If one surfs the Web for Johns, one turns up first a flag, a map, and False Start-another riot of primary and secondary colors. When the right outlaws flag desecration, museums had better fear for their lives.Ĭolor, however, comes with some severe restrictions. Even with White Flag, white comes across as a surfeit of brightness. His Green Target shoves another discordant color in one's face. In some versions, broad horizontal stripes of red, yellow, and blue pour into the Atlantic Ocean. In his maps color runs riot across state lines. Jasper Johns has said that he occasionally cannot distinguish colors, but he made his mark as a colorist, starting with the good old Red, White, and Blue. A postscript three years later looks at Johns past eighty, returning to the numerals in silver, aluminum, and bronze. If a painter is going to hide in plain sight, it helps to cover seeing in layers of gray. Probably no one can keep track of them all-image and object, signs and what they signify, copy and original, public symbols and an artist's private language. In the process, it poses again the enigmas that have made Johns so formidable. It dares one to see Johns differently, but also to figure out whether he does look different in monochrome. "Jasper Johns: Gray" covers fifty years, starting soon after the young artist destroyed all that he had painted and started over. Yet the curators, James Rondeau and Douglas Druick, do not intend a quiet study alcove. It may sound like a mere postscript to modern painting. Now the Met has the temerity to restrict an exhibition to his work in gray, and he looks more provocative than ever.
Perhaps the Cold War could not accept shades of gray, but Johns has outlived all sorts of provocations and assumptions. I do not even count the overlaid numbers from 0 to 9, like the test patterns on early television-or a countdown to disaster. He also began the 1960s by mapping the continental United States. His breakthrough came in 1954, when he began painting an American flag. The Cold War did not do nuance, and Jasper Johns appropriated at least two of its symbols.
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