![]() Key to its effect is Johns’ use of encaustic: A mix of pigment and wax, which he applied in short strokes over skeins of collaged newspapers tantalizingly visible under translucent daubs of color, they’re impossible to read. But is it an image of a thing or the thing itself? Both and neither: A mute presence, yet also an ironic commentary on America’s superpower status by a gay Southerner obliged to deal with the macho pretentiousness around him. Obvious on its face, it is a rendering of Old Glory on a canvas conforming to its shape. Johns’ breakthrough Flag from 1954 (which came to him in a dream), was a particularly provocative riposte to AbEx. He countered their performative sturm und drang with subjects that obdurately concealed as much as they revealed. By reviving Marcel Duchamp’s readymade aesthetic through painting (a medium Duchamp himself disparaged), Johns coolly dissected the broad, gestural psychodrama of artists such as Pollock and De Kooning. NYC’s art scene was still dominated by Abstract Expressionism, the movement that had brought American artists to the dance of art-historical relevance. His work became a sensation, eventually pointing the way to the rise of Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism in the following decade. Castelli gave Johns his first show in 1958, which nearly sold out. Within five years, he’d risen to art stardom, thanks, in part, to Johns’s lover at the time, Robert Rauschenberg, who introduced him to the legendary gallerist Leo Castelli. Raised in South Carolina, Johns moved to New York City in 1953, when he was twenty-three. From the start, he’s stirred up cloudy enigmas around the simplest of images (flags, targets, numbers, maps) and objects (silverware, beer cans, lightbulbs), and continued to muddy his work’s meaning even as it grew more autobiographical. Halfway through the sixth decade of his career, Johns’s output has been prodigious enough to demand a retrospective hosted by not one, but two institutions: The Whitney and The Philadelphia Museum of Art.Ī titanic figure in art history, Johns’s achievements are all the more remarkable given his preference for turbidity over clarity. ![]() He wasn’t very big on barriers.At ninety-one, Jasper Johns has been around for so long that it’s easy to forget that he is-well, still around. “That’s a very smart, aesthetically minded decision: It doesn’t cut off the view or the light and doesn’t make the space smaller. “Those are open shelves, not cupboards,” Gutmann points out. And in the kitchen, plates and bowls are displayed on shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling: a simple, minimal choice. Windows on the upper level come without fussy panes. Tile on the lower level, stretching from the kitchen into a wood-walled dining room with a working fireplace, is a hand-glazed brick in a pale turquoise. “I always felt the whole time I was there that the whole house had been renovated by people with great aesthetic senses,” says Gutmann. Gutmann says none of the owners seem to have changed much of what Johns had done. Land records seem to show two owners between them and Johns, with Tucker buying from Robbin Novak, and Novak buying from Frederick and Elsie Lowell. You have ambient, bright light all the time,” says Stephanie Gutmann, a writer and editor who bought the house in 2013 for $380,000 with her husband, the author William Tucker. “That whole space has light from every direction. ![]() Johns also added an addition to the western side, wedging a family room into the first floor and a studio to the second floor, whose windows roll up into the ceiling like a garage door, opening the room to the trees. He ripped out the first floor’s south-facing wall, replacing it with a grid of windows, whose thick wood frames echo the barn beams. When Johns moved in, he led a renovation to bring in light and add space. In an unprecedented collaboration, the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art will stage a simultaneous retrospectivethe largest of Johns’s seven-decade careerthat offers a fresh take on the living legend. “I do most of my work here,” Johns told the paper in 1976. The radical, inventive art of Jasper Johns continues to influence today’s artists like few others. The three would spend time at Johns’s picnic table in the back, according to local paper The Journal News. That community included Johns’s tight circle of friends: John Cage had been visiting since the 1950s as a founder of the nearby experimental-artist colony Gate Hill Cooperative, also known as “The Land.” That project also pulled in Cage’s partner, Merce Cunningham. “There was just a whole artistic community here.” “ probably knew he was talented and was helping him buy the house from her,” says Jody Atkinson, who shares the listing with Matthews. Records show that Johns bought the place for $48,000 from Adele Earnest and Cordelia Hamilton, founders of the American Folk Art Museum, who held the mortgage. The former post-and-beam barn was set low into the side of a slope that looks out over a creek.
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