Lot Essay
The direct source for Untitled is Picasso's Le chapeau de paille au feuillage bleu (fig. 1). This picture in turn is closely related to another Picasso which once formed part of the Ganz Collection, Femme assise au chapeau rouge of 1934 (Zervos, vol. 8 no. 238; Private Collection); Johns had certainly seen this picture at the Ganzes' Gracie Square apartment. Untitled thus holds an especially significant place in the Ganz Collection in that it represents the link between two of its principal artists, Picasso and Johns. Untitled was purchased by Sally Ganz in 1991, and hung in her bedroom with other works by Johns (White Numbers, Lot 18) and Rauschenberg (22 Lily White; see Lot 18, fig. 4).
During the 1980s Johns had developed a highly personal iconography that included objects from his studio and his home. For the first time in his career, he depicted fictive space, producing complex, multi-layered images. His work from this period incorporates numerous references to other artists, including Barnett Newman, Matthias Grunewald and Edvard Munch, and refers in addition to his own earlier art. He also draws inspiration from games and mind-teasers, the visual puzzle of the old crone/beautiful girl. These paintings are among the most open and personal works that Johns ever made. In 1984 the artist commented:
In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly to do with feelings about myself and partly to do with my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for awhile, but eventually it seems like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve. I think some of the changes in my work relate to that. (J. Johns, Vanity Fair, Feb. 1984, vol. 47 (no. 2), p. 65)
Johns's encounter with the Picasso retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 1980, his work on etchings with Aldo Crommelynk (Picasso's print-maker) in Paris, and his knowledge of Victor and Sally Ganzes' collection inspired him to adopt Picasso as an important source in his art. He has described seeing an etching by Picasso in which a portrait is held with a handkerchief, a reference to the veil of Veronica, and incorporated this motif in his own work on several occasions in the 1980s. He also used etchings from Picasso's Minotaur series as motifs for his Four Seasons pictures. He was particularly impressed at the MoMA retrospective by Picasso's L'aubade, 1942 (see Lot 49, fig. 1), which relates closely to the Ganz Nu couch (Lot 49). And again, he knew the Ganz Femme assise au chapeau rouge of 1934, which precedes the principal source for the present painting, Le chapeau de paille au feuillage bleu of 1936 (fig. 1). Le chapeau de paille was also included in the MoMA retrospective. Of this piece, David Sylvester states:
It is a very particular Picasso, grotesque and rather gratuitously ugly, in that its ugliness makes it more repulsive than expressive. One may well ask oneself whether Johns didn't take pity on it the way one goes to choose a puppy from a litter and returns home with the runt. But perhaps he chose it for its comic possibilities. (D. Sylvester, "Between Picasso and Johns," in ed. M. FitzGerald, Victor and Sally Ganz: A Life of Collecting, New York, 1997, p. 100)
Regarding Le chapeau de paille, Johns told Amei Wallach in 1988:
It looks simple and arbitrary and thoughtless and yet it's full of interesting... He paused, for a minute searching for the right word: Interesting--what? Thoughts, I guess. It's a still life with a book and a vase. The head can be seen as a fruit hanging on a branch. It's kind of rich in sexual suggestion, and extremely complicated on that level. And it seems so offhand. I just liked this painting, so I've been working on a number of paintings with it at once for the last year. (Quoted in A. Wallach, New York Newsday, Oct. 30, 1988)
Johns's work of these years frequently includes books, vases, and portrait heads in the form of the old crone/beautiful girl. Picasso's Le chapeau de paille is a profound meditation on the same elements and is thus particularly powerful for Johns. A sketchbook page from 1986 which Johns gave to Sally Ganz in 1992 (fig. 2) provides some indication of the impact of Picasso's painting; note its remarkable similarity to Picasso's own sketch of the same subject (fig. 3). Johns's drawing shows variants of the head and the vase, together and separated, and annotates a drawing of the vase "FLOWER/FRUIT/PHALLUS/BOOK + VASE" as if to make the connections clear. Next to a sketch of the head as hanging fruit Johns adds the note "LEAR?" Could Johns be thinking about King Lear's new vision after he was blinded, or about the ways in which the head resembles that of the storm-wracked king? Or is he referring to the removal of the eyes as signifying artistic death (see essay for Lot 9)?
