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Born
in 1930, Jasper Johns spent his childhood in small South
Carolina towns. At age twenty-four, he moved to New York.
From the mid–1950s, Johns's work combined cool logic and
private compulsion. His breakthrough 1954–55 painting
Flag instigated a series of paintings of the American
flag and of targets that stunned the art world. As his
paintings became more complex, Johns placed alphabetical
and numerical sequences in grids, and inserted words and
actual objects into his art.
Jasper Johns's art brings mastery, simplicity, and contradiction.
His methodical working process combines intense deliberation
and experimentation, obsessive craft, cycles of revision
and repetition, and decisive shifts of direction. Johns
also frequently borrows images from other artists, which,
ironically, only underscores the originality of his own
vision.
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