Season Posters

Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina. In late 1948 he moved to New York, where he saw numerous exhibitions and attended the Parsons School of Design for a semester. After serving two years in the army during the Korean War he returned to New York in 1953. He soon became friends with artist Robert Rauschenberg, composer John Cage, and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Johns’s early mature work, of the mid- to late 1950s, invented a new style that helped to engender a number of subsequent art movements, among them Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual Art. The new style has usually been understood to be coolly antithetical to the expressionistic gestural abstraction of the previous generation. This is partly because, while Johns’s painting extended the allover compositional techniques of Abstract Expressionism, his use of these techniques stresses conscious control rather than spontaneity.

This early style included one of his signature emblems: the American flag. As an iconic image—like his targets and maps—Johns had the insight that the flag was “seen and not looked at, not examined.” The execution and composition of Three Flags encourage close inspection. The painting draws attention to the process of its making because of how it employs encaustic, a mixture of pigment suspended in warm wax that congeals as each stroke is applied. The accumulated discrete marks that this process creates results in a sensuous, almost sculptural surface. That sculptural element is further highlighted by work’s structural arrangement. The trio of flags—each successively diminished in scale by about twenty-five percent—projects outward, contradicting classical perspective, in which objects appear to recede from the viewer’s vantage point. By shifting the visual emphasis from the flag’s emblematic meaning to the geometric patterns and variegated texture of the picture surface and the canvas structure, Johns explores the boundary between abstraction and representation. As he remarked, this painting allowed him to “go beyond the limits of the flag, and to have different canvas space.”