Endlessly breaking boundaries: three paintings by Jasper Johns

There was no ceiling when it came to Si Newhouse’s passion for Jasper Johns. In 1988, Newhouse paid $17 million for Johns’s False Start (1959), then a record price for a living artist’s work. During the following years, he continued to collect many of Johns’s most important paintings, three of which — Decoy (1971), Cicada (1975), and Momoyama (2005) — will be offered in Christie’s upcoming Masterpieces from the S.I. Newhouse Collection in May 2023 in New York.

Much of Newhouse’s passion for these works comes from what he saw in Johns’s art. From the beginning, the artist has created works that changed the direction of American post-war art. He abandoned figurative painting, as well as Abstract Expressionism, adopting in their place the sensibility of a formalist who found inspiration in the everyday. Johns pushed the boundaries of contemporary art, and in this sense he was Newhouse’s perfect artist: each reinvention by Johns represented a pivotal moment in art history.

Of those offered in this sale, Decoy, from 1971, was the first of the three works that Newhouse acquired, in 1997. The painting is a culmination of the Johns’s earlier Decoy prints, which are considered some of the most visually rich and complex of his editioned work. By all means a crystallisation of the sentiments embodied in these earlier prints, the 1971 painting brings many of the artist’s most recognisable motifs into one canvas.

In the centre of the work, surrounded by a field of black brushwork, is an image of one of his famous subjects, a Ballantine beer can. Immortalised in one of his Painted Bronze works, where two of the cans are portrayed in cast bronze and hand painted, it is one of his characteristic symbols. Though a familiar motif, the can in Decoy has an added layer of complexity. It appears to be a printed image — there are nearly invisible Ben Day dots, as well as notes for an imagined editor requesting a crop of the visible area — rather than a physical can.

‘It is rare to be able to point to a single work that sums up where the artist has been, and shows where he is going to go,’ wrote the writer Benjamin Moser. ‘Decoy is such a work in Johns’s oeuvre.’ Likely, this is one of the reasons that Decoy was included in Johns’s 2022 retrospective, Mind/Mirror, at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Johns spoke about how Decoy is about memory and transformation, referencing how the multiplicity of these motifs gives each iteration a new memory, a new meaning. Thus, as time goes on, an object as mundane as a beer can develops its own history independent of its perceived use.

‘Decoy is intellectually rich and sensuously alive,’ writes Roberta Bernstein, considered the foremost scholar of the artist’s work. ‘Yet it is weighted with a dark pessimism evoked by the area of black that surrounds and threatens to obliterate.’ At the bottom of this canvas, sculptural painted forms serve as the visual grounding of the composition above.

In Decoy, Johns’s iconography is identifiable — despite its areas of abstraction, it relies on figurative composition. Because of this, his intentions can be more easily deciphered than in some of his later works. In Cicada, from 1979, the arrangement of lines and shapes at first appear arbitrary and haphazard, but upon closer inspection they retain that same intentionality as his figurative work.

The crosshatches that comprise this work fold over and intersect one another, making it easy for a viewer to get lost in the scissions between them, but upon closer examination they follow a straightforward pattern. In the centre, the marks are made with primary colours, but by the time they reach the edge they have evolved into the secondary colours of orange, magenta, and green.

As Johns’s catalogue raisonné notes, the word ‘cicada’ calls to mind the insects known for their loud buzzing sound. These crosshatches follow the form of the insect, which emerges after a lengthy period spent developing underground. As the colours move to the edges of the canvas, the shedding of the exoskeleton — the primary colours — reveals a deeper complexity, the combination of green, magenta, and orange producing a visual phenomenon similar to the insect’s characteristic sound.

Made almost 30 years after Cicada, Johns’s Momoyama demonstrates Newhouse’s continued interest in how the artist’s oeuvre developed over time. Inspired by the patterns made by flagstones on New York sidewalks, it explores how colour, form, and material interact in three dimensions. Spanning a canvas composed of a pair of connected sections, the combination of found materials, wood and paint acts as a testament to the artist’s wandering spirit and willingness to experiment, which would continue throughout his later works.

Beyond the obvious differences between the two sides, such as the way in which the wood has been constructed, the two are also subtly painted with different materials. The left, rendered in encaustic, plays against the oil paint of the right, and the organic forms that span the breadth of the construction — coloured orange, green, and magenta, as in Cicada — possess a pulsating, almost electric quality when contrasted against the white background.

Its title, a reference to a period in Japanese history roughly dating to the latter half of the 16th century, calls to mind Johns’s own time in Japan. From 1952-1953, during the Korean War and right after his time as a student at Parsons School of Art and Design in New York, he served in the US Army, stationed in Sendai, Japan. Here, he began to develop his ideas about ‘seeing’ and ‘looking,’ and as a result began to question the relationship between spectator and critic. After this period Johns began to use, as he is quoted telling the art historian Hiroko Ikegami, ‘objects and traces of action in order to diversify the ways of seeing things … and to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.’

This approach made Johns one of the most important artists of the 20th century. He fundamentally shifted the perspective of his audience, altering the very act of looking. His works, as diverse as they are, always return to this theme. It is likely what Newhouse saw in him as well — things are almost never as they seem in Johns’s works, and they reward careful study. One must go beyond just looking to begin to truly see the work in front of them.

‘How will Johns’s refusal of opinion be understood at a time when opinion is so universal, and so cheap?’ Benjamin Moser once asked. ‘How, in an age when culture is increasingly subsumed into the entertainment industries, will we regard the rigour, the austerity, of a painting by Jasper Johns? We don’t know. But if we know anything about Jasper Johns, it’s that he — that emblem of post-war American culture — is also one of his culture’s most persuasive opponents.’