At the end
of the 1950s Johns moved on from the hard-edged style and representative
imagery that had won him immediate acclaim. He began covering
the pictorial field with aggressive brush strokes and introduced
a more layered sense of space. In False Start (1959), he exploited
a discordance between actual colors and the words that name them.
Johns's growing focus on process and craft received an impetus
from his initiation into printmaking in 1960. He routinely painted
in a new mode while simultaneously producing graphic works based
on earlier motifs.