A principal characteristic of Johns's paintings in these years is his willingness to reveal aspects of his childhood which he had previously hidden. In 1990 he told Paul Clements, "Everything I do is attached to my childhood," and he has described his works as "infantile--images of faces where features seem to float about. One tends to associate it with Picasso-esque distortion. So there's a conflation of infantile and adult, if you rank Picasso as an adult." In other pictures of this period he places the eyes and mouth from Picasso's Le chapeau de paille at the edges of his own canvas. They also become the subject of several paintings from 1991, where they surround an image based upon a child's drawing which Johns saw in an article by Bruno Bettleheim on schizophrenic children. (Johns remembered this article from its first publication in Scientific American in 1952.) This image is also used in paintings which refer directly to Johns's childhood, such as Montez Singing of 1989-90 (Collection Douglas S. Cramer, Los Angeles) and Green Angel, 1990 (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis).
In Untitled, which Johns completed at his studio in Stony Point (fig. 4), these components are reduced to the simplest confrontation between the Picassoid head and a reduced version of the crone/girl. They have a cartoon quality that, as Wallach says, "is as proficient as any of his earlier distancing devices in trying to mask the rage, loss, fear, jealousy and dumbfounded helplessness underneath. He's exploring the demons and devices of childhood in vivid new color combinations that would once have seemed anathema to this apostle of the pure." The colors in Untitled are not far from the palette that Picasso used in his portraits of the 1930s, when he was exploring different ways of dismembering the face and body. The contrasts in the present picture between fuschia and green (and secondarily, between purple and orange) are ones which Johns had explored since his crosshatch pictures; however, the intensity of the colors here and the chalky texture of the pigment reveal a new vulnerability. Suggesting Johns's newfound willingness to expose his childhood memories, albeit in encoded form (Johns/Lear, old woman/young woman, vase/phallus), Untitled is both enigmatic and evocative and is testimony to the emotive power of Johns's recent work.
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, Le chapeau de paille au feuillage bleu, 1936
Muse Picasso, Paris
(fig. 2) Jasper Johns, sketchbook page from Book E, 1986
Collection Sally Ganz, New York
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, sheet of sketches, May 1, 1936
Muse Picasso, Paris
(fig. 4) Jasper Johns in Stony Point, New York, working on Lot 56
Photograph by Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos
During the 1980s Johns had developed a highly personal iconography that included objects from his studio and his home. For the first time in his career, he depicted fictive space, producing complex, multi-layered images. His work from this period incorporates numerous references to other artists, including Barnett Newman, Matthias Grunewald and Edvard Munch, and refers in addition to his own earlier art. He also draws inspiration from games and mind-teasers, the visual puzzle of the old crone/beautiful girl. These paintings are among the most open and personal works that Johns ever made. In 1984 the artist commented:
In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly to do with feelings about myself and partly to do with my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for awhile, but eventually it seems like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve. I think some of the changes in my work relate to that. (J. Johns, Vanity Fair, Feb. 1984, vol. 47 (no. 2), p. 65)
Johns's encounter with the Picasso retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 1980, his work on etchings with Aldo Crommelynk (Picasso's print-maker) in Paris, and his knowledge of Victor and Sally Ganzes' collection inspired him to adopt Picasso as an important source in his art. He has described seeing an etching by Picasso in which a portrait is held with a handkerchief, a reference to the veil of Veronica, and incorporated this motif in his own work on several occasions in the 1980s. He also used etchings from Picasso's Minotaur series as motifs for his Four Seasons pictures. He was particularly impressed at the MoMA retrospective by Picasso's L'aubade, 1942 (see Lot 49, fig. 1), which relates closely to the Ganz Nu couch (Lot 49). And again, he knew the Ganz Femme assise au chapeau rouge of 1934, which precedes the principal source for the present painting, Le chapeau de paille au feuillage bleu of 1936 (fig. 1). Le chapeau de paille was also included in the MoMA retrospective. Of this piece, David Sylvester states:
