Winter

Jasper Johns is our greatest living visual poet, and his mature drawings have the convincing power and the absolute insight of a haikú master. Indeed, we all know that it is the artist's method to "do something" to the forces of the given and to do something again and again. In these loving repetitive allegories, Johns has given us a hundred musical tones, sometimes as prosy as one of his favorite poets, E.A. Robinson, and on occasion, something as fastidious and glamorous as to challenge comparison with the "faultless" draughtsman of the Renaissance or of his peers, Juan Gris, Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti. I would go so far as to claim that in his drawings we see an analogue with Cézanne's great watercolors, and it is in what has been called Cézanne's "conversion to loneliness" that we glimpse the true values of such drawing. Both artists have tried to combine what is essentially an impossible koan of abstraction and sensation, of the symbolist and the most pure sign. Johns comes to an edge of painting's destruction and then has saved it.
In Johns's variation on Winter, we have a study of the hundred colors his grey charcoal can provide. He makes us want to decode, and he allows us experience beyond all aboutness and decoding. We know his ladder is from Picasso's heartbroken Minotaur, and we also know this ladder is as shattered and rich as that of Jakob or Wittgenstein. We see rope as real as Picasso's Chair Caning collage and nails that fool us into thinking of Braque, Peto, and every common pin. The snowman is a child's toy and a melting mode from the most intent preoccupations of Stevens. The George Ohr pots descend as if in something fateful, mortal. The hand strikes the end of the living season. And near that nearly suicidal hand and the fast arrow on its "device circle" lie geometrical signs that seem undisturbed as a mountain.
This is a self-portrait in a very convex mirror, and like our other poet of introspection, John Ashbery, we do not know whether this shadow bears a shield or a greeting. The grid system is less scientific than a kind of parquet, as a noisy snippet of a flag rises up to meet it. The shadow is dark but illuminated by snow on snow. These flakes are again as colloquial and torn as Japanese origami, and the whole mastery is of a mirrored, folded universe, where striped puzzles abound, and in an effect worthy of a Joseph Cornell's Hotel du Nord, we are given what Fairfield Porter referred to as "the highest and lowest reaches of the human spirit." And in a spirit that denies these oppositions.
For those who find this to be a symbolist allegory, we say it is no more "literary" than the melancholy of Durer meeting the mystical quarries of Cezanne. The whole experience is as pleasurable as an exquisite, if learned, lightning-stroke from, say, Buson: "the sound of the bell as it leaves the bell." When asked what his darkness might signify, the artist simply told me: "My hand was there." When I once laughed about the antinomy of darkness and clarity, he responded: "But darkness is clear." Indeed, the clear darkness of these branches and frames, these broken ladders and wretched shadows, all point to a splendor like that of a secular altarpiece in panels crashing to the floor. We are reminded how aggressive and economical is wit and the conscious. We are reminded of what Meyer Schapiro, taking from Paul Schilder, spoke of as "the internality of the body." The painting is no more about anything than the unique body, assailed by a true north in a dark time, and the demonstrated overcoming of irony itself by the hand as mind. "And for the listener who listens in the snow beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."