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Lot Essay
Johns often re-used images to explore the potentials of various mediums and compositional problems. For example, the artist took the subjects of flags and numbers (see lot 598) for works he produced separately in encaustic and collage, sculpmetal, pencil, and pen and ink. Similarly, in 1958 Johns created a series of sculptures of flashlights and lightbulbs in various mediums, including paper mach, plaster, and sculpmental. Among these is Light Bulb I (private collection), a sculptural version of the present drawing in which a light bulb sits atop a brick. Like his other works from this period, Johns intended the light bulbs, as commonplace objects, to be a sophisticated and witty commentary on the process of making art. Beneath the beauty of the surface of Light Bulb, with its elegantly drawn and washed passages, lies the intellectual and visual joke of a light bulb that produces no light.
Graphite wash, in which powdered graphite is suspended in a liquid binder such as lighter fluid, became one of Johns's favorite drawing mediums. With its emphasis on surface, and implication of the movement of a solid into fluid state, the medium perfectly suited his aims. The monochromaticism is not only analogous to the texture and color of the sculpture, but it focuses the viewer on the tension between the surface of the sheet and the illusion of the object. Barbara Rose has commented, "We have seen how Johns often displaces elements from one context to another. Depriving color of its conventionally expressive role as well as disregarding the associative possibilities of objects, he displaces a great deal of the expressive burden of his work to technique... But the technical brilliance of Johns's works on paper is surprisingly not the result of his facility as a draftsman...His expressiveness arises rather out of an ability to create analogs of emotional experience in the tempo, regularity and irregularity of stroke, firmness or openness of contour and sensitive bleeding or dripping wash passages." ("The Graphic Work of Jasper Johns: Part II," Artforum, no. 1, vol. 9, September 1970, pp. 69-70, quoted in K. Varnedoe, "Introduction: A Sense of Life," Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, pp. 33-34)
Graphite wash, in which powdered graphite is suspended in a liquid binder such as lighter fluid, became one of Johns's favorite drawing mediums. With its emphasis on surface, and implication of the movement of a solid into fluid state, the medium perfectly suited his aims. The monochromaticism is not only analogous to the texture and color of the sculpture, but it focuses the viewer on the tension between the surface of the sheet and the illusion of the object. Barbara Rose has commented, "We have seen how Johns often displaces elements from one context to another. Depriving color of its conventionally expressive role as well as disregarding the associative possibilities of objects, he displaces a great deal of the expressive burden of his work to technique... But the technical brilliance of Johns's works on paper is surprisingly not the result of his facility as a draftsman...His expressiveness arises rather out of an ability to create analogs of emotional experience in the tempo, regularity and irregularity of stroke, firmness or openness of contour and sensitive bleeding or dripping wash passages." ("The Graphic Work of Jasper Johns: Part II," Artforum, no. 1, vol. 9, September 1970, pp. 69-70, quoted in K. Varnedoe, "Introduction: A Sense of Life," Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, pp. 33-34)