It is a very particular Picasso, grotesque and rather gratuitously ugly, in that its ugliness makes it more repulsive than expressive. One may well ask oneself whether Johns didn't take pity on it the way one goes to choose a puppy from a litter and returns home with the runt. But perhaps he chose it for its comic possibilities. (D. Sylvester, "Between Picasso and Johns," in ed. M. FitzGerald, Victor and Sally Ganz: A Life of Collecting, New York, 1997, p. 100)
Regarding Le chapeau de paille, Johns told Amei Wallach in 1988:
It looks simple and arbitrary and thoughtless and yet it's full of interesting... He paused, for a minute searching for the right word: Interesting--what? Thoughts, I guess. It's a still life with a book and a vase. The head can be seen as a fruit hanging on a branch. It's kind of rich in sexual suggestion, and extremely complicated on that level. And it seems so offhand. I just liked this painting, so I've been working on a number of paintings with it at once for the last year. (Quoted in A. Wallach, New York Newsday, Oct. 30, 1988)
Johns's work of these years frequently includes books, vases, and portrait heads in the form of the old crone/beautiful girl. Picasso's Le chapeau de paille is a profound meditation on the same elements and is thus particularly powerful for Johns. A sketchbook page from 1986 which Johns gave to Sally Ganz in 1992 (fig. 2) provides some indication of the impact of Picasso's painting; note its remarkable similarity to Picasso's own sketch of the same subject (fig. 3). Johns's drawing shows variants of the head and the vase, together and separated, and annotates a drawing of the vase "FLOWER/FRUIT/PHALLUS/BOOK + VASE" as if to make the connections clear. Next to a sketch of the head as hanging fruit Johns adds the note "LEAR?" Could Johns be thinking about King Lear's new vision after he was blinded, or about the ways in which the head resembles that of the storm-wracked king? Or is he referring to the removal of the eyes as signifying artistic death (see essay for Lot 9)?
A principal characteristic of Johns's paintings in these years is his willingness to reveal aspects of his childhood which he had previously hidden. In 1990 he told Paul Clements, "Everything I do is attached to my childhood," and he has described his works as "infantile--images of faces where features seem to float about. One tends to associate it with Picasso-esque distortion. So there's a conflation of infantile and adult, if you rank Picasso as an adult." In other pictures of this period he places the eyes and mouth from Picasso's Le chapeau de paille at the edges of his own canvas. They also become the subject of several paintings from 1991, where they surround an image based upon a child's drawing which Johns saw in an article by Bruno Bettleheim on schizophrenic children. (Johns remembered this article from its first publication in Scientific American in 1952.) This image is also used in paintings which refer directly to Johns's childhood, such as Montez Singing of 1989-90 (Collection Douglas S. Cramer, Los Angeles) and Green Angel, 1990 (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis).
In Untitled, which Johns completed at his studio in Stony Point (fig. 4), these components are reduced to the simplest confrontation between the Picassoid head and a reduced version of the crone/girl. They have a cartoon quality that, as Wallach says, "is as proficient as any of his earlier distancing devices in trying to mask the rage, loss, fear, jealousy and dumbfounded helplessness underneath. He's exploring the demons and devices of childhood in vivid new color combinations that would once have seemed anathema to this apostle of the pure." The colors in Untitled are not far from the palette that Picasso used in his portraits of the 1930s, when he was exploring different ways of dismembering the face and body. The contrasts in the present picture between fuschia and green (and secondarily, between purple and orange) are ones which Johns had explored since his crosshatch pictures; however, the intensity of the colors here and the chalky texture of the pigment reveal a new vulnerability. Suggesting Johns's newfound willingness to expose his childhood memories, albeit in encoded form (Johns/Lear, old woman/young woman, vase/phallus), Untitled is both enigmatic and evocative and is testimony to the emotive power of Johns's recent work.
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, Le chapeau de paille au feuillage bleu, 1936
Muse Picasso, Paris
(fig. 2) Jasper Johns, sketchbook page from Book E, 1986
Collection Sally Ganz, New York
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, sheet of sketches, May 1, 1936
Muse Picasso, Paris
(fig. 4) Jasper Johns in Stony Point, New York, working on Lot 56
Photograph by Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos