.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Jasper Johns’s Gray Target is a magisterial painting which, in its rich, complex and highly worked surface, exhibits both the beauty and the intellectual inscrutability that are the hallmarks of the artist’s groundbreaking practice. Johns’s Targets are among the most celebrated paintings in the postwar canon, and, alongside his Flags and Numbers, were a precursor of Pop, Minimalism, and even Conceptual Art. Combining the artist’s interest in materials and process, Gray Target is an early example of the artist’s use of the color gray as an intrinsic part of his oeuvre. Unlike more vibrant chromatic pigments, gray offered Johns endless possibilities to investigate the construction of his paintings unfettered by the representational and emotional forces of color. Gray would eventually become his favorite and one which he would continue to use in the service of his art throughout his career. Acquired by the legendary dealers Ileana and Michael Sonnabend in 1960, Gray Target’s only other owner has been Si Newhouse, who acquired the painting in 1998. It remained a central pillar of his collection for nearly thirty years, demonstrating not only his deep intellect but also his sophisticated eye for quality.
Out of a flurry of short staccato brushstrokes, a series of concentric circles begins to emerge; four pristine rings—along with a central core—that expand outwards towards the edges of the canvas. Yet these are not forms delineated by painted lines, instead they are merely suggested by the negative space created by Johns’s precise brushwork. Each individual mark is contained within its band, stopping just before its edge, never punctuating it, tracing the trajectory of an outline, while never officially defining it. To complement the circularity of the target form, Johns’s brushstrokes are concentrated in a vertical orientation with few, if any, purely horizontal movements of the artist’s brush. This sense of verticality is further highlighted in drips of encaustic that trail downwards towards the lower edge of the painting, as if to remind us that this is indeed a painting, and nothing more.
Gray Target’s raison d’être is Johns’s choice of monochromatic pigment and the process by which it has been applied. Gray has always been the artist’s favorite pigment as, devoid of figurative or expressive associations, it allows for a myriad of uses. Indeed, writing a review for Johns’s very first institutional retrospective, at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1964, the critic Alan Solomon noted, “For Johns, gray alone has always offered so great a potential as to be almost inexhaustible” (quoted in J. Rondeau, “Jasper Johns” in J. Rondeau and D. Druick, Jasper Johns: Gray, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, 2007, p. 22). From very early in his career, beginning with his 1954 Construction with Toy Piano, gray became the central chromatic element in his work. Continuing with his Gray Alphabets (1956, The Menil Collection, Houston), and Gray Numbers (1957), and constructions such as Canvas (1956, Collection of the artist), Johns employed this pigment across his various painterly investigations. Just as Claude Monet was interested in the various permutations of white in his studies of snow scenes, Johns realized that his chosen palette was not made up a single color but instead an infinite array of hues and tones ranging from, in his case, black to white, and in Gray Target, he used this to maximum effect.
As the art historian James Rondeau has pointed out, gray is essential to helping Johns to fully explore his chosen medium. “For over fifty years, gray has been such a clarifying element. Throughout, gray functions as an apparently impartial hue, an adaptable uniform that reveals form without attendant costumes of color” (ibid., p. 27). So much so, that it has almost become the artist’s signature color, and was the subject of a major retrospective of the artist’s work—Jasper Johns: Gray—organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 (which included the present work). It has also been pointed out that in Johns’s sculpture Painted Bronze (1960, The Museum of Modern Art, New York)—argued by some scholars to be a self-portrait—nearly all of the paint brushes show evidence of gray paint. Even Clement Greenberg, that most vociferous critic of postwar painting, who had earlier dismissed Johns’s work as being too "representational," made an exception for his gray paintings, celebrating the openness they gave to the artist’s purest forms.
The Targets have also become central to the artist’s career: Gray Target is one of the earliest of Johns’s singular Target paintings (as opposed to Target with Four Faces (1955) and Target with Plaster Casts (1955) which contain a series of objects incorporated above a target motif along the upper edge), and belongs to a distinct sub-series of paintings which also includes Green Target (1955, The Museum of Modern Art), White Target (1957, Whitney Museum of American Art) and the multi-colored Target (1958, Collection of the artist) and Target (1961, Art Institute of Chicago).
Johns’s adoption of this particular motif can be traced back to his earlier Flag paintings, as the artist himself has said: “It all began with my painting of a picture of an American flag. Using this design took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So, I went on to similar things like the targets—things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I have always thought of a painting as a surface, painting it in one color this is very clear” (quoted in ibid., p. 27).
In the case of the present work, this “other level” is Johns’s use of encaustic. The ancient technique (first identified over 2,000 years ago) involves the mixing of pigment with hot wax before applying it to the surface of the canvas. The quick-drying nature of this method allows for a more textured surface than can often be achieved in more traditional oil painting, something which distinguishes the surface of Gray Target in particular. Using this technique, each individual brushstroke appears to rise off the surface of the canvas, giving the entire composition an added "third" dimension which is enhanced further by the way the light is absorbed by the surface, reflecting back its different shades of gray.
