skill and variation, and, although some works in the exhibit are entirely and indeed almost monochromatically gray, a very subtle and diverse palette shines through: the glints and touches of an overcast day.

Seeing Johns through gray points up the essentially elegiac character of his work. A particularly revealing title (not without a touch of saccharine in it) is In Memory of My Feelings (1964), a work evoked by the poet Frank O’Hara. As Johns never paints the natural world— his is a domestic interior of artifacts, sometimes painted and sometimes literally incorporated (a hanging fork and spoon; a dangling cup; an attached broom)— so, too, he treats emotion at a remove, the suppositional experience of his suppositional self. Something is there, in an actual process of living and dying; something is passing on the circular suggestions of a clock hand, sweeping and pointing towards its fatal appointment; but nothing that can ever be specified. There is, in fact, a genuine pathos in this, for we can recognize our own fates in Johns’s obsessive preoccupation with his. But a certain impatience grows, too, a desire to smash the darkened window of the canvas and let in, finally, the light of common day.

His unacknowledged debt to Chardin

Johns is a greatly gifted painter, in whose unending versatility and craft it is impossible not to take delight. Whether he is a great artist is a more problematic question. Many influences are traceable in his work, as with any significant figure, and with time Johns has begun to conduct his own dialogue with the masters of the past. The one he most deeply reminds me of is one he has never to my knowledge directly alluded to, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779). Chardin spent his career painting still life; he never went out of doors pictorially, and he found everything he needed within reach of his eye and hand. His personality was invested in objects; he gave them wonderful life without revealing any of his own. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that Chardin revealed himself as far as he wished to, or was able to, in this way.

Jasper Johns seems like this to me. His work will provide lasting pleasure, I think, and will always have its haunting pathos. It will tell the future much about our own postmodern moment. But don’t ask more of it than it is able to give.



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