Tango, 1955. Encaustic and collage on canvas with music box, 109.2 × 139.7 cm. The Ludwig Collection, Aachen. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Flag, 1954–55. Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood (three panels), 107.3 × 153.8 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson in honour of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
The appearance of Flag also belies the impression of a painting made spontaneously and quickly, at least as painterly process was recognised in the context of Abstract Expressionism, where broad, gestural brushstrokes suggested work made in the exalted rush of the moment. In contrast, time in Flag comes to a thickening near-halt. Johns began the painting in enamel, but when it proved too slow in drying for him to prolong a session of work, he recalled reading about the ancient technique of encaustic. He began applying melted pigmented wax to the painting’s surface, and as the wax cooled and set, it preserved its appearance at each discrete moment of its application.
Importantly, the encaustic process was not associated with any other artists Johns knew; it was something that – like the flag itself – he could consider his own. To this method Johns wed a process related to one he had been using in his earlier work and deployed scraps of newspaper and cloth, in some places sewing them to the support, in others dipping them in the hot wax in order to bind them to the cooling surface. The wax gave the painting’s surface an appearance of intensely material translucency, and the series of individually inflected and preserved marks – some almost indistinguishable from the collage support – presented a detailed, almost diaristic record of process. The resulting painting seemed the product of a slowed-down, almost painfully heightened sensitivity, suggestive of vulnerability yet directed to the most unlikely of subjects.
Deciding to take the American flag as the subject of a painting was something of a risk in the conservative 1950s. Although Senator Joseph McCarthy had fallen from grace and the red scare of the early years of the Cold War had abated somewhat by the time Johns painted Flag, the possibility of his work being construed as unpatriotic was deterrent enough for the Museum of Modern Art to drop Flag from the group of works under consideration for purchase in 1958 (instead, a trustee bought it, later donating it to the museum). To complicate matters, Johns’s biography offers some intriguing connections between the American flag and his own identity. When he was a boy, on one of the rare occasions when they were together, Johns’s father pointed out a statue in a park in Savannah, Georgia of a Revolutionary War hero named Sergeant William Jasper, who had sacrificed his own life to recover the flag when it was shot down during a battle. Johns’s father told him that they had both been named after William Jasper, and it is thus conceivable that the flag might be thought of not only as a national emblem but a personal and paternal one as well.
When interviewers first asked Johns why he had chosen to paint flags, he replied that he “intuitively [liked] to paint flags.”[28] The account of his dream only emerged publicly with increased scholarly attention to his work in the early 1960s. There is no reason to doubt Johns’s explanation, but it has interesting consequences for the understanding of his identity as an artist. Johns wanted to do “only what [he] meant to do, and not what other people did,” a stance that might be readily associated with a strong sense of decisiveness. But what Johns “meant” to do he explained in terms far from such willfulness: “It seems to me that if you avoid everything you can avoid, then you do what you can’t avoid doing, and you do what is helpless, and unavoidable.”[29]
Dreams are some of our most intensely private experiences, but they are also the result of neither conscious volition nor taste: we are “helpless” before them. Despite the flag’s status as a patriotic emblem of the United States as well as its connections to his family history, Johns’s dream seemingly takes the responsibility for the painting’s subject matter out of his hands, making it difficult to ascribe a political or personal meaning to his decision to make a painting of an American flag. The difficulty of pinning down Johns’s intentions is not surprising, considering that he had decided that he did not want his work to be “an exposure of [his] feelings,” nor did he think himself capable of making such work, as the Abstract Expressionists claimed to have done.[30] What else might be possible in a work of art, if the expression of one’s self were excluded? That work could be expressive without being self-expressive was one possibility, suggested by one of the first works Johns made after Flag: Target with Plaster Casts.
In selecting a target as his subject, Johns focused on a motif that shared several characteristics with the flag. To begin with, it was utterly familiar, an everyday image everyone knows. Secondly, it was composed of a few simple geometric elements that would allow Johns to devote considerable attention to the application of paint without compromising its legibility. Finally, it was flat, so that it elided the usual conflict between abstraction and representation: there is little practical distinction between a target at which one takes aim and a painting of one.
The plaster casts were another matter. Johns had used a plaster cast of a friend’s face in the early work discussed above, and he had made a number of others that he kept around his studio (traditionally, artists might keep such casts in order to study anatomy or draw from them, and the casts may have also been of use in Johns’s freelance decorating work with Rauschenberg). Initially, Johns had decided that his painting of a target would be topped by a row of wooden blocks that, when pressed by the viewer, would sound notes – a sort of large-scale reprise of Construction with Toy Piano. When he had difficulty figuring out how to make this function practically, he simply changed his plan. Atop the target are a series of wooden boxes with hinged lids that can be closed and opened to reveal their contents: plaster casts of body parts, including a breast, a penis, and an ear, each painted in a different colour.
Johns has explained that he painted the casts because he was concerned that their fragmented forms would appear morbid if they were realistically painted in flesh tones or left white. Nonetheless, these components remain a complex psychological element of Target with Plaster Casts, as they do in Target with Four Faces, which Johns made shortly thereafter. Here, the faces – tinted an orange-tan tone distantly related to the colour of flesh – are cut off below the eyes, so that only their lower halves are visible. The impression is disturbing, although Johns claimed that he only cut the casts because they wouldn’t fit into the boxes whole.
Target with Four Faces, 1955. Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas surmounted by four tinted-plaster faces in wood box with hinged front, Overall, with box open: 85.3 × 66 × 7.6 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Canvas, 1956. Encaustic and collage on wood and canvas, 76.3 × 63.5 cm. Collection the artist. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Drawer, 1957. Encaustic on canvas with objects, 77.5 × 77.5 cm. Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Asked to explain Target with Plaster Casts, Johns denied any particular emotional content to this work, saying simply that he was “concerned with the approach and distance and contact with the painting.”[31] Although Target with Plaster Casts and Target with Four Faces have become too valuable as works of art to continue fulfilling Johns’s intention that the viewer be able to open and close the lids of the boxes, the interaction of vision and touch, distance and intimacy, are central to these works’ meaning. It has not escaped the notice of most viewers that to engage with these works as Johns intended means putting oneself in the line of fire by stepping in front of the target, a moment