In addition to his use of encaustic, the circular motif of the target also has a long and honorable tradition in the history of art. In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550 and 1568), Giorgio Vasari tells the story of how drawing a perfect circle became the ultimate test of artistic skill in fourteenth-century Rome. Pope Benedict XI required the services of an artist to produce “some pictures” for Old Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome and dispatched his staff to find the best candidate of the job. “Giotto,” Vasari writes, “who was most courteous, took a paper, and on that, with a brush dipped in red, holding his arm fast against his side in order to make a compass, with a turn of the hand he made a circle, so true in proportion and circumference that to behold it was a marvel” (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. G. du C. de Vere, New York, 1996, p. 103). This “test” of skill continued for centuries and can also be seen in paintings such as Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles (circa 1665-1669, Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London), a confident depiction of himself at the height of his career flanked by two perfectly drawn circles. For Johns, the target has also been seen as a very personal motif. In his essay for the 1992 exhibition, Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955-1962, the art historian Kenneth E. Silver writes that for the artist’s generation the target became a very personal substitution for the male body, offered up as a target for Cupid’s arrow (as in depictions of St. Sebastian’s punctured body). Thus, with all these factors—the perfectly constructed concentric circles, the association with cupid’s arrow, and the use of his favorite color—Gray Target can be read as the ultimate Johns self-portrait.
Gray Target comes with the distinguished provenance of having been owned by two major collectors. It was first acquired by the art dealer Ileana Sonnabend and her husband, Michael. Sonnabend’s first marriage was to Leo Castelli, Johns’s first dealer, and after she and Castelli divorced in 1957 the couple remained on good terms with Sonnabend acquiring the present work from Castelli’s gallery in 1960. Johns and Sonnabend remained friends and she supported his career throughout her life, featuring his work in her Paris gallery's inaugural exhibition in 1962, promoting his work, along with American Pop and Minimalism in general, to a skeptical European audience. “Ileana was wonderful,” Johns remembers, “She was bright, mysterious, and curious, enjoying ideas and objects. She loved art and she loved artists, even when she thought them crazy. I don’t know why she found them so interesting" (quoted in A. Temkin and C. Lehman, Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013, p. 29). Gray Target remained in Sonnabend’s private collection for nearly three decades before it was acquired by Mr. Newhouse in 1998.
Almost seventy years after it was painted, Gray Target is an important early example of Jasper Johns’s unique approach to art. His concentration on materials and process resulted in paintings that were both beautiful and thoughtful, advancing the parameters of art almost a decade before Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. The present work is also inherently personal, one which bears witness to his own ideas and concerns. Never predictable and always considered, his paintings strike a careful balance between their international status as icons, and the more intimate pull that they elicit in each individual viewer.
Out of a flurry of short staccato brushstrokes, a series of concentric circles begins to emerge; four pristine rings—along with a central core—that expand outwards towards the edges of the canvas. Yet these are not forms delineated by painted lines, instead they are merely suggested by the negative space created by Johns’s precise brushwork. Each individual mark is contained within its band, stopping just before its edge, never punctuating it, tracing the trajectory of an outline, while never officially defining it. To complement the circularity of the target form, Johns’s brushstrokes are concentrated in a vertical orientation with few, if any, purely horizontal movements of the artist’s brush. This sense of verticality is further highlighted in drips of encaustic that trail downwards towards the lower edge of the painting, as if to remind us that this is indeed a painting, and nothing more.
Gray Target’s raison d’être is Johns’s choice of monochromatic pigment and the process by which it has been applied. Gray has always been the artist’s favorite pigment as, devoid of figurative or expressive associations, it allows for a myriad of uses. Indeed, writing a review for Johns’s very first institutional retrospective, at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1964, the critic Alan Solomon noted, “For Johns, gray alone has always offered so great a potential as to be almost inexhaustible” (quoted in J. Rondeau, “Jasper Johns” in J. Rondeau and D. Druick, Jasper Johns: Gray, exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago, 2007, p. 22). From very early in his career, beginning with his 1954 Construction with Toy Piano, gray became the central chromatic element in his work. Continuing with his Gray Alphabets (1956, The Menil Collection, Houston), and Gray Numbers (1957), and constructions such as Canvas (1956, Collection of the artist), Johns employed this pigment across his various painterly investigations. Just as Claude Monet was interested in the various permutations of white in his studies of snow scenes, Johns realized that his chosen palette was not made up a single color but instead an infinite array of hues and tones ranging from, in his case, black to white, and in Gray Target, he used this to maximum effect.
