Lot Essay
Jasper Johns created one of the icons of American post-war art when he utilized the images of the American flag in his first one-man exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. Bronze Flag (1960) is one of the first group of bronze sculptures made by the artist. Made in an un-numbered edition of four, one is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.
From the time of that first show, Jasper Johns's work has beguiled critics and collectors alike. Whether flags, targets, numbers, or letters of the alphabet, the subjects of this most enigmatic of artists at first seem so banal, so well-known that they hardly warrant our close attention and study. However, "Johns's essential gesture as a painter is to bestow uniqueness on the commonplace" (L. Steinberg, Other Criteria, New York 1972, p. 29). As William Rubin wrote:
The enigma of Johns's work stemmed from the paradoxical oneness of the picture as painting and image...Thus the paradox lies in the reversal of the usual process of representation, by which a three-dimensional object from the real world is represented as a two-dimensional illusion. Johns gives his two-dimensional signs greater substance, weight and texture than they had in reality; in other words, he turned them into objects (ibid., p. 26).
The flag of the United States is in real life a flat piece of cloth with a design, a two-dimensional emblem. In Johns's hands, the flag becomes a richly textured encaustic painting, still relatively flat but, when stretched, it attains more object status than the real life flag. And when cast in bronze, as in Bronze Flag, it goes one step further along this path towards objectness--a heavy bronze relief, with real weight and mass, which no breeze would ever wave.
From the time of that first show, Jasper Johns's work has beguiled critics and collectors alike. Whether flags, targets, numbers, or letters of the alphabet, the subjects of this most enigmatic of artists at first seem so banal, so well-known that they hardly warrant our close attention and study. However, "Johns's essential gesture as a painter is to bestow uniqueness on the commonplace" (L. Steinberg, Other Criteria, New York 1972, p. 29). As William Rubin wrote:
The enigma of Johns's work stemmed from the paradoxical oneness of the picture as painting and image...Thus the paradox lies in the reversal of the usual process of representation, by which a three-dimensional object from the real world is represented as a two-dimensional illusion. Johns gives his two-dimensional signs greater substance, weight and texture than they had in reality; in other words, he turned them into objects (ibid., p. 26).
The flag of the United States is in real life a flat piece of cloth with a design, a two-dimensional emblem. In Johns's hands, the flag becomes a richly textured encaustic painting, still relatively flat but, when stretched, it attains more object status than the real life flag. And when cast in bronze, as in Bronze Flag, it goes one step further along this path towards objectness--a heavy bronze relief, with real weight and mass, which no breeze would ever wave.