Everything you need to know about Jasper Johns

Where did Jasper Johns get his start?

Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia. After his parents’ early divorce, he was raised by his paternal grandfather in Allendale, South Carolina until the age of nine. Drawing from an early age, he studied art at the University of South Carolina before dropping out. In 1948, he moved to New York. There, he attended Parsons School of Design, visited the annual exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and encountered the work of Jackson Pollock, Isamu Noguchi and Hans Hofmann for the first time. Drafted in 1951 during the Korean War, Johns was stationed at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, where he organised exhibitions — an early indication of his dedication to art. After serving in Japan, he returned to New York in 1953. While working a night shift in a bookstore on West 57th Street, he met Robert Rauschenberg, who became both a romantic partner and key artistic comrade.

What recurring motifs shape Johns’s work?

In 1954, after destroying his early paintings and drawings, Johns began the body of work that would define his mature practice with Flag, reportedly inspired by a dream. Using encaustic on fabric, he collapsed the distinction between image and object. This elision between subject and support — where materials and production become the subject — marked a pivotal development in American art. The flag became a generative motif: less a subject than a structure through which variation and process could unfold, following his epigrammatic formula to ‘take an object, do something to it, do something else to it.’

Alongside his series of targets, maps and numbers, the flags presaged the seriality of Pop Art while carrying forward the preoccupation with mark-making from Abstract Expressionism and earlier French modernists such as Paul Cezanne. Johns described his approach in a 1965 interview with curator Walter Hopps, ‘My only idea is that one ought to be able to use anything that one can see and any quality one can perceive.’

Johns’s subjects are things we know or think we know: maps of the continental United States or the infinitely recombinant numbers one through nine. His approach is shaped in part by the language games of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose 20th-century writings explore meaning, perception and interpretation. Works like Tennyson (1958) turn language itself into image. Later series such as Bushbaby (2003–06) extend his interest in perceptual instability. Of Johns’s ability to shift between subject matter, Scott Rothkopf, Alice Pratt Brown Director at the Whitney Museum of American Art and co-curator of the artist's retrospective Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (2021–22), says: ‘If you think about works from any given decade — flags, hatches, surreal dream imagery — they could almost be made by different artists.  He’s never been on autopilot.’

How is Johns positioned within postwar art?

Johns’s work is often understood as a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, while anticipating Minimalism and Conceptual Art. His practice embraces an oblique yet painterly approach to recognisable icons, positioning his work both within and against the major artistic developments of the 20th century.

Johns’s work continues to resonate. Rothkopf observes: ‘At a time when people make and consume images so quickly, [...] Jasper’s art is all about slowing both those actions down. His work is all about slow concentration on his part and ours, how we sense both him and ourselves in the act of perception. But there’s also deep connection to contemporary image culture if you think of how his interests in mirroring, doubling, cropping and copying relate so easily to what we all do all the time with images on our phones.’

What materials and mediums define his practice?

Johns is closely associated with encaustic, a wax-based medium that produces a dense, tactile surface. Used on many of his most celebrated paintings from the 1950s, he continued to favour the technique well into the 1980s when his canvases took on a more personal, melancholic quality with looming, shadowy figures and references to past work. Collage — often incorporating newspaper, comics, book pages — was central to his early works, including Target with Four Faces (1955) and Green Target (1955). As his work segued into the complex assemblages of the later 1960s and early 1970s, collage became not only a material approach but a philosophical one.

Early sculptures such as Painted Bronze (1960), a cast of ale cans, translate everyday objects into durable form. Flashlights and light bulbs were made from Sculp-metal, a compound of vinyl resin mixed with aluminium powder. This material also appears in Target (1961) and the gnomic No (1961).

Printmaking has been central to Johns’s practice since 1960, aligning with his interest in repetition and variation. His long collaboration with Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in West Islip, Long Island produced an extensive body of prints reworking key motifs across media. By 2021, Johns had produced 343 editioned prints and more than 2,000 unique proofs and monotypes.

Techniques such as intaglio introduce reversal and recursion, underlining the iterative structure of his work. As Rothkopf noted in the catalogue for Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, ‘Johns often works recursively from one painting to the next to the one after that. An image frequently returns — sometimes years and even decades later — in a different size, medium or palette.’

What records has Johns’s work achieved?

In 1980, the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired Three Flags (1958) for $1 million, the first painting by a living American artist to reach that mark. In 2022, Small False Start (1960) set a new auction record for the artist. The work, from the collection of Paul G. Allen, sold at Christie’s for $55,350,000. Christie’s has also shaped the artist’s work more directly. His Regrets (2012–14) series originated with a 1964 John Deakin photograph of Lucian Freud once owned by Francis Bacon, which Johns encountered in a 2012 London auction catalogue. Regrets, comprising paintings, works on paper and ink drawings on plastic, was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in 2014.

How did Johns gain early recognition?

Johns emerged as a major artist with his first solo exhibition in the winter of 1958 at the Leo Castelli Gallery on East 77th Street. Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr and curator Dorothy Miller purchased three paintings for the institution’s collection and arranged for the architect Philip Johnson to acquire a fourth work, the encaustic, oil and collage Flag (1954–55), as a promised gift. Miller later included Johns in the seminal 1959–60 group exhibition Sixteen Americans, while the curator and poet Frank O’Hara invited him to exhibit in the Central Pavilion of the 1958 Venice Biennale. Thirty years later, he received the Venice Biennale’s prestigious Golden Lion Award.

Six years after the Castelli exhibition, the Jewish Museum in New York presented the first of several career retrospectives. Later surveys include the Kirk Varnedoe-curated 1996 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (2021–22), organised jointly by Carlos Basualdo at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Rothkopf at the Whitney. Johns’s awards include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Medal for Painting (1972), the rank of Officer, Ordre des Artes et Lettres from France (1990) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2011).

Where can Johns’s work be seen?

Johns’s work is held in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, in addition to the Ludwig Museum in Budapest and the MMK (Museum Angewandte Kunst/Museum für Moderne Kunst) in Frankfurt, among others. In addition to his artistic practice, Johns established the Low Road Foundation, named after his studio in Sharon, Connecticut.