Nothing else has so infuriated his critics. And then, against all odds, he began instead to look back. Still, he was again leading the way while standing apart. One can is hollow and its mate is solid, but you would never know without lifting them both-which of course you never can. It gave his art a still greater conceptual edge, just as artists were turning to conceptual art. What had he given up, and why? He still turned to everyday life for casts of Savarin coffee cans, Ballantine beer, and a flashlight that look like appropriations but are not. He named one in honor of Merce Cunningham, as Dancer in a Plane. Even then, though, he claimed an inspiration in a painting by Edward Munch, in the appearance of a passing car, and in dance. (The Jewish Museum, gave Johns a solo show in 1964, a reminder of how much it meant back then to contemporary art.) Still, he was not giving up on imagery any time soon-and then he did give it up for crosshatch painting, just as Minimalism was losing steam. And Johns had his museum breakthrough at the Whitney in 1959, the very year that Stella appeared in a group show at the Museum of Modern Art. The black of his abstractions and the stripes of his flags lead directly to the black paintings by Frank Stella. At the very center of a movement, he kept to himself and apart, like Michelangelo to Rauschenberg's Raphael. Rauschenberg, though, was by nature a collaborator, as Johns was not. Like him, Johns preferred the experimental scene to art's bar crowd or popular culture. Neither, no doubt, did Rauschenberg, his friend and for a while his lover, whose combine paintings inspired Pop Art as well. His turn in the 1950s to familiar images inspired the next big thing, Pop Art-but just what do they have in common other than an alternative to abstraction and academic realism alike? He has no interest in keeping up with fashion like Andy Warhol or the comics like Roy Lichtenstein. His beach house in South Carolina caught fire in 1966, as if he had personally destroyed his work to put the past behind him. What, though, was he doing when he allowed images into art, years before Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, as recognizable as maps and flags? Was he mocking the heralded triumph of American art or wallowing in it? When he moved to New York in 1953, he seemed determined not to join the crowd, but to find his own. He adopted the blacks rich in color of Ad Reinhardt and the bright primaries of Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and ever so many others. In movement after movement, Johns plays instead the great contrarian.īorn in 1930, he painted big and brushy like AbEx almost from the start. You may think of great artists as the de facto leaders of a movement, like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in Abstract Expressionism- Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell in color-field painting soon after. For now, he keeps reflecting on his past and working out his future in sculpture, collage, and paint as he enters his nineties. At least I cannot name a challenger, and I often wonder who that will leave after his death. With the death of Robert Rauschenberg in 2008, Jasper Johns rules unchallenged as greatest living artist. It makes them all the plainer and all the more unfamiliar. Johns is not waving his white flag in surrender, and the boldness of Three Flags, one in front of the other, still pops right off the wall. These are flags and targets, but not where you expect them-up a flagpole or on a distant tree.

Oh, and it speaks of the show's wild layout over two museums, comparable but never quite the same-and its overwhelming challenge for you. It speaks to the motif of doubling in some of his best-known works and the mind games that they play. How can all that be true? What can maps, flags, numbers, and targets conceivably say about Johns himself? What can they say about modern art or, for that matter, the United States? The show's title, 'Mind Mirror,' speaks to the inner world of an artist's mind and the outer world that art can hope to reflect. Nearly sixty years after his first target paintings, he is still targeting modern art. If you have lived through those years, it may sum up your first encounters with art as well. It is overwhelming for another reason, too: it sums up an artist's life, from youthful exuberance to anticipations of death. An opening wall of prints, hung salon style, brings home how many of them have become central images of late modern art-and then the career survey starts all over again at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on much the same scale.

The Whitney Museum gives it every nook and cranny of its largest floor, for more than two hundred works. This museum blockbuster extends far more than a block. Jasper Johns in retrospective is overwhelming. Jasper Johns (in conversation with Irving Sandler) Jasper Johns: A Retrospective Well, a painting of a flag is at once a flag and a painting and there's no avoiding that.

Jasper johns philadelphia museum of art