#JASPER JOHNS WHITNEY FULL#

But the real track-jump happened, or started, with Johns - in part because, ironically, in rejecting self-consciously iconic grandiosity, he produced what turned out to be among the most iconic, if largely impersonal, works in all of art history. In this, he had predecessors, like Marcel Duchamp and Yves Klein, and successors, like Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and even Jean-Michel Basquiat. Johns initiated a new century, still ongoing, in which works could be purposefully impure, imperfect, and connected to the things of the world, while also being serious philosophical machines.

#JASPER JOHNS WHITNEY FULL#

For a full century before, beginning with the Impressionists, cresting with Picasso, and reaching a sort of endpoint with the Abstract Expressionists, most of whom were a few decades older than Johns, the making of art was ruled by the principle of purity and the vision of the artist as a history-bending shamanic genius. Johns had made his mark not as a throwback but as a genuine revolutionary - one of the biggest in American art history. It felt like proof that by then, Johns was being seen as an outmoded artist from another era. What is your name?” He said, “My name is Jasper Johns.” It was a perfect picture of my unchecked egoism and his imperturbability, modesty, and honesty. After a while, he turned at me and said, “Hello, Jerry.” I was surprised.

One night in 1986, while standing at the top ramp of a Guggenheim Museum opening as an art-world wannabe, peering down at this social universe that seemed so distant and magical to me, I found myself standing next to an older man. Photo: Pari Dukovic for New York Magazine “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Jasper johns whitney