As the art historian James Rondeau has pointed out, gray is essential to helping Johns to fully explore his chosen medium. “For over fifty years, gray has been such a clarifying element. Throughout, gray functions as an apparently impartial hue, an adaptable uniform that reveals form without attendant costumes of color” (ibid., p. 27). So much so, that it has almost become the artist’s signature color, and was the subject of a major retrospective of the artist’s work—Jasper Johns: Gray—organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 (which included the present work). It has also been pointed out that in Johns’s sculpture Painted Bronze (1960, The Museum of Modern Art, New York)—argued by some scholars to be a self-portrait—nearly all of the paint brushes show evidence of gray paint. Even Clement Greenberg, that most vociferous critic of postwar painting, who had earlier dismissed Johns’s work as being too "representational," made an exception for his gray paintings, celebrating the openness they gave to the artist’s purest forms.
The Targets have also become central to the artist’s career: Gray Target is one of the earliest of Johns’s singular Target paintings (as opposed to Target with Four Faces (1955) and Target with Plaster Casts (1955) which contain a series of objects incorporated above a target motif along the upper edge), and belongs to a distinct sub-series of paintings which also includes Green Target (1955, The Museum of Modern Art), White Target (1957, Whitney Museum of American Art) and the multi-colored Target (1958, Collection of the artist) and Target (1961, Art Institute of Chicago).
Johns’s adoption of this particular motif can be traced back to his earlier Flag paintings, as the artist himself has said: “It all began with my painting of a picture of an American flag. Using this design took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So, I went on to similar things like the targets—things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I have always thought of a painting as a surface, painting it in one color this is very clear” (quoted in ibid., p. 27).
In the case of the present work, this “other level” is Johns’s use of encaustic. The ancient technique (first identified over 2,000 years ago) involves the mixing of pigment with hot wax before applying it to the surface of the canvas. The quick-drying nature of this method allows for a more textured surface than can often be achieved in more traditional oil painting, something which distinguishes the surface of Gray Target in particular. Using this technique, each individual brushstroke appears to rise off the surface of the canvas, giving the entire composition an added "third" dimension which is enhanced further by the way the light is absorbed by the surface, reflecting back its different shades of gray.
In addition to his use of encaustic, the circular motif of the target also has a long and honorable tradition in the history of art. In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550 and 1568), Giorgio Vasari tells the story of how drawing a perfect circle became the ultimate test of artistic skill in fourteenth-century Rome. Pope Benedict XI required the services of an artist to produce “some pictures” for Old Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome and dispatched his staff to find the best candidate of the job. “Giotto,” Vasari writes, “who was most courteous, took a paper, and on that, with a brush dipped in red, holding his arm fast against his side in order to make a compass, with a turn of the hand he made a circle, so true in proportion and circumference that to behold it was a marvel” (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. G. du C. de Vere, New York, 1996, p. 103). This “test” of skill continued for centuries and can also be seen in paintings such as Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles (circa 1665-1669, Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London), a confident depiction of himself at the height of his career flanked by two perfectly drawn circles. For Johns, the target has also been seen as a very personal motif. In his essay for the 1992 exhibition, Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955-1962, the art historian Kenneth E. Silver writes that for the artist’s generation the target became a very personal substitution for the male body, offered up as a target for Cupid’s arrow (as in depictions of St. Sebastian’s punctured body). Thus, with all these factors—the perfectly constructed concentric circles, the association with cupid’s arrow, and the use of his favorite color—Gray Target can be read as the ultimate Johns self-portrait.
Gray Target comes with the distinguished provenance of having been owned by two major collectors. It was first acquired by the art dealer Ileana Sonnabend and her husband, Michael. Sonnabend’s first marriage was to Leo Castelli, Johns’s first dealer, and after she and Castelli divorced in 1957 the couple remained on good terms with Sonnabend acquiring the present work from Castelli’s gallery in 1960. Johns and Sonnabend remained friends and she supported his career throughout her life, featuring his work in her Paris gallery's inaugural exhibition in 1962, promoting his work, along with American Pop and Minimalism in general, to a skeptical European audience. “Ileana was wonderful,” Johns remembers, “She was bright, mysterious, and curious, enjoying ideas and objects. She loved art and she loved artists, even when she thought them crazy. I don’t know why she found them so interesting" (quoted in A. Temkin and C. Lehman, Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013, p. 29). Gray Target remained in Sonnabend’s private collection for nearly three decades before it was acquired by Mr. Newhouse in 1998.
Almost seventy years after it was painted, Gray Target is an important early example of Jasper Johns’s unique approach to art. His concentration on materials and process resulted in paintings that were both beautiful and thoughtful, advancing the parameters of art almost a decade before Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. The present work is also inherently personal, one which bears witness to his own ideas and concerns. Never predictable and always considered, his paintings strike a careful balance between their international status as icons, and the more intimate pull that they elicit in each individual viewer.
