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Student Union Collection |
Jasper
Johns
American, 1930
Flags, 1968
color lithograph
34” X 25”
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In 1954, after a dream about the American
flag, Jasper Johns painted the first of his American
flag series. A struggling artist in New York City,
he painted, during the next three years, more flags, as well
as targets, stenciled numbers or letters, and other emblems that
filled the entire surface of the canvas, forcing an awareness
of the painting as the object itself. Johns exhibited his first
flag paintings at the important Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958.
From that time, flags, along with his other "borrowed" images,
are associated in the public mind with Jasper Johns.
Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Southerners, close friends, similar
in age, neighbors who lived in the same building and saw each
other's work daily, are credited with inspiring the transition
from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art in the 1950s. Each artist,
in his own way, reintroduced figurative subject matter to painting,
yet retained the painterly gesture of the earlier generation.
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Johns makes us see familiar objects
in a different way by utilizing optical illusions. If you stare
at the top flag long enough,
then shift your focus to the gray flag below, it seems to take
on the familiar colors of red, white, and blue.
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